We analysed Q1 2026 spend patterns across our 500-plus gaming publisher network, representing over 4 billion monthly impressions. The results challenge conventional wisdom about where gaming CPMs peak, which regions are growing fastest, and what formats are capturing the largest share of brand budgets in 2026.
Gaming advertising is a $28 billion global market in 2026, up from $18 billion in 2023. The growth is concentrated in specific verticals and formats, not distributed evenly across the ecosystem. Understanding the segmentation of that growth is where the opportunity lies.
The platform mix continues to shift. Mobile gaming now accounts for 58 percent of total gaming ad spend, up from 52 percent in 2024, driven by continued growth of hypercasual and hybrid-casual titles with large, demographically diverse audiences. PC gaming maintains a premium CPM position despite lower volume, primarily due to the older, higher-income demographic profile of PC audiences. Console advertising, once considered impractical at scale, has expanded significantly with the growth of in-game advertising placements in sports, racing, and open-world titles.
The biggest shift in Q1 2026 is not which platform is growing fastest. It is which advertiser verticals are treating gaming as a primary channel rather than a supplemental one. Financial services and automotive are the stories of the quarter.
Conventional wisdom suggests mobile gaming CPMs are lowest in hypercasual titles with broad audience demographics and highest in mid-core games with engaged, higher-income players. Our Q1 data complicates this picture considerably.
The highest CPM inventory in our network in Q1 2026 was not mid-core mobile gaming. It was PC strategy titles targeting 25 to 45 year old audiences in North America and Northern Europe. These placements cleared at an average of $14.80 CPM, significantly above our network average of $8.40 CPM for mobile gaming inventory. The audience composition (employed, high household income, high purchase intent across premium categories) is driving unusual demand from financial services, automotive, and travel advertisers who have discovered gaming as an underpriced channel relative to CTV or premium digital news.
Within mobile gaming, the CPM premium for rewarded video placements continues to hold. Rewarded inventory cleared at $9.20 average CPM versus $6.10 for interstitial and $2.80 for banner formats in Q1. The attention quality differential, documented extensively in our attention research, is increasingly reflected in market pricing.
North America remains the highest CPM region, but the growth story of Q1 2026 is South East Asia and Latin America. Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil, and Mexico all showed spending growth of 35 to 55 percent year-over-year. CPMs in these markets remain well below North American levels ($1.20 to $2.80 versus $6 to $14), but the scale of inventory and audience growth makes them increasingly significant in absolute revenue terms.
South Korean and Japanese markets continue to command premium CPMs for domestic advertisers, driven by highly engaged gaming populations and strong local brand investment in gaming adjacency. These markets are underserved by Western DSPs, creating opportunity for regional and global advertisers with infrastructure to reach these audiences efficiently.
The most significant Q1 trend is the rapid acceleration of financial services (fintech, crypto, insurance, and banking) as a gaming advertising vertical. Financial services spend in our gaming network grew 78 percent year-over-year in Q1, driven by competitive acquisition environments in mobile banking and the recognition that gaming audiences skew toward financially active millennials and Gen Z users.
Automotive advertising in gaming grew 45 percent year-over-year, concentrated in PC and console environments where the audience demographic overlap with car buyers is strongest. Luxury automotive brands in particular have discovered that gaming environments provide reach into high-income 25 to 45 year old male audiences at CPMs significantly below their alternatives.
The fastest-growing spend category by percentage was sports betting and gambling, though this vertical is heavily geography-dependent given regulatory variation. In markets where sports betting is legal and growing (US, UK, Australia, Germany), gaming adjacency to sports titles has driven significant advertiser interest.
Rewarded video continues to be the performance leader by engagement metrics and is now also outperforming other formats in brand recall and purchase intent lift studies. Interstitials remain the highest-volume format by impression count but show declining CPMs as supply has grown faster than demand. Playable ads, a format unique to gaming environments, are showing early-stage momentum with strong advertiser interest from app and game categories, though publisher adoption is still limited by creative complexity.
The emerging format story of Q1 is in-game advertising: virtual billboards, branded in-game items, and sponsored tournaments. These placements sit outside traditional programmatic pipes but are growing as publishers develop standardised buying mechanisms. We expect in-game advertising to represent 12 to 15 percent of total gaming ad spend by 2028 as the commercial infrastructure matures.
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