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SuperScale vs. Building an In-House UA Team
You probably already have someone strong running paid UA on Meta, Google, and AppLovin. The open question is what it takes to expand past those channels into 35+ ad networks, and whether that is a hiring problem or an execution problem.
On average, the top 8 ad networks take about 50% of mobile UA spend and return about 25% of the profit. The other ~30 networks carry the other half of the spend and about 75% of the profit. Reaching them is a bandwidth problem, and bandwidth is exactly what a hiring plan is supposed to buy.
The decision in one line
Hiring in-house buys dedicated, always-available headcount you fully control. SuperMedia buys the outcome that headcount is meant to produce, daily execution across 35+ ad networks, without the recruiting, ramp, tooling, and retention load of a growth team.
Side by side
The comparison
| Dimension | Building / expanding an in-house UA team | SuperScale (SuperMedia) |
|---|---|---|
| Setup / time-to-value | Months. A search, an offer, a notice period, then ramp on your titles, plus the time your new hire spends opening each network relationship from scratch. | One relationship, one IO, one invoice. The networks are already under contract, so you activate supply instead of negotiating and integrating it. Onboarding is a tracking link, not an integration project. |
| Network coverage / reach | Bounded by how many networks your team can open, learn, and manage well. Publishers commonly stall at the handful of networks they can operationally manage, usually Meta, Google, and AppLovin plus one or two more. | Your spend runs through SuperScale's own network agreements — one IO, 35+ networks. That includes rewarded, OEM, creator-led, regional, and emerging supply that in-house teams rarely have the bandwidth to reach. |
| Pricing model | Fixed cost regardless of results: salaries, benefits, payroll overhead, tooling and MMP fees, and management time. A senior UA hire plus tooling is a fixed annual cost you carry through slow quarters, and expansion usually means more than one head. | An 8% management fee on managed spend. One line item that moves with your spend rather than with your org chart. You bring budget and targets; SuperScale runs the operation. |
| Headcount required | You own recruiting, onboarding, management, and backfill when someone leaves. Growth talent is scarce and expensive to retain. | None added. Your team keeps strategy and creative direction; ours runs the buying across the networks. |
| Expertise & ramp | Deep, but concentrated in the specific people you hire, and it leaves when they do. Network-specific knowledge gets rebuilt per platform and per person. | 70+ publishers. 200+ games. Ten years encoded in the platform. The expertise is institutional rather than tied to any one hire. |
| Optimization / AI | Whatever your team builds or licenses. Manual optimization is capped by human hours and by how many networks one person can watch at once. | SuperAI: an autonomous AI workforce executing 80–90% of publishing ops inside guardrails, 24/7. Not a chatbot. |
| Data & reporting | You assemble it. Stitch each network and your MMP into a warehouse and standardize the metrics yourself, or live with siloed dashboards. | SuperPlatform: no-SDK integrations into one gaming-native source of truth, deployed in your own BigQuery. You own the data. |
| Incentive alignment | Salaries are paid whether campaigns win or lose. Incentives run indirectly, through bonuses and tenure. | The fee is published rather than negotiated account by account. Buying is network-neutral: a network closes the loop only on its own supply, optimizing its own revenue, so allocation follows your data instead of one network's inventory. |
| Risk / downside | A fixed cost you carry through slow quarters. Hiring risk, since a bad senior hire is expensive and slow to unwind. Key-person and retention risk. The opportunity cost of the channels you never get to. | You depend on an external partner and route spend through one relationship. Full data visibility in SuperPlatform offsets some of that, but you have less hands-on-keys control than with an employee, and a fee on managed spend gets bigger as you scale up. |
SuperScale's specific edge
- Channel expansion without a hiring cycle. Publishers who stall at a handful of networks usually have the budget for more; what they run out of is the people-hours to open, learn, and watch each one. SuperMedia lifts that ceiling without asking you to win a recruiting race in a thin talent market.
- One relationship replaces N integrations. One partner, one IO, one invoice across 35+ networks, instead of your team opening, learning, and reconciling each network account, contract, and payment cycle on its own.
- Coverage scales with software, not headcount. Agencies add headcount to scale; we add software. The same arithmetic applies to an in-house plan, where every additional network is more human hours. SuperAI runs across every connected network around the clock.
- The expertise doesn't churn. Ten years across 70+ publishers and 200+ games sits in the platform, not in one person's notice period.
- The data problem is already solved. SuperPlatform lands unified, gaming-native reporting in your own BigQuery, which is otherwise a build-and-maintain project your team owns forever.
On real titles: one game we took over went from −39% UA ROI to +11%, worth $1.37M in extra profit after all fees. On another, ROAS tripled (50% → 153%), CPI fell 78% ($2.80 → $0.60), and the title reached breakeven in four months.
The honest version
When building in-house is the better choice
We would rather you pick the right path than the SuperScale path. Hire and build internally when:
- UA is your core strategic moat and you want the capability, playbooks, and network relationships to live permanently inside your company.
- You are at a scale where a full growth org is clearly justified and you want maximum hands-on-keys control over every bid, budget, and creative test.
- You have a niche or proprietary channel strategy that a multi-network partner is not built to run, and you would rather own the execution end to end.
- You can actually hire and retain senior UA talent in your market, and you are comfortable carrying that fixed cost through slower quarters.
Many publishers land on a hybrid: a lean in-house team owning strategy and the core Meta/Google channels, with SuperMedia running the expansion layer across 35+ networks so headcount doesn't have to scale linearly with channel count.
Keep the team, license the stack. If the reason to build in-house is control, there is a version where you keep all of it. SuperStack is the licensed product: SuperVYZR (the app layer), SuperAI (the agent layer), SuperPlatform (the data layer). Your team operates it and executes on your own network agreements, with the loop closing inside the licensed product. One platform: licensed or managed.
Licences start at EUR 7,000 per month per game on Growth and are custom on Enterprise; UA Creative Production is quote-priced, so talk to us for that. See the pricing page. Pricing also lists a UA Management add-on at 8% of marketing spend, which requires a Growth or Enterprise tier. It is a separate SKU from SuperMedia's management fee, not the same line item counted twice.
The fastest way to make this concrete is to model it against your own spend and targets.
See the numbers against your own spend
Put your current spend against the networks you don't run today and see what the long tail is worth net of the 8% management fee. Then set that against what another head costs you every month whether or not it performs.
Walk through how SuperMedia, SuperAI, and SuperPlatform would run against your titles. Ask for a publishing strategist if you want the operating detail rather than the tour.
SuperMedia: a standalone managed UA service powered by SuperStack — no stack licence required.
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