On April 10, monetization leaders from Korea’s top apps came together at Boutique Monaco in Seoul for a night of honest conversation about how apps actually make money. The event, App Monetization Seoul, was co-hosted by DARO, RevenueCat, and EHVM Apps Capital.
There was a great turnout with C-levels, growth leads, and product folks from companies like Google, AppsFlyer, Toss (Viva Republica), Healing Paper, Moloco, Criteo, SNOW, and CJ. The mix of ad-side and subscription-side practitioners in the same room was what made the evening work.
Two levers that drive ad revenue
Eungil Cho, BD Manager at DARO, opened the evening. His framing was simple and hard to argue with. Ad revenue comes down to two levers: eCPM and impressions. Getting one of them right is not enough. The teams that win are the ones that balance both and build a culture of continuous experimentation around them.
The point landed because the insights came out of DARO’s own experience running ad monetization for Alarmy, the number one alarm app globally built by Delightroom. Real numbers, real trade-offs, no slideware.
What actually moves subscription revenue
Rik Haandrikman, VP of Growth at RevenueCat, spoke next: his session pulled from the State of Subscription Apps 2026 data across 115,000 apps on the RevenueCat platform. The talk cut through a lot of the rumours floating around about paywalls, pricing, and trials, and replaced it with what the numbers actually say.
If you have been guessing at what drives subscription revenue, the answer is that most of the industry is guessing too. The signal, when you zoom out across that many apps, is sharper than you would think.
The global opportunities founders keep missing
The night closed with a panel on global monetization. Evelin Herrera, CEO of EHVM and the person behind more than 150 mobile app and game M&A deals, joined Rik and Seunghwan Stephan Seo, Chief of Staff and Product Owner at Delightroom.
The conversation kept coming back to the same point. Korean app founders have world-class products, but many of them leave real revenue on the table because they underinvest in markets outside their core. Evelin’s view from the deal side, paired with Stephan’s operator view from Alarmy’s global playbook, made the case concrete.
Finger food and frank Q&As
The last 90 minutes were networking over finger food. This is the part of these events that is hard to engineer and easy to get wrong, but conversation flowed and the food was great. Conversations that started in the Q&A kept going through the networking, which is usually the sign of a room full of the right people.
Thanks to everyone who came out.