ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) is the average revenue per user in a period. Simple to compute and easy to misread.
The problem is the distribution: in iGaming a few players account for most of the revenue, so the average is dominated by them. A single high-value player distorts a whole month's ARPU, and month-to-month variation starts reflecting that person's presence or absence rather than the health of the base.
Practices that make the metric useful:
- Always report the median alongside the average.
- Segment by vertical, acquisition channel and value band.
- Use ARPPU (average revenue per paying user) when the question is about monetisation, since it removes non-depositors from the denominator.
Daily ARPU is rarely useful for operations: variance is too high and nobody acts on it. It is a monthly metric.