I didn’t make them intrusive, I used 3 small banners in 3 different screens making sure they didn’t interfere with the user experience.
My thinking was: it’s another incentive to upgrade to the Pro version, I didn’t realize at the time the other negative impacts of ads.
The first thing I noticed was obviously the drop in ad revenue but it correlated with another metric: Daily active users was growing.
Downloads grew by almost 35%! I didn’t run any campaigns or anything. This is just from people using the app and talking about it.