Average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU)

Average revenue per daily active user, ARPDAU, measures how much revenue a game or app earns, on average, for each user who was active that day. It is the standard monetization metric in free-to-play mobile games, where most users never pay anything and revenue comes disproportionately from a small share of spenders.

The formula is total revenue for the day / [[daily-active-users]] for that same day, typically including in-app purchase revenue and ad revenue where applicable. This differs from average revenue per user (ARPU), which is usually calculated over a longer period, monthly or annual, against total registered or subscribed users rather than only those active on a given day; ARPDAU is a daily, activity-gated view better suited to games with highly variable daily engagement.

Game studios track ARPDAU alongside player retention because the two interact directly: a game can have strong ARPDAU among its remaining players while losing so many users daily that total revenue still declines, so ARPDAU should never be read in isolation from retention curves. A common pitfall is treating ARPDAU as representative of a "typical" player when, in most free-to-play titles, revenue is heavily concentrated in a small percentage of high-spending users, meaning the average can be far from what most players actually pay.