In her latest column, mobile expert Peggy Anne Salz looks at what publishers need to do to turn ad quality into tangible results...

Whether ads are deceptive, disruptive or degrade the user experience, publishers, platforms, and ad tech partners broadly agree that poor ad quality carries real business consequences. But until now, the conversation has been largely reactive, triggered by isolated incidents or user complaints, without a consistent way to assess the problem at scale or compare ad quality performance in a meaningful way.

That is beginning to change as the industry recognises that any metric viewed in isolation gives a distorted picture of performance. As Mixpanel’s 2026 State of Digital Analytics report argues, app growth now depends on measuring holistic, lifecycle-wide business impact rather than siloed proxy metrics alone.

In monetisation, that shift has major implications for how publishers evaluate ad quality, partner performance and the trade-offs they are willing to accept. 

“A more mature, more holistic view of monetisation is taking hold,” observes Charlie Castell, in-app ad monetisation veteran and co-founder of PubRev+, a consultancy focused on app growth and monetisation. “Today, publishers understand they need to make proactive decisions about ad quality based on how it impacts retention and LTV, not a post-mortem on what went wrong where.”

The good news: More publishers understand why they need to do more to improve the ad experience and are stepping up to take control of monetisation. The not-so-good news: Without data, publishers still lack a clear way to compare monetisation partners, judge ad quality and act before damage is done.

Turning ad quality into action 

This changes with the release of AppHarbr’s In-App Network Ad Quality Index, the first benchmark to rank networks on the quality and safety of the ad experiences they deliver. 

Updated quarterly, the Index draws on live traffic data from billions of impressions across gaming and non-gaming apps to benchmark demand partners on user safety, user experience and monetisation health. That gives publishers a production-level view of network behaviour in live app environments, not just performance on paper. Rankings are based on observed in-market performance, not self-reported compliance, and measure the friction ads introduce into the user experience, the safety risks they expose users to and the longer-term monetisation impact that follows when bad ads slip through.

That matters because ad quality does more than shape the user experience. “It also shapes monetization outcomes,” says Rona Lautman, director of product management at AppHarbr. “There is a hidden trove of revenue being blocked by bad ad experiences. To unlock it, publishers need transparency into where ads are coming from and how clean their partners really are.” 

The Index puts numbers behind that argument.

• Gaming is a risky business. Gaming apps are more exposed than non-gaming, with roughly 1 in 58 ads flagged as malicious and 50% of ad networks failing baseline player-safety requirements. High-value iOS audiences are even more exposed, facing about 3 times as many bad ads as Android users.
• Bad UX is bad monetisation. Skippability failures, deceptive close buttons and overstretched video ads are no longer edge cases. The report notes that 93% of users abandon games because of deceptive “X” buttons and that 15–30 second ads are too often stretched into 60–80 second experiences, driving rage quits, abandonment and weaker long-term ARPU.
• Clean supply is a competitive edge. The spread between networks and supply paths is real and actionable. Header bidding SDKs emerge as cleaner than many network SDKs, with The Trade Desk, Equativ, Index Exchange, TripleLift, and LoopMe ranking best-in-class on cleaner supply paths. In gaming, Meta and AdMob lead on relative ad quality, with BidMachine, Amazon Ads, Digital Turbine and Mintegral close behind.

The Index gives publishers the visibility to rethink partner decisions and demand mix. In practice, that can mean expanding work with cleaner networks already in the mix, cutting back weaker performers or adding partners they had not seriously considered before. But without an ad quality policy for what they will and will not allow, the Index becomes a signal, not a standard, Lautman explains. “Putting policy into action has to be the first step.”

The metrics look fine. The product doesn’t.

That logic resonates with publishers grappling with the disconnect between monetisation performance and product health.

For Nastassia Hubarevich, head of monetisation at DigitAlchemy, a US-based mobile app developer behind a portfolio of utility apps used by millions worldwide, the issue is not whether bad ads exist. “It’s whether publishers can see clearly enough to connect ad quality to business impact and act on it.” 

That is exactly where a benchmark like this helps publishers move beyond assumption and ask harder questions about what their monetisation stack is really doing to the product experience, Hubarevich says. Even “safe” or default setups can still allow disruptive behaviours that negatively affect users, and the damage rarely appears in one obvious metric. The outcome is an “invisible tax” on monetisation. 

But the cost rarely shows up all at once, she says. It leaks out through weaker retention, lower session depth, rising complaints and the growing operational burden of dealing with partner escalations. “Ad quality needs ownership,” she adds. “It can’t sit somewhere between monetisation, product and partners with nobody really controlling it.”

And that’s why the Index should not be treated as a passive readout.

John Wright, CEO of mobile sports-action gaming studio Turborilla and an advisor to gaming studios globally, sees the same risk from a broader publisher vantage point. It’s a classic case of “short-term gain, long-term pain,” Wright explained during a recent ad quality publisher roundtable. What looks like a small win in the short term can create much larger losses over time through weaker retention, lower ratings, reduced discoverability and damage to brand trust. 

“A few extra cents from a bad ad are never worth the downstream damage. If you hurt the user experience, you hurt retention, ratings and, ultimately, the brand,” he said. Seen through that lens, bad ads are not just irritating. They’re expensive.

Critically, ad quality is not a problem publishers can simply push onto the ecosystem. “The bad actors are external, but the exposure is only partly external,” she says. Publishers still control partner mix, supply path choice, placement design, ad rules and whether they continue buying revenue from sources that repeatedly fail quality checks.

Three steps from visibility to better judgment 

That’s where better visibility must translate into better judgment. For Itai Cohen, chief strategy officer at Digital Turbine, a global growth solutions partner for the mobile ecosystem, the real question is not whether publishers have more visibility, but whether they can translate that into better judgment. Ranked among the stronger performers in the Index, Digital Turbine offers one example of what that more deliberate approach can look like.

• Start with the mix

For Cohen, the Index is most useful when publishers treat it as a working tool, not a scoreboard. The first step is to look at the cleaner networks identified in the report and ask a basic set of questions: are they already in the stack, how much volume are they driving, and does that mix still make sense? In some cases, the answer will be to expand relationships with stronger-performing partners. In others, it may mean rethinking networks that were never seriously considered before. “The Index should trigger a review of partner decisions,” Cohen says. “If cleaner supply is already in your mix, maybe you should be leaning into it more. If it isn’t, that’s a signal too.”

• Control the cadence

Better visibility only matters if publishers use it to make more deliberate decisions about how often friction appears and where. Cohen’s point is not that every ad experience has to be frictionless. Some formats will inevitably introduce a bit of friction. The real question is cadence. How often do they show up, how disruptive are they in context, and is the revenue they generate worth the longer-term cost to the product and the brand? “Not every aggressive experience is automatically a bad decision,” Cohen says. “The question is cadence. If something introduces a bit of friction but appears in the right place and at the right frequency, that may be manageable. If it starts overwhelming the experience, that’s when it can become a challenge.”

• Watch the exit

Publishers also need to look beyond the impression itself and focus on what users do next. One of the clearest indicators of ad quality is whether users continue engaging after an ad or simply disappear. That is where the real cost of a bad experience starts to show up, and why ad quality cannot be judged on revenue alone. The ad may monetise well in the moment, but if it breaks the session or weakens retention, the long-term math looks very different. “The ad itself is only part of the story,” Cohen says. “What matters is whether the user stays and keeps engaging after it. If they don’t, you’re looking at a quality problem, even if the revenue looked good in the moment.”

Control starts here

The Index is a first, but it’s not a fix. Publishers still have to decide what they will tolerate, which partners deserve more volume and where short-term revenue is no longer worth the longer-term cost. The industry already knew bad ads existed. What publishers have now is deeper visibility into the problem, and far fewer excuses not to act.