Life360 · B2C · family location sharing app
Show banner ads to free users and check harm with a holdout group
Holdout showed no harm; banners drive little performance and CEO wants them gone
Mixedads-monetizationexperimentation
What they did
About a year before the episode, after ~16 years of subscription-only revenue, added home-screen banner ads for free users using their own ad unit (ad exchange demand, some AdMob testing). Team ran a holdout group to check the ads' effect. Subscribing removes ads.
What happened
Holdout showed ads didn't hurt anything; guest says banners only work for brand impressions, performance is capped, and he dislikes them.
- Stage
- scale
- Effort
- Ongoing for about a year
Related topics
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from Life360
All 23 Life360 tactics- Keep 2 days of free location history even though cutting it doubled subscribersCutting to 6-12 hours doubled subs from that hook; not shipped to protect free users
- Show the top-price plan on the paywall only to people a model predicts will buy itDoubled new Platinum subscribers without losing a single Gold subscriber
- Announce a pet feature with a cute animated dog that asks to be pettedCalled a huge success; many users made pet profiles; no numbers
- Sell trackers at low margins to pull people into the app and keep them longerTile owners retain better than non-owners; Pet GPS requires a subscription
- Add in-app share buttons and gifted subscriptions to copy parents' word of mouthFailed across the board; parents don't share inside apps
- Offer a free Tile tracker to people who subscribeHelps conversion for certain users; no numbers
More from this episode
- Life360: Give daily location sharing away free and charge for safety featuresGrew to 80M+ active users and ~$400M revenue; about 1 in 8 families pay
- Life360: Don't charge anything until you reach 10 million active usersFounder says charging early would have killed them; no direct numbers
- Life360: Write down which free features can never be taken awayToo new to judge; founder says ask again in a year
- Life360: Test new ideas with a fake button shown to about 100 people
- Life360: Offer a one-tap Uber ride when a user lands at an airportFounder says it adds value to users; no numbers
- Life360: Sell only grouped location data, not raw GPS feeds, to a data partnerAbout $20M+ a year from Placer.ai; still some bad press
- Life360: Match good drivers with cheaper car insurance using their driving dataPlanned; could double revenue at 1/8 of paid-user performance
- Life360: Block ads for young users and let staff report bad ads in SlackGuest says it's been okay; a few bad ads still slip in
- Life360: Chase every possible battery or location bug, even if most are false alarms80-90% of chases are false alarms; old battery bugs still hurt trust