Before we proceed, I'll read our forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures. Some of management's comments today will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, which include, but are not limited to, statements related to our future financial performance. Forward-looking statements, which are usually identified by the use of words such as will, expect, should, or other similar phrases, are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. Therefore, you should exercise caution in interpreting and relying on them. We refer you to the company's 10-K filing with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact future operating results and financial condition.
Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. Additionally, during the presentation, management will discuss non-GAAP measures which we believe can be useful in evaluating the company's operating performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute to our financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure is available in the appendix of our presentation for this event. With that, I'll turn it over to Andrew for today's agenda.
Welcome, everyone, to the Skillz 2022 Investor Day. We've got a great agenda for you today. We've broken the day up into modules that touch on the technology, content, distribution, and financial aspects of our business. You'll hear from the leaders within the company who are driving this vision and execution of our key initiatives. Our purpose today is to give you a window into our business and strategy, as well as a better understanding of what makes the Skillz platform unique. I'm Andrew Paradise, Chief Executive Officer at Skillz. I'll kick us off with an overview of our long-term vision of where we're headed and more details on our plans for this year. Building the competition layer of the Internet is a huge endeavor.
This is the digital equivalent of capturing in our platform every sport in the world, from baseball to soccer to basketball to football, and at every level of play, from recreational to professional. There are 2.9 billion gamers worldwide today, and based on several surveys, we believe that 40% of gamers would like to compete for prizes in their favorite video game. That's over 1 billion competitive gamers and growing. This is what makes me most excited about the opportunity at Skillz. We're innovating in a massive consumer media market. Like some of these businesses on this slide, we also have a two-sided platform. As a result, we're taking our revenue when money is changing hands, which is really always the best time to capture our platform fee. Additionally, like all the businesses on this slide, we're a data business.
We capture unique user data which we can apply data science to in order to make the experience better for both sides of our platform. You can imagine the potential outcome for Skillz when we have gained worldwide adoption of our competition platform for mobile gaming by looking at the outcomes of other leaders with platform business models similar to ours. The platform we've built enables us to abstract competition from content. In the long term, we expect to extend our platform across multiple markets, ranging from exercise to fitness to education. For now, though, our focus is mobile gaming, a $93 billion market and rapidly growing. Today, developers primarily monetize their games through ads or in-app purchases, but these models create problems for both the developer and for the gamer. For the gamer, ads are intrusive and disruptive to the experience.
For the developer, in-app purchase puts them on a content treadmill, requiring them to continuously create more content for ever fewer users. By inventing competition monetization, we align the interests of the gamer and the developer. This results in a higher conversion rate for the gamers and at the same time, higher monetization for the developer, as people are willing to pay more for an experience they love. In short, we're making gaming better for everyone in our ecosystem. As a reference point, last year, leading market research showed that monetization via ads represented 21% of the mobile gaming market. We believe that gamers enjoy a substantially more engaging experience through competition, community, and the ability to win prizes, and our engagement stats versus the industry are proof that this is the case.
We believe that gamers would play and pay more for their favorite games if they could compete. We believe that competition is universally loved and fundamental to the human experience, a belief we continue to hold today. The real question is: how much of the gaming market can and will monetize through competition in the next five-10 years? As we'll discuss today, we're continuing to expand our platform's portfolio of games and capabilities to bring all 1 billion potential competitive gamers onto the Skillz platform. Bringing a groundbreaking solution to market also involves changing industry beliefs. Change is not a quick or easy process. When we launched the business close to 10 years ago, we faced many inhibitors to developer adoption, and today we have knocked many of them down.
These days, we rarely face friction in the sales cycle from perceived regulatory risk or a belief that developers can build a platform for themselves or fear that the platform will go out of business. Perhaps not surprisingly, there's still a perception within the developer community that building a game that monetizes through competition is a riskier proposition than building what they already know, games that monetize through advertising or in-app purchasing. That's why we're ramping our investment in developer marketing and optimizing our product roadmap for developers this year. We plan to deliver developer education and insights so our community has the know-how and advice to build successful skill-based competitive games. We also will prioritize product features that meet the needs of our developers, such as the ability to better customize our user interfaces.
We anticipate these changes will accelerate developer adoption and investment in building skill-based games on our platform. Our solution provides a compelling value proposition to game developers that addresses many of their pain points in a complete go-to-market solution. With Skillz platform, the developer can focus on what they want to do and what they do best, which is building great games. We handle all the payments, analytics, live operations, user acquisition, server hosting, and customer service, giving these developers the bandwidth to focus on game design and creativity. Increasing monetization and growing LTV is a service that developers look to Skillz to provide to leverage the data we have across the entire platform to improve their games. To put this in perspective, here's one example of the analytics we provide. We deploy artificial intelligence to our limited time offer marketing programs to drive improvements in monetization.
For example, a player in Blackout Bingo who took a $10 + $5 offer, $10 in real cash deposit into the system, plus an additional $5 in bonus cash. They may get stepped up to a $100 +$ 25 offer, $100 in real cash deposit into the system for $25 in bonus cash. By tuning these limited time offers to individual preferences, we have the potential to generate more revenue from those users over time. In the past, we would have needed a team of analysts to determine which users would get which offers. Now, with our machine learning systems on this part of the ecosystem, we can look at a user's historical pattern and see players like them across the platform, instantly analyze them, and serve up the perfect offer at the right time for optimal monetization.
That's just one example of how our platform provides tremendous value to the developer in one type of marketing program, as it would take years of data collection and a team of data scientists for these developers to do this on their own. We plan to continue to drive value for the developer community through a combination of new product features, developer education and insights, and a broader suite of services that in the future could include services such as media buying through our demand-side platform, Aarki. As a leader in skill-based gaming, we face competition primarily from alternative forms of monetization, such as ads or from game developers who entertain the idea of building it themselves. We have a substantial advantage over ad networks by creating user accounts where we can capture unique consumer data. This unique data set and our analytics power user trust and fairness for our platform.
We continue to have a substantial advantage over the game developers who are trying to build versus buy. Although the developers have user gameplay data, they're limited in their ability to even track cross gameplay within their portfolio of games. Finally, several large tech platforms have tried to compete and failed. It was really exciting when Amazon launched GameOn in 2018 to compete with us as it was validation of the potential market opportunity that we're pursuing. I have a healthy level of respect for that organization, the assets they have in gaming infrastructure and their server and data science capabilities. Now that the moats around our business model have withstanded the entry of someone like that, we can say they've truly been tested. Over the past 10 years, we've also seen many venture-backed startups try to compete with us.
These companies have claimed to do what we do, but when we have the opportunity to look under the hood, we've never seen anything close to what we've built. At the end of the day, what we deliver with our platform in terms of transaction volumes and uptime is truly hard. In fact, it would take our existing team at least 10 years to recreate what we've built. That being said, we're continuing to invest in our platform to grow our lead over potential competitors. For instance, initiatives like our strategic partnership with Exit Games, the world's leading provider of real-time multiplayer server technology. This partnership expands our capabilities to support more complex gaming content such as multiplayer racing, fighting, and shooting games. As game makers continue to compete with the best content, the content is inherently becoming harder to replicate, which continues to widen our moat.
Beyond enabling more sophisticated content, data science contributes to our deep competitive moat. We measure about 300 data points per game session, and we run over 6 million sessions per day. We're effectively collecting over 1.8 billion data points every day. This feeds our big data engines, which informs us on how to segment users, making the user experience better as more users play and pay. We also have a high-performance technology architecture supporting over 70 transactions per second with better than 99.95% uptime. This builds user trust on our platform. The data we collect every day allows us to learn and improve, further widening and deepening our competitive moat. We talked about artificial intelligence in marketing, but here's another specific example of our data science.
One of the most essential pieces of the platform is the Skillz rating system that we've built. This rating system is a patented algorithm that ensures every opponent, match, and tournament is a fair experience. Data science problems like player rating and player matching are a similar optimization problem fueling the needs and growth of businesses like Google. For a company like Google Search, it's optimizing the breadth of search results versus the speed of search results. For Skillz, our optimization problem is fast versus fair matching. The fastest match is the next player in line, while the fairest match can take an unknown length of time to find someone who is perfectly similar in terms of skill. In the real world, we don't have an unlimited amount of time to find an opponent.
One size doesn't fit all, and what we have developed is a library of matching algorithms to suit the needs of any game, regardless of scoring or population size. That's just another specific example that's only possible because we own all the gameplay data. Taking this approach has had great benefits for our business, but it has also come at great costs, as the significantly higher friction in the sales cycle with developers has slowed down adoption. While developer sales friction slowed adoption initially, we do believe the network data in our data model will result in a far more valuable company over the long term. We've been able to reach significant scale in paying monthly active users without the tailwinds of a top ten game to date. We now have 44 games that are generating over $1 million of annual GMV or Gross Marketplace Volume.
Despite early traction, we've yet to see a game that's scaled to reach the top ten. It's one of the most exciting things about this business, and that's why we're increasing our focus on building out our content engine to attract new and better content for the upcoming year. There are over 15 million game developers worldwide and 1 million games on the App Store today. It's a massive and fragmented market where great products sell themselves and awareness is generated typically through community word-of-mouth. We've achieved proof points of early developer success in a couple of categories of games thus far, but there are many more categories to enable the reach to 1 billion competitive mobile gamers in the world. The next phase is to build our developer marketing and account management capabilities to bring more developers into our fold while also providing them with superior service.
These changes will expand the range of successful game content on our platform today. Specifically, this means educating the developer community on how to build skill-based games and then providing insights to our developers to help make more of their games successful. Many investors have asked if we would consider buying or building our own content, and while that has the potential to generate some quick and early revenue, we truly believe that having an enablement model for third-party that leverages the collective creativity of the 15 million game developers worldwide is a larger force multiplier for value creation in the long run. Our enablement business model provides us with an enormous advantage in terms of cost, risk, and capital requirements. On average, it costs $375,000 to build a mobile game, and there's no certainty of success.
If you wanna de-risk the content creation, then it costs on the order of $10 million to acquire a game. Compare that to the average cost for us to acquire a developer in 2021, which was $11,000. The cost for us to acquire a developer is a fraction of what it costs to either build or buy a game. Our model is at least 30 times more efficient than these other business models, and this results in greater capital efficiency over time with better alignment of interest between the game developer and Skillz platform since we both share in the game's success. 2021 was a key building year for Skillz. We set out to accomplish the twin goals of aggressively growing revenue while also building the critical organizational infrastructure for the future growth of our platform.
We invested heavily in marketing to grow and engage our user base and added key leaders and talent across the company. In 2022, we've decided to transition our strategy from revenue growth at all costs to increasing profitable growth. As we have a substantial lead in our market, providing us with the luxury of taking our time to build thoughtfully. To accomplish this, we'll be focused on key initiatives that improve our LTV and user acquisition cost this year. Here's how we're planning to improve our user acquisition cost efficiency. First, optimize user acquisition spend across geographies and networks and increase organic traffic sources. Second, invest in our developer community to increase the content on the platform to reach new audiences. Third, migrate more of our user acquisition spend to Aarki to recapture margin that we're giving away to third-party DSPs.
We believe that the results of these efforts will be a far stronger business by the end of 2022, and more importantly, it will position us to continue to efficiently grow the company at an attractive pace in 2023 and beyond. Skillz is a unique invention company. It's a company that continues to pioneer the future of competitive mobile gaming and competition mobile gaming is still in its early innings. When we launched 10 years ago, mobile gaming was the runt of the video game sector, with investors asking, "Why weren't we building for computer or for console?" Today, mobile is the majority share of the games industry at over $90 billion.
We had the foresight back in 2012 to build for where we are now, and that's why I'm so excited to unveil a new technology that we've been developing in stealth over these last two years. This technology has the potential to be a massive unlock for our ability to reach a much wider audience of gamers at substantially lower costs. We looked at the key points of friction for consumers in trying out mobile games, and we sought to reduce them. How does it make sense to ask a consumer to engage in a lengthy download that might even require being connected to Wi-Fi simply to see if the App Store screenshots match the gameplay? Moreover, to find out if they even like the game. Currently, consumers clicking on an ad for a mobile game on average delete the game before opening it 20% of the time.
I have to wonder, how often do they even forget the game exists on their mobile desktop? How about if you fall in love with the game and you tell your friend about it, and unlike you, they're on an Android device instead of an iOS device, and sadly, the game isn't available on both platforms. We all know word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing and is critical to the adoption of any business, let alone ours. We thought long and hard about these problems and that there had to be a better way. Here it is. Our cloud gaming technology embedded in a playable ad has the potential to break all of these previously covered barriers.
With the solution, we'll be able to reach gamers regardless of whether they're on iOS or Android or even any computer in the world, dramatically reducing the friction during the onboarding experience and improving game discovery, which we know will both increase LTV and lower UAC. We think this could be a game changer for Skillz, and we're already actively testing it. The goal is to have every gamer, every developer, and every game on Skillz, and cloud gaming takes us one step closer to that totality. We have a long journey ahead, and I'm happy to be on that journey with you, our most valued partners, our shareholders. With that, I'd like to hand things over to Vatsal, who will take you through our product and technology and give you more details about upcoming platform innovations. Thank you.
Thank you, Andrew. I'm Vatsal Bhardwaj, Chief Product Officer at Skillz. It's good to be here with all of you today. I joined Skillz last year from Amazon Web Services, and I'm incredibly excited to be here. It's not often that you have an opportunity to join a mission-driven company that's truly innovating in a large and rapidly growing market. I'll be giving you more background on our platform and the new features for our developers and users that are fueling our business. To start, let's dive into our solution. Skillz brings innovation to a mobile landscape that is crowded with one-dimensional solution for developers. That's why we build the Skillz platform. It's a multifaceted competition engine that retains users and provides transformative solution for game developers. Our platform is easy to integrate with, and most developers can be up and running in a matter of few hours.
After a quick integration, developers have access to a competition engine with skill-based matchmaking, fraud prevention, asynchronous and synchronous tournaments, and live operations. All of this is built on top of a secure multi-tenant architecture inside a virtual private cloud. There is a lot to talk about, but I would like to highlight some of the key components before I get into what new features we are focused on this year. On one side of the platform is a gamer competition engine, which is the front-end SDK and plugs into the games. This is core of the Skillz experience, providing users with fun, fair, and meaningful competition. Features here include head-to-head tournaments, live events, brackets, and more. It's lightweight, so we can download updates for new features over the air without submission to app stores.
On the other side of the platform is our developer console, where developers rapidly integrate and monitor their games' performance. Features here include Unity, iOS, and Android SDKs, documentation, samples, and game analytics. In the middle of the platform is a LiveOps system, which is highly automated and leverages machine learning. In LiveOps, we run everything from multivariate testing on acquisition of new cohorts to optimizing on system engagement for maximizing revenue retention. Underpinning these three pillars of the platform is data science technologies that augment all sides of our platform. The most important of these technologies are player rating and matching algorithms, user fraud protection technology, and segmentation engine. The first two technologies, player rating and matching algorithms, are critical to delivering a fair and trusted experience to the user. The third technology, segmentation, is key to delivering a personalized user experience.
We have over 85 total granted and pending patents covering our proprietary technologies. As you can imagine, there is a ton of differentiation in our platform. Ultimately, everything we are doing is in service of developers. They get all of this and more. Let's start with a big update we are making to core product experience for users. Skillz has experienced continuous growth with the same visual user interface for the most part of the last decade. There are three main parts of the core product experience. When you open the app, you land on the play screen. This is the screen to select tournaments you want to play. With every match you play, you see versus screen, which shows you who you are playing against. The results screen shows you the results of the game with detailed score breakdowns.
We are updating the product experience across these screens and giving platform a more modern look, improving player experience, and increasing trust in our platform. Here, you can see a sneak peek of the direction we are headed with this clean, new interface. Dialing in on some of the specific changes we are making to the core product experience, we'll be able to configure the play screen layout in order to offer a more personalized experience and ease match discovery. We will be able to use our segmentation system to tailor each player's journey. By repositioning and reordering the match offerings, we can encourage players to try higher or different stakes after a win streak. The results in versus screens are also getting an overhaul, which will make it easy to access gameplay, and in turn, increase the speed and frequency of the games they play.
An important goal of the core product experience revamp is to provide developers with greater freedom through design. Game developers will be able to provide players with more explicit gameplay details, such as easing the learning curve for players new to the game and improving existing players' skill set. Developers will also have more control to showcase their creative assets and provide more variety in gameplay with better filters and discoverability on the opening tab of the app. Developers will also have ability to cross-promote their own Skillz-powered games to help drive organic discovery and installs of additional titles. Core product experience is currently under development and will be available later this year for our players and developers. Skillz is committed to connecting a fun and safe community of competitive players globally. Competition and social not only bring the world together, but it also sets the stage for stickier communities.
Coming back to the game every day to spend time with friends is one of the strongest ways we can build retention. With that in mind, Skillz is building out social identity and connection between players across games on the platform. First, we build an auto-scaling chat messaging service. We found that existing players who use chat features stay more engaged with the platform. We are stepping up our rollout to users now with the goal of supporting 100% of our player base across all of our games by end of Q2. We expect this to increase user engagement and result in higher LTV in our games. Skillz will continue to build on top of chat service to enable new and meaningful ways for players to connect with each other and our content.
For instance, being able to purchase gifts to send to friends or playing private tournaments with friends. These features are just a few examples of ways that we plan to empower players to bring their friends to the platform with great experiences and connect through fun, fair, and meaningful competition. As our system has grown in users and tournaments, we have also been growing our data science capabilities. The investments we have made in data science enable us to enhance the user experience on our platform through greater personalization, which in turn drives better conversion, retention, and monetization. For example, deploying artificial intelligence in our limited time marketing programs drive improvements in monetization. This starts with data ingestion to form insights on each end users on the platform. We utilize our own first-party data, such as spend patterns, activity in the app, gameplay patterns, and social engagement.
We also integrate third-party data, which we collect from ad networks, payment partners, and industry sources. As we amass this cluster of data on each user, we can begin to segment them based on a variety of attributes, such as location, spend, engagement, favorite game, and play patterns. In fact, our patented proprietary segmentation technology can segment new customers in a matter of seconds. That's down from several minutes two years ago and an entire day when we first launched. Segmentation enables Skillz to customize the user experience in real time based on sequence patterns, like giving a user an offer when they reach a new achievement milestone or unlocking a new game mode as their engagement deepens. We also run hundreds of A/B tests using our system to test pricing, timing, and communication of offers.
We can also test gameplay during the first session where we segment users right when they open the app. Not only can we test things within the Skillz code base, we enable our developers to A/B test game modes too. For example, should a shooting game have a bonus round at the end or focus all of the gameplay on fighting and beating the main boss? Skillz can enable game developers to learn definitively which content flow works better and in turn, grow their LTV. Finally, with our data ingested and our experience optimized, we can use our data science to get to the heart of the competition, which is player matching. Our player matching system pairs players based on skill, wins, experience, and a variety of factors to surface the next opponent that will engage our players.
We have also developed custom matching algorithms for new features like synchronous gameplay to meet the needs of users who want to get into a live game quickly. All of these features that I just covered can be leveraged by our developers through our SDK. In addition to these experiences, we are also prioritizing building out critical and innovative features for our developers. Skillz real-time multiplayer games are easier to create than ever. This is an exciting new part of our competition engine. Skillz real-time player versus player titles such as Pool Payday and Dominoes Gold continue to grow on the platform. In addition to growing the numbers of real-time multiplayer games on the platform, we have made it a top priority to simplify the process of developer building and releasing a multiplayer game using Skillz Fairness technology. We have streamlined the process in two major ways.
First, titles such as Big Buck Hunter: Marksman, which are new to synchronous games, can use Exit Games Photon Engine. Photon is relatively easy to use, well-documented, and widely adopted technology. Using Photon, they were able to get their game to market in almost half the time that developers could do prior to our partnership with Exit Games. Second, we are building tools to give developers the flexibility to either bring their own servers or deploy their game servers on our platform. This allows game developers greater control over development experience and iterate much faster in tight loops. In addition to making our platform easier to work with, new types of custom game server architectures that are an industry standard for AAA titles are now being supported. This removes the barrier for experienced multiplayer developers who are bringing higher quality experiences to mobile.
By supporting these new types of architectures, we are able to provide groundbreaking multiplayer experiences that are changing the nature of competition on mobile. For example, Frayhem, pictured here on the slide, is a high-quality brawler-style, session-based multiplayer game, which is using dedicated game servers hosted by Skillz. Partnering with our amazing solutions engineering team, developers can quickly get up and running with new types of groundbreaking multiplayer experiences that are changing the nature of competition on mobile. A common design pattern in modern games is a content reward loop that allows players to unlock a steady stream of customizable and other content to reward them for staying engaged in the game. Not only does this increase monetization in games, it also increases user retention as they have greater investment in that experience.
Ultimately, this is on the path for developers being able to offer battle pass or subscriptions, which is very powerful. For example, when Fortnite released their first battle pass subscription at the start of season three, they generated $50 million of revenue in a single day. Skillz is now offering game developers the opportunity to showcase content they have developed for this very purpose in their games. A progression system allows developers to reward their dedicated players with content for completing certain objectives, like bowling three strikes in a row or winning 10 tournaments. When players enter games, the Skillz platform customizes the experience with the content that the players have earned and equipped. For example, they can equip different pool cues and tables in Pool Payday. In a darts tournament, they can equip different darts and badges.
By offering players the chance to customize their experience, they can increase their sense of ownership and progression on the platform, leading to their continued investment in the games they love. Players can show off the things they have earned and view their collection. Developers have really taken this system to the next level. Some are already offering content seasons that allow players an evergreen way to earn rewards for playing. Because Skillz owns the data of the player achievements and rewards, this content will be accessible platform-wide. By building more systems around this, players will be able to use their in-game content to customize other parts of their Skillz experience. As you can see, we are really working to prioritize the game developer needs, wants and desires in terms of building a successful game and therefore a profitable business.
Lastly, all the innovations I have mentioned are built on a reliable, performant, and scalable technical platform. Today, we host over six million tournaments per day on Skillz. That's 2.6x increase from three years ago. We have been able to maintain a highly stable system throughout this incredible growth because it was architected from ground up to scale and handle growth. Our payment system is built by engineers who have built some of the highest volume transaction processing systems in the world, such as Amazon, ITA, Zappos, and One Kings Lane. We are able to deploy in multiple regions, auto-scale our servers, and build redundancy in critical functions such as our payment systems. These factors contribute to an uptime that's unheard of in gaming.
As we have grown our player engagement and increased our uptime, we have also hired best-in-class talent that has enabled us to maintain efficiency, resulting in industry-leading gross margins. This reliability creates a strong trust for both users and developer customers. In summary, we bring a differentiated solution for developers to monetize games with competition without sacrificing the creative aspects. Our two-sided marketplace platform is focused on both users and developers, and we'll continue to innovate in creating engaging experiences for both audiences. To recap, we look forward to refreshing our core product experience, which will provide greater developer freedom through design in addition to exciting new user interface for users. We'll also continue bringing new features that both encourage player engagement through social features such as chat and create a more personalized experience with data analytics, which will further drive user engagement and retention on the Skillz platform.
All of these features which I just covered can be leveraged by developers through our SDK and our upcoming advances in real-time multiplayer synchronous and progression. We are growing our audience, increasing developer and player investment in our platform, and building user trust, and ultimately increasing LTV. Our platform is built on a foundation of high-performance architecture powered by data and will continue to deliver innovative, disruptive experiences that are changing the nature of competition on mobile. I hope this discussion has given you a good understanding of our technology and our platform and our continuing plans to innovate the user and developer experience. With that, I'll pass it over to Stefan to open the floor to questions you may have regarding our strategic vision or product and technology.
Good day, and welcome to our first question and answer session. With me, I have Andrew Paradise, Chief Executive Officer; Casey Chafkin, Chief Revenue Officer; Vatsal Bhardwaj, Chief Product Officer; and Ian Lee, Chief Financial Officer. Let's begin with the first question. This one is for Andrew. Did we hear this correctly that we're leveraging a multi-tenant virtual private cloud? And if so, who are your providers?
We are leveraging a multi-tenant virtual private cloud. Our primary provider today is AWS.
Thank you. This next one is for Andrew as well. Is the Skillz Cloud a single super app where all the games can be played within it?
We haven't announced our full intentions of our product roadmap around cloud-based gaming. I'm glad that everyone here was able to see the demo of the technology that we're now actively testing. The vision for where this will go with both the Skillz app and games.skillz.com is the app or website will enable you to launch existing apps already on your phone. If those apps aren't available, those games aren't actually already downloaded, you'll be able to launch directly into a cloud-based version of the game.
Great. Another vision strategy question here is: Are there any thoughts to leverage blockchain technology in the platform to reach new audiences or to provide new services?
It's funny. We're talking about blockchain 10 years out from when we first mined Bitcoin with our development servers. A quick little story for everyone here. We had to have a pretty sizable development cluster when we were building the company in stealth mode. One of our engineers had the idea that it would be a good idea to mine Bitcoin at night when we weren't using the cluster to build Skillz. We started doing that and ended up actually mining multiple Bitcoins. We lost all of our Bitcoin in the 2014 Mt. Gox hack. I thought Bitcoin might die. We then looked at an ICO in 2015.
We staffed a team of six people who worked on it for over a year before informing our board that we weren't gonna proceed with an ICO as we determined it was potentially an illegal securities sale. You know, it's one of these things where we've constantly been examining crypto and the emergence of Web3 in 2018 with the rise of NFTs and where we are today with the NFT technology and applications. I think it is potentially going to go mainstream and will become a technology that we'll wanna provide to our developer community.
Great. This next question is around developer integration with the platform. Andrew, you cited $11,000 cost to acquire developer versus $375,000 for a developer to build a game. Can you talk about what the cost is to build a game internally once a developer's acquired? Or how do developers integrate their content with the Skillz platform?
Sure. Integrating Skillz technology into a game is a single day task for an engineer or even a non-engineer. When we were early in Skillz, we would actually teach each businessperson who came on board how to launch Unity, how to download a game off the Unity Asset Store, and then how to actually integrate that game and deploy it to the App Store with Skillz. You know, training someone who's never actually even programmed, we could do this in about five elapsed hours. One of our very first customers that was successful, they went live in the course of basically three calendar days to the App Store with the game that was actually ultimately successful, which was Strike! Bowling originally, and then Strike! by Bowlero.
A bowling game on the platform. I think the question behind the question is how long does it take to build a hit on Skillz? I think the answer is sort of like how long is a piece of string? Because you're talking about potentially taking a single player game and making it multiplayer, and you need to make a compelling multiplayer game. That's the part that Skillz can't kind of do for the developer in our community. Some of the early games like Solitaire Cube. Solitaire Cube was developed by a husband-wife couple, so one engineer, one creative resource in the space of about 30 days. And it became a tens of millions of revenue hit.
It's certainly achievable to build a hit game on Skillz very quickly. I do think what we'll see as we continue to build out the community and the content on the platform is that content will continue to become more sophisticated, and the amount of investment to build that next hit will continue to increase.
Great. This next question is around product and technology. Vatsal, how do we protect users from cheating and fraud on the Skillz platform?
Yeah, absolutely. We protect our users from cheating and fraud in two ways. One is by using proprietary machine learning algorithms we have developed. What these algorithms do is that they are able to detect anomalies in our player behaviors, and when that anomaly, when their behavior is outside of norm, whether it's their win rate suddenly going really low and they're playing low stakes game or their win rate shooting up, when we detect an anomaly, these machine learning algorithms can actually flag. These algorithms have become so sophisticated that we are 5x more efficient at detecting them fairly quickly. The second thing we do is that we do manual reviews in a handful of cases to make sure our fairness team is looking at these game results and ensuring fairness.
In the most extreme cases, we actually get in touch with players, and we watch them play their game live to validate that there was no cheating or fraud, being done on the system.
One thing I'd add to that is, Skillz is a platform technology for game makers. We're networking the data across multiple developers to build basically something like what Avast did or McAfee. By networking all the developers' data together, we're really building a capability around anti-cheating that wouldn't really be possible for a single developer.
Great. Next question around strategy for you, Andrew. Thoughts on how the potential rise of Web3 games, so quote unquote, "the play-to-earn" games will impact Skillz in the long term?
Well, Skillz is the original play-to-earn. If you think about it, our developer community has been building games so that consumers can pay to compete in their favorite game to win prizes. This is very much by its nature, pay-to-earn. Actually implementing crypto, I'd refer back to my earlier comments of how we're thinking about crypto as a new and emerging technology and whether or not it's a good fit for the developer community.
Great. Another question around product and technology for you, Vatsal. How does the Skillz matching algorithm help the player experience with Skillz?
Sure, yeah. Our goal with the matching algorithm is to ensure two things. The first one is a fair competition, and the second one is that it's actually fun for players. We look at several player attributes, their past playing behavior among one of the inputs to ensure that the matches are competitive. Players are being somewhat matched within bounds so that the games they play with each other are competitive. They'll lose some, they'll win some. And again, we want to have matches where both players will have fun.
Great. Next question around strategy. This one's for you, Andrew. How will cloud gaming potentially impact our business, and when do we see that rolling out?
Well, I think your top thing with cloud-based gaming is it makes the effort to try a game so much easier for the consumer. Just to kind of walk through what it looks like right now when you try a game as a consumer before cloud. You'll see an ad typically rendered inside someone else's video game. You're going to tap on that ad in that mobile game. It will then take you out to the App Store. You're gonna read that App Store description, potentially. You're going to tap Download. Now, if it is a game that is underneath the Wi-Fi download limit, it'll download over there. Otherwise, you know, you're kind of out of luck until you get home and connect. Either way, that download time can take minutes, if not longer.
It's going to place the app onto your desktop. You then have to remember to go to that spot on your desktop and try it. When you compare and contrast that with cloud-based gaming, the consumer will tap the ad and immediately launch into the game. A process that took minutes, if not even longer, becoming a split-second access point. Moreover, when you think about cloud-based gaming and the virality of cloud-based gaming, when I share a game on Skillz going forward to anyone, anywhere, they can render it on any device. It doesn't just unlock Android for us in a very meaningful way outside of Google Play. It actually also unlocks things like the computer platforms out there. There are literally hundreds of millions of desktop computers out there that we currently can't service.
I'd say it really fixes that kind of breakage we have right now, where you have an iOS user tell an Android user or a computer user, "Hey, this game's really fun, you should try it out." They go to try and play it, and then they can't find it available. I think it will have a meaningful impact over time on virality, and I also think it will have just direct impact on customer acquisition costs in the sense that it's much lower friction for a user to try a new game.
Now, Google tried to do something similar with Stadia. How is this different than what some other cloud gaming service providers have tried in the past?
I don't wanna be blasé and say ours works, but as we're still in soft launch. What I will say is that Google Stadia tried to run cloud-based gaming in a subscription model on Triple-A titles. Skillz is running cloud-based gaming on casual content, so easier smaller video games that are easier to compute and render, also that have, I would say, that are more lag tolerant than Triple-A games. Separately, we run a transactional business model. People literally pay per play on our system. As such, it's much more feasible for us to deliver cloud-based games to the user community when they'll pay per play.
Great. Another strategy related question, Andrew.
Mm-hmm.
That came in here. Given current prices, would you use cash to buy back stock?
I don't think we have the intention of using the balance sheet to buy back stock. I agree with you that the stock price is very attractive from a valuation perspective. We raised the capital with our IPO, as well as post-public, in our follow-on equity raise and then debt raise, with the intention of furthering the Skillz platform. If we thought the best use of capital was to buy back stock, we probably would've had a different capital strategy.
Great. Sorry to bounce around a little bit, but there's a follow-up question here in the live Q&A on cloud gaming. How does cloud gaming help drive more Android users?
Well, right now, if you're an Android user, you're really only access point for Skillz is either to go to the Samsung App Store, if you own a Samsung device, that's possible. We see that a lot of Samsung users actually have uninstalled or don't have, for whatever reason, the Samsung App Store installed. Pretty big friction point. They first have to get to the App Store, then they have to register there, then they have to download, then they have to register into Skillz. For a Samsung user, even in that workflow, I think you're cutting incredible amounts of time out of their trial process. Separately, if they didn't wanna go through the Samsung App Store, if they're on other Android devices, we do offer direct download for Android devices.
For those of you who are Android users in the audience, you're probably aware of the warning dialogues that pop up when you try this. Downloading an app outside of one of the preferred app stores, such as Google Play, you'll see a number of warning dialogues, literally telling you as a user, you may be downloading an application full of viruses. You know, I think moving away from that to a world where the user can try our platform and become familiar with the game in a single touch is a huge win for the business.
Great. Another cloud related question for you, Andrew. Obviously 5G is still rolling out. How critical is 5G to unlocking the full potential of Skillz Cloud?
Okay. Well, I'm really excited that everyone is seemingly excited about cloud like we are. The question is a little bit loaded because the full potential of Cloud, I do think that we'll be the company that will pioneer from casual to hardcore competitive gaming on Cloud. The reason I say that is for us, it will be a logical next step in the progression of furthering the service, versus trying to leap forward to servicing AAA. Having said that, we wouldn't be announcing cloud today if we didn't think it was a market viable technology with existing infrastructure. We intend to roll out cloud broadly over the next several quarters with or without 5G adoption, so we're not dependent on it for the casual content on the platform today.
Great. Another product and technology related question for you, Vatsal. What is the segmentation engine, and why is that important to our platform?
Sure, yeah.
Segmentation technology, which we have developed at Skillz, it's a key differentiator for us. What this allows us to do is to segment users, segment a group of users and deliver really a personalized experience for them. Our segmentation technology looks at over 64 different player attributes to segment them, and this allows us to run up to 400,000 segments at any given time across our player base. To give you an idea of how powerful this is and how differentiated this is, major, you know, some of the largest game developers and publishers, they're running anywhere from 50-100 segments, and they are doing so statically. We are able to run 400,000 segments and deliver that experience in almost real time.
This is a technology which has been at Skillz for a while, and we've made just tremendous improvements when it comes to creation of these segments. When the technology was first built, it used to take about a day to look at these user attributes and create segments, and now it's almost real-time in under a second. It's a really powerful way for us to deliver a personalized experience for our players.
I don't think you were here, Vatsal, when it used to crash this much when we first launched it. We are aware of the value, at least historically, of the system, because when we had an outage on the segmentation technology, it would literally cut revenue in half roughly per second, per minute, per hour. I do think, though, that you're almost forgetting to mention that you used to work in Zynga. I think you're the perfect person to tell us about how segmentation technology runs outside of the ecosystem on Skillz.
Yeah, absolutely. I think what we have built is really state-of-the-art here.
Great. A related topic that came in for you, Andrew, as it relates to segmentation and skill-based matching is, can you elaborate a bit more on some of the 85+ patents that we have that protect Skillz technology? What do those patents relate to as it relates to the important elements of our platform?
I think as an innovation company, we have been focused on protecting our core IP. Some of the first filings I was the author behind, ranging from the competition system to the segmentation technology. The patent strategy is pretty complex, so I'm not sure if I can answer it in the space of the next two minutes, but definitely would direct our investors to go and read what's available online.
Great. Next question for Vatsal around product initiatives this year. What impact do we expect from the product initiatives that we talked about, and when will we see results from them?
Yeah. Some of the product initiatives which we talked about around improving the overall product experience, rolling out new features like chat, they are all in development and product improvements. They'll start rolling out in the second half of the year. It's hard to quantify exactly what the numbers lift would be, but the early results are very, very promising, and we expect to see results in second half of the year in 2022 and in 2023.
Okay. Another question here for Vatsal on product and technology as it relates to synchronous gameplay. Can you talk a bit about the capabilities needed for PVP, Player versus Player sync versus multiplayer synchronous gameplay and timeline for extending our platform capabilities to support multiplayer synchronous gameplay?
Absolutely. Today the Skillz platform already supports both asynchronous and synchronous turn-based games. You know, when I think multiplayer, like synchronous and asynchronous turn-based games are one of the still very popular formats on mobile, and our current technology already supports that. When you look beyond these games to games with slightly more simulation complexity, you get into games which are N versus N or a game like Battle Royale, where you're starting off with large number of players and then whittling down to one winner at the end. There are two attributes on these games which are different from what we currently support. One is just the number of players in a given simulation or a given play game session.
The second is the number of players competing with each other in a N versus N settings. Those are the capabilities which we'll have to develop. Having said that, these capabilities are pretty straightforward. They are well understood, so it's just a matter of time for us to expand our platform for both Battle Royale style multiplayer games and N versus N games, whether those are MOBA or Brawlers. Yeah, we are really excited about getting our platform there.
Maybe just to add before we wrap on that topic. Our investment in Exit Games with the Photon Engine was focused specifically around that N versus N interaction so that we can move more quickly into things like Battle Royale.
Great. Thank you. With that, we're going to go to break.
Welcome back, everyone. I'm excited to be here today and to bring a couple of really innovative game developers together, two of my favorite developers from the Skillz Network. I'm joined by Tim O'Neil from Tether Studios on my right and George Petro from Play Mechanix, one seat over from me. I'd love to just start maybe with a brief introduction. Can you each share a little bit about your company, what inspired you to build mobile games, and how that experience led you to working with Skillz? Maybe, George, we'll start with you.
Sure.
Our company, Play Mechanix, has been in existence since 1995, and we specialize in the making of arcade equipment. We make arcade games that you would find out in the public space. You know, for us, mobile, when mobile showed up in the mid-2000s, you know, we thought about it, but we knew that it was a business that we'd have to really concentrate on, and we weren't able to do that. We had made a relationship with Skillz a bunch of years ago.
You know, two or three years ago, once we had some trouble in our market due to the pandemic, we really decided to focus on mobile, and we went right to Skillz right away to discuss with them how best to get in the market. We felt that having the data and all of the information that Skillz brought would give us a leg up into the mobile market. That's why we decided to, you know, start a group developing mobile.
Tim, how about you? Tell us a little bit about Tether and when you started building mobile games and how you came to join Skillz.
Yeah. As in on a social platform, but really playing with other people and, you know, everybody actually having a device in their pocket that, you know, could kind of, you could talk to them. That was, I think, one of the things that was really a big unlock for us. I think we were growing up, we were kind of semi-pro gamers, and so we were just really keen to kind of take that feeling of, you know, competing, playing with other people, and really doing it in a way to kind of play a multiplayer game with your friends. You could actually just load up a game and play for three minutes and still have that feeling of, you know, competing with other people. You know, so that was, I think, one of the biggest appeals for us as we started out.
Other key thing was, particularly on mobile, we found it much more accessible to deliver quality experiences, quality products, with really small teams. I mean, we founded super scrappy and, you know, we were able to build successful products and then hire a team to kind of support us rather than having to go out and amass a kind of a group of specialists.
Announced just last week that the company has exceeded $250 million in lifetime revenue across your Skillz Gaming portfolio.
Yeah. It's been a different thing. Okay, let's just try it out. Let's get one product done, and maybe that'll work. That was, you know, Cube Cube, and it sort of worked, but there was enough there that really convinced us that skill-based, you know, we're like, "Look, okay, I think there's a real opportunity here to really, I think, have a thesis around having a studio dedicated to making these kinds of games." You know, it was kind of off to the races from there. I mean, I think in those first few months, when we built some of our most successful products and, you know, it's been a fantastic, profitable relationship since then.
Very cool. George, you, of course, come from the arcade space where you've built the incredibly successful Big Buck Hunter franchise. I'm interested, you know, as you started to build the mobile version of the game, can you talk a little bit about how access to data has changed the trajectory of information and optimization for the mobile version of Big Buck Hunter?
Yeah, absolutely. With Big Buck Hunter, that started around 2000. We connected our early 2000s and started engaging with players around the country and creating tournaments and skill-based challenges using a fairly limited.
Tim said, you know, when we moved Big Buck Hunter to mobile, now all of a sudden, you know, you don't have 2,000 connections, you have two million connections. More data involved in how they play. You know, the play sessions are not anonymous anymore using the Skillz platform. Now we know who the players are, we know what they're doing, we know the game. That allows our designers to really fine-tune the experience. If we see a problem, we can see it in the data where, okay, somebody doesn't like this certain setting, we can deal with that. Not only that, but just, you know, to me, the most amazing thing is really the A/B testing that you can do.
Like, you can just all of a sudden target everybody. It's just gonna go to a small group, and then you can see how that affects the metrics of the game, and that's something that we cannot do in arcade. It's not easy to A/B test, but with Skillz testing new features and trying new things inside the games. Tim, I know you launched Progression, one of the new Skillz features in Solitaire Cube, just last week. George, I think you're in the process. Why do you think it'll be meaningful for the player experience, and how you think about it across the other games in your portfolio?
Yeah, definitely. I think there's, when you look at a principle of, you know, you unfold the complexity over time, you know, give people simple experiences that they can understand, then they advance through the game. As they advance, up until recently, they have the same experiences now. I mean, obviously, they're way better. You know, they think about the competition very differently, but they would have kind of the same experiences as they'd had when they'd started. Things that don't necessarily affect the outcome, but give them the opportunity to feel like, "Oh, you know, I've got this really cool new background to my game scene, and I'm still playing a game of cards." Let people just feel more invested, more engaged over time.
You know, I think we have a whole suite of card games that I think this, we're unlocking card backs and, you know, all sorts of things. Practices and understanding how we can start to apply, you know, what in, you know, typical free-to-play markets is one of the, like, the key tools to increase engagement and retention over time, really starting to apply that to.
The opportunity to potentially give players skins for their hunting weapon or the opportunity to build out a trophy room potentially inside the game. Talk a little p latform. We just launched it about a year ago. We're a little bit newer than Tim's company to the whole platform. We're really learning that, you know, we are developing a progression system that will allow players to, you know, collect things that they've won throughout the game. Just going to different areas, progressing, say, throughout the United States, and hunting in different places and then marking that down. That way they can kind of compare with other players. Like, "Look, I've done all this. You know, you haven't done this." And giving them the ability to just kind of, you know, build that life. We think there's a lot to it.
We know in the hunting space that that is a very passionate space, especially when it comes to the kind of outfitting that, you know, if you look at the big outfitters that are out there, you know, outfitting your whole rig for hunting is a big deal, and we wanna bring that onto our app and the platform.
Very exciting. That's cool. I wanna switch gears here, because I know, Tim, you've shared with me many times over, I think, how important you think it is to broaden, continue to broaden distribution, ease onboarding for your products, maybe both. One of the things that Andrew was talking about just this morning was the upcoming cloud gaming product that we're working on, and we've gotten a lot of questions about that from the attendees of today's content. Can you tell me a little bit about, maybe how you think about what this feature will offer for Tether?
This is one where I'll have to try and keep my answer short 'cause I have a million ideas. I think the most fundamental part of it all is, you know, the thing that we've seen over and over is the people that we're bringing into our games tend to actually be playing their first skill-based game ever, right? You know, this isn't a multiplayer shooter where you've got a standing audience of hundreds of millions of players who are eager for the next one. This is like we're educating players of, you know, how does this work? How does the competition work? Do I understand this game?
Like, there's a lot of points of just, you know, kind of first contact, where with the cloud gaming in particular, like giving people the ability to try things out and just dabble with a minimal amount of friction so that, you know, they can understand that what makes these games different, what makes them unique, and really kind of see that it's an enjoyable experience, just, you know, literally from loading up a website and seeing it played. You know, I think it's actually. As the feature was kind of introduced to me, I'm like, "This is actually the best application of cloud gaming that I've seen," you know? 'Cause I think the traditional, like the Google Stadia and the whatever, they're. You're trying to replace something that people are already super dedicated to, engaged with.
They have powerful PCs and consoles, and you're trying to get them to pay you a subscription instead of use all the stuff that they already have. You know, it, like, it wasn't really a great fit. I think using cloud gaming actually as a way to just reduce friction in teaching the player what, you know, our products are, I think, is actually should, you know. I'm super hopeful that it'll actually really help to, you know, ease the on-ramp into the games and lower our customer acquisition costs and all those good things.
Yeah. We're definitely excited about it also. You know, maybe as we close out, Tim, you've been with Skillz in the space for a while now. What advice would you give other developers looking to leverage competition as a monetization mechanism inside their content?
Yeah. I would say, you know, I think the most important thing really, you know, that we say is that the game design needs to flow outward from the business model, right? I think the way skill-based games work generally is similar to but just different from a lot of, you know, free-to-play games and other. You know, they rhyme and they harmonize, but it's not the same thing. I think really just understanding that competitive session of, like, going in, you know, not only how do I play the game such that I enjoy it, but also how do I play it in a way that unfolds over time. Like, how is the hundredth experience better than the first? How is the thousandth?
We have, honestly, some players who have played 100,000 or more sessions individually, and they're still coming back and really, you know, enjoying new challenges every time. Thinking about that journey, I think is, you know, from a design perspective, I think the most fundamental part. Sorry, I could nerd out about this all day. The other part really, I think, that I would say is, when we look at, you know, Skillz in particular and skill gaming generally, there are so many new experiences that just haven't been explored yet.
You know, one of the things, honestly, I'm most excited about and that I really passionately tell anybody who asks is I think there's just so much ground to be covered of new types of games, new genres, new audiences that can be attracted that, you know, I think there's just so much exploration yet to be done that, you know, I'm just really keen to see more people coming in and, you know, figuring out what the best practices are, figure out what the next big genre that honestly we just don't even know exists yet.
Yeah. I think that's quite right and-
I hope we build it.
I know we're just about out of time. George, parting thoughts. What are you looking forward to in 2022 with Skillz?
Man, there's so much to look forward to. We just, you know, we just launched Sync Play in the Big Buck Hunter app, and that's looking really, really good. We also are working with the new SDK for leagues, which we're also very excited about because that allows players of differing skill levels to compete amongst each other and have a chance at being number one. You know, we're very excited about not only Big Buck Hunter, but we also have the NFL QB Shootout that's about to launch. We definitely have a couple more ideas that we're gonna start working on. It's just like Tim said, it's super exciting.
There's so much to explore with it, and there are so many ideas that just haven't been done that I know our minds are clicking and you know, we wanna. On being selected as one of the finalists in the NFL competition.
Thank you.
With that, I wanna thank both of you for joining us here today and sharing your insights on the platform. I'm going to transition and talk a little bit about distribution on the platform. I'm Casey Chafkin, Chief Revenue Officer, and I'm glad to be here with all of you today. We channel their competitive desire in a fun, safe, and engaging setting. Our players aren't just passively consuming content. They're highly engaged, leaning in and interacting with the platform. It's actually a common misconception that gaming is the domain of the stereotypical nerd in their parent's basement. Whether they call themselves a gamer or not, almost everyone plays video games today. To effectively reach, acquire, and retain these diverse audiences, we're deploying a personalized strategy through a mix of paid, owned, and organic channels.
The breadth of our current capability is really the product of the investment we've been making over the past 18 months. When we entered 2021, we had strong media buying capability, but we didn't really have a comprehensive marketing function. We recognized in 2021 that we needed to invest in this area while continuing to make improvements to our media buying capabilities and begin to connect these capabilities together. Over the past year, a major area of investment for us has been in diversifying our paid media strategy across different channels, networks, partners, and geographies, all with the focus on efficiently acquiring high-quality users for our networked platform. In addition to capturing traffic, we've invested in analyzing user behavior, including responsiveness to different creatives, when users first deposit money, how many tournaments they play each day, and much more.
Studying those user behaviors guides our investment strategy in paid marketing, but also fuels the marketing flywheel across our own channels such as email, push, and our internal messaging framework called Skillz News. I'll come back to our own channels in just a couple minutes. Beyond paid channels, we are bullish on continuing to expand user acquisition through our organic channels, which is really about acquiring traffic through channels that require very little investment. This was another big investment for us last year when we launched a focus strategy to improve our App Store Optimization or ASO, and our Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Through a mixture of creative content and product-driven initiatives, we have seen a pretty dramatic shift in the mix of traffic coming from organic channels.
These investments are starting to pay dividends, and we expect customer acquisition costs to come down significantly in 2022 as a result. I'd also like to share some of the exciting new investments that we're making this year in order to further drive UA marketing efficiency both this year and beyond. We see opportunity to maximize the revenue from the customer journey through enhancements in our marketing tools, including building a more detailed mobile gaming player segmentation, which will allow for further targeting. In other words, serving the right message to the right prospective player at the right time. We're also making investments in improving our data automation workflows, which will lessen click fraud and the waste that comes from duplicative spend. We're also investing in artificial intelligence solutions to improve our bidding precision across all channels, including our internal Demand-Side Platform or DSP.
This will enable us to pay exactly the right amount for each user we acquire and ensure that we're allocating our budget correctly in real time across all data dimensions. I just mentioned our DSP, Aarki, which represents another opportunity for us. We estimate that we can capture the 20%-30% margin we're currently giving away to our other DSP partners by continuing to migrate our spend in-house. For context, approximately 1/3 of our overall budget has historically been invested via third-party DSPs. It goes without saying that recapturing the 20%-30% represents a pretty substantial opportunity. While we haven't disclosed a specific target for how much we intend to migrate this year, we intend to do this as quickly as we practically can while retaining or improving the level of efficiency we achieve with our other DSP partners.
As an added benefit of this effort, by integrating our data pipelines, we'll be able to make Aarki's machine learning bidding algorithms smarter at acquiring the best traffic, both for us and for their other clients, which should further drive efficiency, growth, and revenue of the Aarki business unit. As we orient towards a more profitable 2022, we are not just driving efficiency in our user acquisition spend, but we're also optimizing our engagement marketing spend. For those not familiar with engagement marketing spend on our platform, it can largely be characterized as marketing spend we deploy through formats such as bonus cash to trigger engagement with the platform. In 2021, we deployed a significant amount of engagement marketing spend. We learned from this spend in terms of which trigger points were most efficient.
However, in generating those learnings, we also spent a lot of money that we do not need to spend in 2022. This year, a major initiative for us is to eliminate low-return engagement marketing spend while continuing to drive deeper user engagement on the platform. We're using a new metric called revenue after engagement marketing to measure our progress in increasing profitable growth. Revenue after engagement marketing is the single most important metric that the team is focused on this year. We have already removed our lowest performing engagement marketing programs and have begun to A/B test new programs. As I mentioned earlier, we're also expanding our own communication channel investments, which are essential as they allow us to deliver highly targeted and contextually relevant messages.
As an example, this could look like targeted offers based on where a player is in their Skillz journey, discovery of other titles on the platform, or even content to support a player looking to improve their gameplay abilities. By investing in the layering of user data and creating detailed, perpetually updated user profiles, we'll be able to provide the most personalized experience to our users. We view these areas as an essential investment to drive profit margin accretive revenue everywhere across the entire consumer life cycle. As we continue to scale, in addition to growing our direct response marketing efforts, we're placing bets on our brand, and we're working through an evolved expression of who we are.
What this ultimately means is that we are undergoing a brand refresh aimed to more effectively communicate who Skillz is, what we do, and what we stand for in a more consistent and repeatable way. Our belief is that by investing into the brand, we will not only be able to engage users in authentic and relevant ways, putting ourselves squarely into the cultural zeitgeist, but also expand to reach new audiences, driving further efficiency of user acquisition spend and our developer acquisition and brand partnerships. To that end, we plan to continue to invest in brand and content partnerships similar to what we've done with the NFL, the American Red Cross, Samsung, and others.
These strategic alliances will not only yield new streams of revenue for Skillz, but will support our interest in reaching and acquiring audiences efficiently, adding diversity to our prizes, enabling more frictionless distribution of our content, and more. We're particularly excited about this work, especially as we emerge from the global pandemic. By partnering with entities such as the NFL and the Drone Racing League and others to come, we believe we can foster stronger connections with consumers by bridging the gap between the online and offline worlds, thus making Skillz more synonymous with everyday life. For our partners, we'll provide them with innovative ways to engage their current and target audiences.
We see tremendous opportunity in this area in both its immediate term returns, but also in support of how we continue to build our competition layer for the Internet and our developer ecosystem, which I'll talk about next. The initial chapters of our growth story were focused on building the demand side of our platform as we sought to establish a new normative consumer behavior in an industry that didn't previously exist. This isn't terribly different from other two-sided marketplaces we're all familiar with. Let's use Uber as an example. When Uber was first created, the idea of getting a ride from a stranger in an unmarked, unlicensed car seemed scary, if not downright crazy. Thus, the initial growth cycles for Uber were spent honing the consumer marketing message, building trust in the ecosystem, and establishing a consumer behavior that hadn't previously existed.
Once ride-sharing became the norm, the company evolved their investment strategy to prioritize drivers. In other words, the supply side of their business. They realized that ridership would be driven by the speed and quality with which the company could match rides with drivers. Skillz is at a similar inflection point. When we launched nine years ago, competition-based gaming with real-world prizes was a novelty. Since then, we have educated consumers about fun, fair, and meaningful competition, and in doing so, created a new category of casual esports, which we've made accessible to over 40 million registered Skillz users. To invent this new category of gaming, we partnered closely with a small number of developers, some of whom have gone on to become quite successful.
We also have learned valuable lessons about what it takes to make a successful game in this new category and what kinds of support and features our community needs from us. While we remain committed to making our existing Skillz developers even more successful as beacons for this emerging industry, we also believe it's the right time to translate the lessons we've learned into investments to scale our community. To guide these investments, we're already underway on building teams in developer marketing, partner management, and developer-centric product management. These teams will be foundational to guiding three key initiatives. First, we want to invest in demand generation and community. There is a large group of developers that isn't even aware of what Skillz can offer. We plan to grow our customer community through targeted marketing campaigns to lift awareness and interest in building on the Skillz platform.
Second, we regularly find developers seeking guidance and advice about this new category of games. We're going to give them that. We will be building out an in-house advisory team who will help developers maximize their investment into the platform by syndicating best practices, actionable insights, competitive intelligence, game design suggestions, and more. We also want to enable our developer community to connect with one another to share best practices and advice. Third, as Vatsal mentioned, our teams will be focused on building new scalable tools and services that not only will give developers more control and functionality to increase their potential, but will also reduce Skillz' recurring costs. A good example of this is our developer-powered marketing function that we launched in beta in 2021.
Just as it sounds, developer-powered marketing allows developers to execute their own user acquisition strategies as opposed to having Skillz lead it for them. This gives developers higher upside for their business while reducing the marketing commitments and cost burden from Skillz. Overall, our developer community is the lifeblood of our business and will be the hero of the company's next chapter of growth. With that, let me summarize the highlights of what we've covered today. We have a large and diverse audience of users who wanna play competitive mobile games. 2021 was a major building year for us, and we mentioned in our earnings call a couple of weeks ago, we are shifting our focus to drive efficiency and sustainable growth this year.
Here's how we plan to do that. We're optimizing our user acquisition spend by leveraging our data science capabilities, building more automation in our media buying processes, migrating more of our DSP spend to Aarki and growing our organic traffic sources. We're optimizing our engagement marketing spend by eliminating low return programs and driving deeper user engagement through owned communication channels and data-enriched user profiles. We're building a stronger and more durable brand that enhances all of those consumer marketing efforts, as well as supporting our developer marketing investment. Last, and perhaps most importantly, we're investing in our developer ecosystem through education and insights that we expect to drive increased developer success and adoption and result in more new games on our platform. I'm very much looking forward to what we're planning to accomplish this year.
With that, I'll pass it off to our CFO, Ian Lee, to cover our financials.
Thank you, Casey, and thank you everyone for joining today. I'm Ian Lee, Chief Financial Officer at Skillz. In my section, I'd like to cover a little more about our financial profile and model for people who are newer to Skillz, and also discuss how we plan to become a more efficient growth company and make progress towards profitability. First, let's take a step back to reflect on where Skillz has come from. Five years ago, the worldwide mobile gaming market was approximately $58 billion in size. In 2016, against this backdrop, Skillz was establishing itself, developing a base of users and revenue. We ended that year with approximately 24,000 paying monthly active users in Q4 and $8 million in annual revenue. Fast-forward to the present, and it's clear that both mobile gaming and Skillz have come a long way.
As we covered earlier, the mobile gaming market is over $90 billion in size today, and it's still growing. In fact, it's expected to grow to $175 billion by 2026, according to Statista. Much like mobile games, Skillz has been on a rapid growth trajectory that's still in its early days. By Q4 of 2021, Skillz had over 600,000 paying monthly active users and achieved $384 million in annual revenue. We invested aggressively in 2021 to build and scale our platform to take advantage of this opportunity. In 2022, we will look to attack it in a more efficient manner in a way that sets us up for sustainable and more profitable growth in the years ahead.
Before we discuss our strategy in 2022, I want to provide a quick overview of our revenue model for people who may be newer to our company. At the top of our revenue model is Gross Marketplace Volume or GMV, which Andrew mentioned earlier in our presentation. This is a representation of the total entry fees generated by people playing games on our platform. GMV is calculated by taking the number of paying users multiplied by the average number of tournaments, multiplied by the average entry fee. From this number, we subtract a few items to get to revenue. These include prizes, developer revenue share, and end user incentives. For background, prizes are generally the largest use of our entry fees, and approximately 80% of our GMV is paid out in prizes.
Next, we share a portion of the revenue with the developers who've built the games on our platform. This is usually paid out after we've recouped the cost of our user acquisition marketing that we do on behalf of the developer to attract users to their games. In essence, it works like a profit share. Before the repayment of user acquisition costs, the average developer earns approximately 20% of revenue, which is consistent with other media industries. Finally, we may offer certain end user incentives to players. End user incentives includes bonus cash that is awarded to players on a system-wide basis, which is recorded as a reduction to revenue. An example of this is the initial sign-up bonus players receive when they join the platform or the tickets loyalty store rewards that users earn at the end of each paid tournament.
This does not include bonus cash that's awarded to users on a targeted basis, such as limited time deposit incentives offered to certain player segments. That bonus cash is accounted for as a sales and marketing expense and is considered part of what we call engagement marketing. Turning next to revenue. Our revenue can be boiled down to two metrics. One, paying monthly active users, and two, monthly average revenue per paying user. Paying monthly active users is the number of unique users who entered into at least one paid competition during that month. The monthly average revenue per paying user is the average revenue we generated from each paying user. I'd also like to note that we recently introduced an additional measure of our top-line growth, which is Revenue After Engagement Marketing or RAEM. This is simply revenue less engagement marketing costs, which is a proxy for cash revenue.
I'll talk more about RAEM shortly. Now that we've discussed how we generate revenue, the next slide provides a little more detail on our business model. In this example, we have two players entering a tournament. Each pays $0.60 to enter, generating a total of $1.20 in entry fees. As I noted, GMV is the total entry fees paid by players, which in this case is that $1.20. Calculating GMV, less prizes, and user incentives and developer profit share gets us to revenue. Our take rate or revenue as a portion of GMV has typically been in the mid-teens% on a percentage basis. With our highly scalable technology platform, we have a high gross margin well in excess of 90%. To take advantage of the massive growth in the mobile gaming sector, we have been investing in marketing and to grow our organization.
As a result, our expenses have exceeded revenue to date. Excluding the investment in user acquisition to grow our base of gamers, our Adjusted EBITDA has been positive. To restate, our primary focus the last several years, and especially in 2021, has been investing aggressively for growth, and we have been successful on that front. You can see from the revenue chart that we've grown revenue from $51 million in 2018 to $384 million in 2021. As I touched on earlier, we have two primary forms of marketing investment. User acquisition marketing to drive new users to our platform and engagement marketing to support the engagement and monetization of existing users. Looking more closely at 2021, user acquisition as a percentage of revenue grew to 63%, while engagement marketing grew to 49%.
At the same time, we have invested in growing our organizational infrastructure, especially in 2021. Coming into the year, we were very light in a number of key areas internally, such as HR, for instance, both at the leadership levels and also at many mid and junior tiers. Last year, we more than doubled our headcount, adding 370 people, inclusive of the 170 employees that came with our acquisition of Aarki. All this investment has helped build a strong base of users, content, and talent, but it has impacted profitability, as you can see from our Adjusted EBITDA margin chart. We plan to leverage the scale we built in 2021 to focus on driving efficiency and advancing towards profitability. This year, we'll no longer be focused on GAAP revenue growth at all costs.
We have an increased focus in growing revenue after engagement marketing as we look to reduce ineffective forms of engagement marketing. This will come at the cost of near-term GAAP revenue growth, but will be balanced by a reduction in Adjusted EBITDA losses this year. As we noted in our earnings call a few weeks ago, we expect to achieve an Adjusted EBITDA margin improvement of approximately 10 percentage points when compared with an Adjusted EBITDA margin of negative 47% in 2021. We expect that margin will improve significantly from Q4 of 2021 to Q1 of 2022, and will continue to improve across the year. It's worth noting that marketing spend is ramping down from Q4 of 2021 to Q1 of 2022 in order to execute with maximum efficiency.
This will be partially offset by a 15% compensation adjustment that took effect on January 1st to bring our compensation in line with market benchmarks. In terms of people, we don't expect to grow our headcount significantly from Q1 levels during this year. We expect to exit 2022 with Q4 revenue after engagement marketing growth rate above 30% and an Adjusted EBITDA margin better than -30%. By focusing on greater efficiency, even at the cost of near-term revenue growth, we will be positioned to drive growth into the massive mobile game market in 2023 and beyond. Our target is to reach Adjusted EBITDA breakeven by the end of 2024.
To take material steps to reduce our Adjusted EBITDA losses and make clear progress towards breakeven, we aim to do three key things to improve the Return on Investment or ROI of our user acquisition. Grow the lifetime value from our users through improved user retention and engagement. Improve the efficiency of our user acquisition marketing. Last, optimize the efficiency of our engagement marketing. We define lifetime value on a cash basis. It is calculated as a cumulative gross profit derived from our users after taking into account the cost of engagement marketing incentives. You can see the cash LTV curves on the chart relative to the cost of the user acquisition costs needed to acquire them.
You will note that the ROI has been lower in some of our more recent cohorts, and this has been primarily driven by the general rise in the cost to acquire new users. For the other two points, we will seek to drive higher efficiency from our marketing investment. First, we will drive user acquisition efficiency by optimizing spend across geographies and networks, driving higher organic traffic and migrating more UA spend to Aarki. We expect the shift will reduce the total UA dollars spent relative to 2021 and at a much lower average user acquisition cost with shorter payback periods. Second, we aim to reduce low return engagement marketing programs, which we expect will result in lowering engagement marketing as a percentage of revenue, as well as in absolute dollars.
We expect to use the learnings from our testing and experimentation in engagement marketing over the past year to inform our reductions. Turning to the growth of our user lifetime value, you can see from this chart the historical cash LTVs of different quarterly user cohorts. These trends are generally consistent. What's also important to note is that our cohorts tend to be long-lived, often generating positive returns even after five years, and we've never had a cohort go to zero. As we noted in our Q4 earnings call, and that Vatsal covered earlier today, a primary way we intend to drive greater LTV is through more impactful product initiatives. Our near-term product roadmap is focused on improving user experience through social features and greater personalization.
We have several of these initiatives rolling out in the first half of this year, including chat, which enables players to communicate with one another on our platform, personalized leagues, which provide players with opportunities to compete with their relevant communities, and a core product experience overhaul, which will refresh the interface for users for a more inviting experience. Of course, the addition of new content that transitions into hit games would also clearly drive greater user growth and engagement. We have not assumed any new content in our 2022 full year guidance. Another area of focus this year will be increasing the efficiency of our user acquisition investment that we used to attract new users. We aim to reduce our overall UA dollars invested in 2022 relative to 2021, while enhancing the returns we achieve from those dollars.
We expect to focus our investments more directly on channels where we can optimize returns and reduce the payback periods on our spend. In 2021, we saw payback periods across many channels lengthen. We want to bring that in significantly over time so that we are optimizing. As a reminder, Aarki is a Demand-Side Platform or DSP with a focus on the mobile gaming market that we acquired last year. By vertically integrating into the ad tech market, we expect to continue to look for avenues to drive more organic traffic to our platform. These will be through greater use of initiatives such as search engine optimization and App Store optimization. Our approach to improving UA efficiency. I want to provide a quick flavor of one way in which we are looking to optimize for efficiency.
On this slide, we're showing a chart that illustrates the cost of acquiring users on the Y-axis relative to dollars spent on the X-axis. This chart is obviously simplifying a lot of variables that go into determining how we may go about looking to optimize UA efficiency. Think of it as a representation of an elasticity curve steady with spend. At a point, it reaches critical mass, unlocking an area we can scale spend without increasing user acquisition costs. You could call that the mid-tail part of the market. Cost doesn't increase, so long as your user lifetime value or payback expectations can support it. Note that there may still be reasons to push spend beyond this zone if, for example, you could reap the benefits of scale. For instance, the network where you're spending.
I would further note that we've been looking to find that inelastic zone with parts of our user acquisition investment this year. We were able to achieve that balance in parts of February as an example. Before I leave this area, the discussion of UA here covers the near-term areas of our focus. Potential upside drivers to our plan over time could include cloud gaming, which Andrew went over earlier, on the Google Play Store. Cloud gaming could provide us with an avenue to reach more of the Android users far more effectively than our current methods. Turning to engagement marketing, as we indicated in Q3 of last year, we intend to start reducing our investment in this area in 2022. Engagement marketing has been a tool in which we've effectively driven user engagement and monetization, supporting revenue growth.
As you can see from the chart, we increased the use of engagement marketing as a portion of revenue in 2021. A segment of that increase was due to greater testing and experimentation across different forms of engagement marketing to gain learnings on the effectiveness of various initiatives across our user segments. Looking back, not all the investment was as effective as we would have liked. In 2022, we are focused on reducing the overall level of engagement marketing, both in terms of dollars and as a percentage of revenue. Our focus will be on reducing or eliminating initiatives that generate low returns. Ideally, we would also eliminate initiatives that may have been displacing cash deposits that users might otherwise have made.
The reduction of engagement marketing will lead to lower GAAP revenue in the near term, in part because the use of incentives such as bonus cash has led to more in-period entry fees by players, which in turn has supported revenue. However, we believe that reducing the level of engagement marketing will enable us to focus on initiatives that drive positive returns, leading to profitable growth. Our additional top-line measure, revenue after engagement marketing, will be a useful metric to gauge our ability to grow our business while reducing our spend in that area. On this slide, I wanted to provide a quick view into how we are looking at focusing on the most effective forms of engagement marketing. We've shown here the results of four different engagement marketing initiatives run over the past few months. Each was run for a seven-day period.
The two on the left are what we call limited time trophies. These are incentives for taking actions on our platform, such as playing a certain number of games within a certain period. Within each initiative example, we show the bonus cash provided relative to the gross profit after engagement marketing that was delivered as a result. The latter is a proxy for cash generated. As you can see, Initiative B on the left was smaller, but generated a significantly higher return than Initiative A. We look to cut back on Initiatives like A and do more of B. On the right of the slide are two examples of limited time offers, which, for example, provide incentives to deposit cash into your account during a certain period. These both provided strong returns relative to the bonus cash invested.
We look to focus on initiatives like these when we're investing in engagement marketing. To summarize the last few slides, we're focused on driving profitable growth and are targeting break even by the end of 2024. We will be seeking to drive greater engagement and retention from users through impactful product initiatives, driving greater efficiency in our user acquisition efforts, and targeting both lower and more effective use of engagement marketing. There are various elements that we're not factoring into our forecast today. These could further drive profitable growth and speed our time to break even. These upside drivers include new content that develops into hit games, opportunities to enhance our take rate from the mid-teen% levels we see today. This can be supported through initiatives such as experimentation with different tournament formats.
An example would be shifting gameplay from head to head to a more exciting bracketed tournament involving multiple players, where the take rate could be higher and we could be expanding the user wallet. Take rate can also benefit from continued partnerships with brands. Partners may also take responsibility for a portion of the prizes that we pay out. This would drive a significantly higher take rate for the games involved. Expansion and traction into new international markets such as India remains an opportunity for growth. As Andrew covered earlier, cloud gaming may create an avenue to attract new users in an effective manner. Finally, entrance into the Google Play Store would give us a more direct way to acquire Android users. As I wrap up my time with you, I'd like to leave with a summary of some key highlights for our business.
We are pioneering a new market in competitive gaming amidst the backdrop of this huge and growing mobile gaming market. We have invested in building a strong platform and are now moving our focus to drive profitable and durable growth. We are doing that by focusing on improvement in the unit economics of our user base through greater marketing efficiency and product initiatives. Finally, I'll leave you with a reminder that our guidance is based on our existing set of content. Among other vectors, new hit games on our platform would provide upside to our full year 2022 revenue and revenue after engagement marketing guidance. With that, I'll pass the discussion back to Stefan to open up for Q&A again.
Welcome back, everyone, for our second question and answer session. Let's begin with the first question. This one will be for Ian, a financial question. Can you please clarify the distinction between end user incentives that reduce revenue versus incentives that are included in sales and marketing?
Yeah, sure. Thank you. That's typically determined by what's considered a valid expectation by the developer, whether that would be delivered. For example, if there's incentive offered for the first time a user logs into a game, that's sort of considered a reduction of revenue. Conversely, if there's a incentive that's offered to a specific segment of users, for example, a limited time offer for, again, very specific set of users, that would be to be considered in a sales and marketing expense as engagement marketing.
Great. This next question is for Casey around developers. What are some of the tactics that you plan to use in order to attract more developers to the platform?
Thanks, Stefan. Really there are three big things that we're focused on this year as I mentioned. The first is really building awareness and community, and we think about this by running targeted marketing campaigns to let developers know that we exist, explain the value proposition to them, and explain the opportunities that exist with this form of monetization. Inside of that, we also think there's an opportunity to build community, connecting those users together or those developers together through conferences, through webinars, meetings where we can share best practices inside the community. Beyond growing the community itself, we wanna make developers more successful on the platform, really increasing the hit rate of the investments that they're making on the platform. That's where our second and third investments are most impactful.
I mentioned previously giving developers advice and guidance, sharing best practices, helping them understand what works and what doesn't on the platform, some of the insights that Tim from Tether was mentioning in our panel. Really building out that functionality and that muscle so that developers have a higher rate of success when they build new games on the platform. Third, as Vatsal has talked about, it's really about product functionality that improves the unit economics for users, reduces friction in the onboarding, and gives developers more control over their businesses. That will help both attract new developers who are looking for that functionality and capability, and also increase the rate of success that they have once they join.
Great. Do you mind elaborating a little bit? We've talked about developer-powered marketing in the past. Maybe briefly describe, you know, what that is and how developers have engaged with that so far.
Yeah. Thanks. This is a great example of what I was just referencing in terms of giving developers more control over their business, more ability to drive innovation and affect successful outcomes. What the developer-powered marketing program really is, it's in beta right now with a small handful of developers. It's a set of data flows and functionality to enable developers to run their own user acquisition campaigns on the platform, and they have economic incentives for growing the player population inside of the Skillz federated network. We're giving them the tools and data to run their own user acquisition as well as economic incentives to grow the community.
What that does is fosters innovation, enabling them to figure out how to best market their games, giving them more control over their businesses, and reducing the expense burden for us of growing the community via Skillz consumer acquisition.
If I may cut in, I think strategically, we always intended for the developers to market their own content. If you think about other content creator industries that we, you know, video gaming is now very much parallel to music, to film, to books. These industries over time have migrated to where the industry is primarily there are kind of two businesses that are built in each of those industries. It's either a content creation business or a marketing business or both. There are companies that excel at content creation, at marketing content, or both. We thought and believed 10 years ago that the same thing would happen in video games.
When you think about Skillz as a strategy, it's really building the infrastructure to enable the industry so that the content creators in our industry can focus on what they do best, which is building content and marketing content. Developer powered marketing is really this idea that we can get these businesses to do what they do best, and I think that makes a lot of sense.
Great. Continuing on the content theme, Netflix obviously became very successful using other people's content as well as creating and controlling their own content. Andrew, question for you. You know, how do you think about the content strategy for us in terms of leveraging other people's content versus building and controlling our own?
I know Casey, who's an HBS grad, he loves that Harvard wrote a case study on this very topic. First party, second party, third party, I think it's an evolving discussion that we continue to examine. As many know, we are engaged both in third party as a platform, and as well as in some second party content development, investing in some of the content on the platform. I think we will continue in those two vectors. We examine first party, I'd say, periodically, if not quarterly, and think about whether or not it makes sense to engage in it as a platform.
Now and for the foreseeable future, we don't believe that makes sense to really engage in first party as a meaningful portion of our revenue.
Great. This next one's for Casey. Casey, as it relates to the NFL, can you talk about how many NFL games we expect to release?
Yeah. We're right on schedule with our partnership and just announced the four semifinalists inside the competition. Four different developers, four different very unique games, and we're really excited about them. They're entering what we typically call soft launch right now, which means that the games will be made available for consumer play testing, feedback, and iterative development by the developers as they hone the onboarding experience and the game mechanics themselves. We're planning to announce a winner ahead of the next NFL season. Typically, as a competitive platform, we think about there being a winner. It is possible that there could be multiple winners if multiple games show standout performance.
It was really exciting to see the NFL-branded marks launch on all the finalists. I was literally downloading one on the way here today. For anybody who's watching, it'd be awesome if you have a moment and you can go and try out any of the finalists, and you can discover those via our website.
Great. A related question to that for Ian. What % of second half revenues do we expect will come from these NFL games?
Yeah, thanks for the question. We're again really excited about the finalists that we just mentioned there. Typically with new content, we don't assume contribution from them in our financial guidance, so there is no contribution from those games in the guidance we provided for this year. That would be potential upside if they were to kind of come out and have material contribution, but there's nothing in the guidance we provided for the new content in the NFL games today.
Pretty exciting to have so much new content launching that has the potential to change the outlook for this year.
Sure. Yes.
Yeah. Continuing on content, another game, Trivia Crack Payday. This one's for Casey. Can you provide an update on the progress and status of Trivia Crack Payday on our platform?
Sure. Trivia Crack is a incredibly exciting opportunity because trivia as a genre of video game is one of the largest and most accessible genres that is on mobile today. Etermax with their game Trivia Crack is the largest game in the trivia category, and it's a really big opportunity for us. Trivia Crack right now is in that stage I just mentioned. It's in soft launch. The game developers, the studio they have assigned to the project from Etermax is currently in active development of the game. They're iterating on the play features to drive better user retention, better LTV, and to continue to hone those metrics ahead of broad marketing of the game.
Great. Switching gears for a second to distribution. Casey, what percentage of our ad spend was reduced, and when did we start to reduce that ad spend this year?
In terms of that we had on the table in front of us in January, we translated that into a defined execution plan and we began executing that marketing plan in the beginning of February. We're spending about half of what we were previously from a user acquisition perspective, and all of this with an eye towards efficiency and ensuring our paybacks are inside of 24 months.
Great. Talking about efficiency and how we measure return, how do you think about return on our user acquisition as well as our engagement marketing spend, and what are the parameters that you're thinking about for 2022?
Yeah. With respect to user acquisition, as I mentioned, what we look at a couple different dimensions. We look at payback, and as I mentioned, making sure that we're inside of that 24-month target. Then we measure our return on investment against a three-year LTV curve. We've shared this before, but the user cohorts actually survive well beyond three years. We think of three years as an industry standard benchmark that we're using in terms of measuring return on investment. You know, with respect to engagement marketing, we think about engagement marketing and measuring the efficacy of that against incremental end user deposits onto the platform and incremental end user entry fees on the platform.
We typically target a double-digit return with respect to each $1 of engagement marketing that we're putting to work.
Great. Continuing on the theme of marketing efficiency, and Aarki. By the end of this year, how much of our marketing budget do we expect to be on Aarki, and how do we think about that ramping across the year?
As I mentioned, when I was previously talking about distribution, we haven't yet shared a specific benchmarks around how much of our spend we expect to move from our other DSPs—big opportunity for us. It was about a third of our advertising spend last year, and typically the margin on that spend is between 20%-30% of your media dollars are being allocated to the Demand-Side Platform. Moving that spend from third-party DSPs into the DSP that we own is a really big opportunity and one that we're still in the early innings of.
That's of course before we take into account the added benefits of integrating data pipelines, which should drive added efficiency, both for the Skillz business, but also making the Aarki product more impactful for their existing customers.
Great. Financial question. This one's for you, Ian. When we describe achieving EBITDA breakeven by the end of 2024, do we mean that 2024 for the full year is expected to be breakeven, or does that mean that Q4 of 2024 could be breakeven, implying the first full year of breakeven would be 2025?
Yeah, thanks for the question. The comment about achieving breakeven by the end of 2024 was, you know, during the course of the year. One of the quarters, you know, towards the end of the second half of that year would be in the description. Not the full year of 2024. It would be the kind of years post that where we might achieve the breakeven in terms of the full year.
We're still very much in the early innings of the mobile gaming market. You know, this is a $80 billion sector projected to double by 2025 to $160 billion plus. I think as a strategy, we continue to focus on investing heavily into capturing that market opportunity for the foreseeable future. Although we are now tapering back our investment level given the sentiment from the market about, I would say, growth and gaming. We're thoughtful in terms of the feedback we're hearing from all of our investors. That doesn't change the fact that mobile gaming is an explosive market opportunity.
Great. This next one's for you, Casey. Is much of your marketing spend on short-term spot purchasing, or does that happen via long-term contracts?
All right. Most of our acquisition today is digital. Typically the distinction between spot purchasing and long-term contracts is more applicable to television advertising. We run our marketing budget on a dynamic basis. It's done short term. We're able to increase or decrease spend very quickly, making our marketing spend both discretionary and giving us the optionality to scale up or scale down based on the efficiency that we're seeing inside the market.
Great. Related question for the NFL and that promotional process around the developer contest. How is the NFL helping out with promotional activity in connection with the NFL developer contest?
Yeah. We've been working hand-in-hand with the NFL in terms of building the most impactful marketing program that we can for the eventual winners. There are specific contractual commitments on both sides in our agreement with the NFL around marketing of the products. What we wanna do is build out the most effective program that we can in terms of driving as many users as we can into the winning game. That will be somewhat dependent on the game itself, the audience segments that we see as most effective, but we're doing that hand-in-hand with the NFL.
Great. This next one's for you, Andrew. It's as it relates to addressing Android users. The question is, most of your users today are on iOS, not Android. What is being done to get Skillz games available on the Google Play Store to tap into this huge part of the mobile market?
Well, we've been engaged in a dialogue with Google Play really since we left the Google Play Store in 2013. I wish I had better news on their enablement of the entire category. At the foreseeable future, I don't think we can set an expectation that Google Play is going to change their policies. Having said that, launching cloud-based gaming, it's really an enablement play, not even just for Android, as I mentioned earlier, but also for the now 700 million computers that are actively deployed worldwide. A lot of people forget that computer gaming is actually still quite meaningful. There are 300 million monthly active users on computer gaming.
Those users are actually spending a lot more time and money due to the form factors differences between that and a mobile and tablet device. Cloud-based gaming doesn't just help facilitate the Android user to having access to content. It facilitates an entire another category of devices that we currently couldn't service.
Great. Next question is for Ian, and it's around the high-yield deal. Can you provide some additional context around the reasons for why we raised that debt capital?
Yeah. We raised $300 million of a senior secured offering in December of this year just passed, and that was primarily done to give us the flexibility to move quickly for M&A investments.
Again, it just gives us the ability to move quickly should opportunities come up. We're actively looking at those opportunities right now. That was the reason for doing that deal last year.
If I may add, I think in terms of timing on when we may be discussing M&A or strategic investment, the kind of deepest companies in our pipeline ended up not panning out right around the time when we did the debt deal. I would just wanna caution those who are listening and watching that they should expect a noticeable lag from when we did the debt deal to when we may be able to announce an M&A or investment deal, mainly because the, you know, the deepest funnel companies were not suitable for moving forward.
Great. This next question is for Andrew, around crypto and blockchain strategies. "Is Skillz currently looking at incorporating any crypto or blockchain strategies to build out our gaming ecosystem?
I think the interest in NFTs are undeniable. I think the reality of NFT right now in gaming is that it's primarily around speculation, not around gameplay and gameplay enablement. I was actually having a great chat with Tether's management team in the lobby here during the break, and we were really discussing use cases for NFT in gaming. I don't think we're quite there yet, but I think it is a very dynamic discussion that we're having. I can tell you that we are all over examining the application of NFT in our ecosystem.
Great. Last question for Casey around advertising. Are you considering advertising on the free tournaments in order to generate incremental revenue?
Showing ads to the free-to-play users on our system is and remains an opportunity to extend monetization across our product. It is still the vast majority of users who are playing in free-to-play competitions, and that is an opportunity for us. Having said that, when we look at the other near-term opportunities in terms of expanding retention, growing player LTV across the product, advertising actually tends to fall below many of the opportunities that we're currently working on. It is an opportunity and I think we'll continue to look at it, but we're prioritizing the things that are gonna be most impactful for the business right now.
If I could cut in on that, I think investors should think about our ability to monetize via ads as similar to something like amazon.com in its earlier days. Certainly they were buying a large amount of advertising to enable the platform to generate user interest and eventually move into Amazon Marketplace. Having said that, you know, the ad revenue generation that they're engaged in was really an after-the-fact monetization. It was not the primary form. It was built so that they could harvest this user traffic that was not interested in any of their primary services. I think very much similarly we'll be engaging in that type of monetization with ads to our users as opposed to saying, "Hey, this is really a big shift in monetization strategy.
Great. With that, we're going to go to Andrew's closing remarks.
Thank you, Ian, and thank you everyone for joining us today. In the past, we've spoken quite a bit about our audacious mission to build the competition layer for the internet. Today, we appreciated having the opportunity to speak to you about our more near-term plans that will propel us toward that long-term goal. We're humbled to serve such a rapidly growing market. Gaming is the future of entertainment. It's bigger now than music, movies, and books, and mobile is the largest and fastest growing segment in gaming. In the short time that's passed since we've set out on this ambitious path, we've created an innovative platform that provides a better experience for users, enables better monetization for developers. It's a massive opportunity, and we're still in the early days of developer adoption, but we face fewer obstacles today than we ever have before.
In this year, we'll build on the foundation we've laid to drive better marketing efficiency and higher LTV through powerful new product features that benefit our users and our developers. We also plan to increase investment in the developer community through education and insights, which is really the next stop on the path to creating the best content engine. We expect these initiatives to extend our lead over potential competition and increase profitable growth. The opportunity for Skillz has never been greater, and we couldn't be more excited for this journey to get every gamer, every developer, and every game on Skillz. Thank you again for joining us today. Of course, game on.