Block Blast! Made $127M From Ads by Rigging Your Next Round

Block Blast! earned $127 million in ad revenue this year through August — about $46 million more than Candy Crush — and newly decompiled code shows part of how it gets there. Data scientist Ayomide Omolewa, founder of AI game coding platform a0.dev, went viral after pulling apart the game's code and finding that your performance is tied to your value to advertisers.

The mechanism is blunt. A rule Omolewa calls "high value ad harvest" flags players who tend to watch ads and quietly helps them beat their high scores. Then a "death algorithm" kicks in, making the next round impossible to win — at which point the app readies a rewarded video ad (a video a user watches voluntarily in exchange for an in-game perk) that brings the player back to life.

Another game Omolewa decompiled, Dicero, sends five separate conversion signals to its ad trackers whenever a player makes a purchase. That setup helps the app pull in roughly $100,000 a day in ad revenue.

What does this change for mobile marketers?

Plenty, if you buy rewarded video inventory. Omolewa's work suggests some publishers aren't just placing ads — they're engineering game states to manufacture ad impressions at moments of maximum frustration. Performance teams should ask harder questions about where their rewarded inventory comes from and what triggers it.

It also signals a transparency problem that cuts both ways. AI-driven decompiling is now cheap and fast enough that creators can audit black-box monetization mechanics in top-5 downloaded apps. Expect more of these revelations, and more scrutiny of ad-driven game design, as the tooling spreads.

Brands move into microdramas

Elsewhere in social video, advertisers are lining up behind microdramas — short-form serialized shows built natively for platforms like TikTok. Poppi, e.l.f. Cosmetics and skincare startup Sol de Janeiro are early sponsors of Hoorae, the microdrama studio founded by Issa Rae and backed by TikTok, Ad Age reports.

The appeal for brands is twofold: breakout-hit potential and relatively cheap inventory. Poppi, which got in early on pickleball league sponsorships, weaves its soda directly into the show's fabric. Hoorae's branded entertainment arm, Ensemble, also puts paid media behind the content, extending sponsors' visibility beyond the feed.

There's a data perk unique to the format. Because microdramas air on social networks with live commenting, brands can engage viewers in real time and harvest feedback as a marketing signal — something linear product placement has never offered.

Sports betting's growing grip on coverage

In sports media, former ESPN producer Nicole Noren — who left the network in 2024 after 24 years — told the Columbia Journalism Review that viewers now see gambling ads or logos every 13 seconds during a game. She quit over ESPN's partnership with DraftKings, citing gambling addiction that devastated her family, including a brother who died homeless in Las Vegas.

Noren said ESPN once held a hard line against promoting gambling, but shifted after the 2018 Supreme Court decision loosening betting restrictions, and launched its own betting app by 2023. The app flopped, but it was her last straw. She described the wall between business and editorial as becoming "a little more penetrable," with "a rocky path to report some stories that involved stakeholders."

Her exit echoes a 2024 case in which a Publicis employee with a family history of opioid addiction quit after the holding company's $350 million settlement over Purdue Pharma marketing.

In brief

• Fox's $22 billion Roku acquisition is approved by shareholders and should close in the first half of 2027.
• Netflix laid off roughly 1,000 employees, about 6% of its workforce.
• Polymarket launched its first ad campaign promoting political markets ahead of the midterms.
• Two unnamed minors sued OpenAI over allegedly training models on sensitive data from ChatGPT conversations, including kids' health information.
• Swedish social company W Social exposed verified users' personal data in plain text.
• Adam Gerhart was promoted to global chief client officer at WPP, after holding the same role at WPP Media.

The next uncomfortable question for the industry: what other ad-targeting mechanics will AI agents surface next — and how fast can buyers respond before regulators do?