Miniclip has launched AdSurge, an AI-powered mobile advertising platform that now operates as a standalone company serving third-party publishers. The tool went live today as an integrated solution for user acquisition and ad monetisation, with an initial focus on mobile games that earn revenue primarily through in-app advertising.

Miniclip chief data officer Paul Bugryniec told PocketGamer.biz that AdSurge ads become skippable in half the time and require half the clicks to close compared with formats commonly used on other networks. That difference anchors the product's pitch. Bugryniec argues the user experience around mobile ads has been deteriorating for years, citing long waits before an ad can be skipped and close buttons that sit in inconsistent places or are hard to find.

What does this change for publishers?

For studios weighing network options, AdSurge enters the market with a stated focus on partner outcomes rather than raw network yield. Bugryniec said: "Unlike other ad networks that prioritise network yield, AdSurge is focused on delivering results for our partners. AdSurge was engineered inside a studio portfolio, and we evaluate performance using the same metrics our partners care about: return on ad spend, net ad monetisation yield, player experience and SDK technical performance."

The platform took three years to build. It aims to fulfil a public Miniclip mission to construct an ad network, a goal the company could only pursue once its portfolio reached the necessary scale. The $1.2 billion acquisition of Easybrain played a key role in that expansion, giving Miniclip the diverse games portfolio required to validate a dedicated ad platform and now to commercialise it.

How the business is structured

The economics remain modest at launch. AdSurge is said to capture "a low single-digit share of wallet" in ad monetisation terms, while delivering a double-digit margin for Miniclip itself. The underlying technology has been tested and refined across Miniclip's own playerbase before this external rollout.

The platform runs independently of Miniclip as a standalone company. All partner data is isolated from Miniclip to protect privacy, a structural decision aimed at publishers wary of sharing performance data with a competing studio owner. The engineering drew on lessons and expertise from Tencent's ad ecosystem, but the technology itself was built from scratch.

What comes next

The roadmap matters for studios outside the pure ad-monetisation segment. Initial development has targeted titles monetised through in-app advertising, but the next phase will broaden AdSurge to support in-app purchase games and hybrid-monetised titles. That expansion would put the platform in direct competition for a far larger slice of the mobile market.

For now, publishers evaluating the launch should weigh the claims against their own SDK performance data. The signal worth watching is whether AdSurge's next phase lands on schedule and whether the platform's share of wallet grows beyond low single digits once third-party results accumulate.

By Elena Vasquez