What timeframe is used to compute ARPDAU for monetization purposes?

Question

I search this for a while now but could't find the answer. ARPDAU - the 'average revenue per daily active user' is a metric for the financial performance of a game/app. But what timeframe is the value measured in?

For example, some statistics that can be found online mention an ARPDAU of $0.05 to $0.1 for casual games and up to $0.8 for hard-core (targeted at hard-core gamers) games. But what's the timeframe over which this is computed? One day? One month? The lifetime of the game?

The acronym itself would suggest it's lifetime revenue divided by DAU (otherwise it should be named ARPDAUPD or ARPDAUPM shouldn't it?), but then these numbers seem incredibly low. Let's say I have a casual game that performs averagely and has (on average, or let's say constantly) 10,000 daily active users. Does that mean I could expect from such a game to generate $500-$1000 over it's entire lifetime? Seems like nothing. Or is that rather $500-$1000 per day?

Answer 1

I'd assume it's simply per day for ease of calculation (and since it's an average value).

• Get the unique players logged in on one day.
• Get the total money spent on that day.
• Divide the amount of money by the amount of players and you've got your ARPDAU.

Of course, this may go up/down a lot on a daily basis. As such you can average the result over a month or even a year. It's up to you, but the result would still show you an average per day per user.

Regarding your numbers:

If you've got an ARPDAU of 0.05$ and an average of 10,000 players active a day, then you could assume that they might spend around 500$ on that day. Just keep in mind that this isn't your net revenue. There's still some money to be taken by service providers/shops, taxes, etc.

Answer 2

It means nothing, because there is no such thing as "a daily active user". You can have "an active user" or "daily active users", but not "a daily active user".

This is probably yet another case of "business people who have no idea about math and therefore make stuff up"

Probably, what they meant was "daily average revenue per active user", which is self explanatory.

The difference word order makes...