Unity & In-App UA
Whale
A small segment of extremely high-value players whose deposits dwarf the average, the users in-app iGaming acquisition ultimately optimizes toward.
iGaming revenue is heavily skewed: a handful of whales can outweigh thousands of casual depositors, so the real economics of a campaign often live in the tail, not the average. This is why cost per depositor alone can mislead if it ignores who those depositors become.
Networks that optimize on revenue events (ROAS bidding) implicitly hunt for whale-like behavior, which is why clean LTV and deposit signals matter so much. The pitfall is optimizing to first deposit and stopping there, missing that the channel that finds whales may look worse on FTD cost but wins on LTV.
In buyer speech
“Two whales from that Unity cohort covered the whole media cost; on FTD numbers alone we would have killed it.”