We're severely limited on our ad availability as well, now about 4 per day or so.
SimilarWeb's ranking for the Tapas app has been in a decline since March 24th. We were wondering why the pull back and was thinking it was related to spring break, but now its more clear its probably due to people having less ads to watch so they log in less often.
We can tell you from experience that most advertisers are able to get instant feedback on their campaign. Many are checking their numbers several times per day and most are very quick to cut the cord when something isn't working. The decline in ad values from 60 to 32 to 24 to 12, and a general lack of ads, is a sign that advertising to Tapas users isn't resulting in an acceptable return on investment, so advertisers are pulling out.
If there are 25,000 active users pulling out $.10 (120 Tapas coins) a day, that's $2,500 a day. If none (or very few) of those users ever respond to the ads, what marketer is going to keep pouring money into that?
On the other hand, if the stuff being advertised has no interest to the user, they shouldn't have to click/tap. Mobile Strike, Bubble Island 2, etc. aren't anything we're interested in. One time there was an Olive Garden ad that got us thinking about dining there (someone later told us the promo turned out to be deceptive). Perhaps if the ads had better targeting? At one time they seemed to but since Crackle jumped on board, they seem to be largely non-specific.
Hopefully staff can do something about the ad stream but a lot of it may be out of their hands.
Which is why we were hoping that mobile surveys (or some other earning opportunity) would come into the equation at some point. However maybe staff decided that the time invested in relationship to the reward given isn't enough incentive. We just checked a Peanut Labs dashboard on another site and the average survey is paying about 4.4 cents per minute, or 52 Tapas coins per minute, which isn't all that great for something you have to really engage with vs. ads that at one time were paying 60 Tapas coins and all you had to do was watch.
Maybe there's a better idea out there for how readers can earn coins. Fire away!