Table of Contents
50% Higher CPMs and a New Revenue Stream: The KBH Games and Playgama Ad Case Study
When your site’s CPM drops by more than 50% overnight, you have two choices: shut things down, or upgrade your ad stack. For KBH Games, a web gaming portal with 2 million monthly active users, the answer was clear but not easy, since the next monetization partner had to meet a wide range of requirements.
In this article, we’ll briefly overview how KBH Games moved beyond a decade and a half of basic monetization solutions, switched to Playgama Ad, and began seeing meaningful revenue growth without compromising the player experience.
Meet KBH Games
KBH Games is one of the web’s established free-to-play web game portals — a destination for casual browser gaming that has quietly built a loyal audience across the globe, primarily in the United States.
The Problem: 15 Years with a Single Ad Solution While AdTech Raced Ahead
For most of its life, KBH Games ran on a single, basic monetization solution, left essentially unchanged for 15 years — no header bidding, no yield optimization, just one minimalist setup powered by Google AdSense. That’s an eternity in a fast-paced field like adtech, where everything is constantly evolving.
For a long time, that was enough. US CPMs in the $1.50–$2.00 range kept the lights on and the site running smoothly. But heading into 2025, something shifted on the demand side, and CPMs collapsed.
“It was no longer sustainable to even keep the site up and running at this CPM, so I had no choice but to look for alternatives.” — Viktor Huang, founder of KBH Games.
Discovering AdTech Solution for Web Game Portals — Playgama Ad
Playgama Ad is a monetization solution built specifically for the web gaming ecosystem. For KBH Games, it offered higher CPMs from the start because from now on many ad networks and demand sources have been competing for its ad inventory through one real-time auction, ultimately delivering significantly higher rates. Another factor behind the income growth was the introduction of video ads to the portal.
One of the common fears around changing monetization infrastructure for a web game portal is the integration burden — the weeks of back-and-forth, the technical headaches, the risk of breaking something that’s already working. With Playgama Ad, the team walks every partner through the launch and optimization of their new monetization setup, so a problem like this simply doesn’t arise.
“It was smooth and easy, and took about one week.” — Viktor Huang, founder of KBH Games.
The Results: What Actually Changed
CPMs and overall income went up — meaningfully
For US visitors — the most valuable segment of KBH Games’ audience — CPMs on banner ads increased by 50% compared to the AdSense baseline.
“Many publishers, who run their own web game portals, focus on increasing banner revenue through more frequent refreshes and additional ad requests per user. While those are worth testing, we always start with the fundamentals: support multiple ad sizes (including native) to maximize fill and add more demand partners to create a competitive auction and drive CPMs up.” — Valeria Svistunova, Head of Monetization at Playgama.
Beyond banners, video ads opened the door to demand that banner-only setups can’t tap into and unlocked a whole new revenue stream. Introducing pre-roll ads as a new placement for the portal proved especially impactful — across the games where it was added, it delivered an additional 50–75% uplift in total revenue on its own.
And today’s results aren’t the upper limit either: KBH Games can keep experimenting and optimizing their ad logic, trying different placements and new, unlocked ad formats — there’s still room to grow.
The desired volume of ad frequency + changes in ad quality
Most optimization conversations push in one direction: more placements, more formats, more interruptions. For a site like KBH Games — where the value proposition is an enjoyable, low-friction gaming experience — such an approach can quickly disrupt the balance if applied aggressively.
“The biggest positive is that the Playgama Ad team never pushed me to add as many ads as possible. KBH Games’ goal is to provide the best experience for the players while still using ad support to keep the site up and operational. Because of that, we prefer to keep monetization as minimal and non-intrusive as we can.” — Viktor Huang, founder of KBH Games.
Beyond the volume, the quality of ads being served also went up because of the premium demand sources. Higher-quality creatives mean a better experience for players — and for KBH Games, which has always put the player experience first, that’s a valuable addition.
The Takeaway and What’s Next for KBH Games
The ad stack isn’t something you set up once and forget — it’s an ongoing process. The portals that win long-term are the ones that keep testing new practices, exploring new formats, and refining their setup as the market shifts.
With those long-needed changes, the upside is the fun part. From here, KBH Games can keep tuning its ad logic toward whatever serves players best — there’s still more to unlock in both placements and formats. And as the game portal experiments, Playgama Ad will be there to help it find what works.
About Playgama Ad
Playgama Ad provides monetization infrastructure purpose-built for web game portals and HTML5 game developers. Through a hybrid ad stack combining premium demand and smart ad logic, it helps publishers grow revenue while keeping players engaged. Publishers get full transparency through regular reporting and a team that works to their goals.
Key features:
- Unified format support: comprehensive coverage of both in-game (pre-roll, mid-roll, rewarded video) and portal-based formats (interstitials and various display banner sizes).
- AI-driven ad frequency logic designed to balance monetization and engagement.
- Fallback cross-promotion to capture incremental value from unsold inventory.
- Granular customization: partners can maintain brand integrity with customizable ad loaders, logos, and flexible controls over ad categories.
- Dedicated analytics dashboard that delivers granular performance metrics.
Learn more at playgama.com/adv.
