Ask players' age, show kids only child-safe ads, and block gambling and gun ads

David Barnard… saying, "Why are you showing ads for guns?" And I'm like, "What the heck?" And I'm going into Google AdWords and trying to turn off all the, make it as age appropriate as possible. And then I get another one, why are you doing gambling ads? Because it would have the slot machine ads and I'd go and try and figure out how to turn that off. So how do you approach keeping those ads brand safe and kids safe since so many kids are playing the game?

Mathias Gredal NørvigSo we're doing two things and now it gets a little technical. But obviously, when you install the game you show your age. And if you are younger than the legal age in your country, then you get placed in what we call the COPPA segment. Depending on the country it's 16 or 13. And if you're in the COPPA group, then you are only served COPPA ads and it's only certain ad networks that have COPPA groups. So they are not showing anything that would not be COPPA compliance. But even in the adult version, if you say that you're older than that age, and I'm saying you should not be able to see ads for gambling, for guns, for pornography, for anything that is R rated. And that's because we don't believe that that's the way we should be making business. When I say should not, it's because of course the ad networks sometimes make mistakes and when you're a show of a billion impressions a month as we are, then of course I'm sure the viewers of your podcast could come with …

Mathias Gredal NørvigAnd we would actually actively go into that network and say, "This is a mistake, remove this because we have heard from a player that this ad was shown." That's not how we want to make our money. So we are also very proactive in the sense that we've blacklisted a lot of categories that should not be shown. We've done all the COPPA compliance and GDPR compliance. And then we also make sure that if anyone says I was shown this, that we also flag that to the ad networks.

Jacob EitingYeah, I was going to say you must have a team that's just dedicated to, well, one responding when a customer writes. But then figuring out what ad networks you are and aren't working with and what's your obviously expectations for yield and stuff like that. But it must be a substantial amount of effort.

Mathias Gredal NørvigIt's a very efficient system and we have very few complaints, so we actually are not a lot of people doing it, but they do it really well. And then I think because we also have SDKs in the game that allows us to show what ads were they shown. [inaudible 00:29:00] that shows us that these were the ads that people engaged the most with and these are the ones that they didn't.

Jacob EitingAre you seeing this outside of the ad network's own analytics, you all are tracking to what ads are performing the best?