Rewarded Ads You Can Play!

17/03/2018

Advertising continues to be an increasingly popular method of generating revenue for app developers. For many years apps were monetised primarily by requiring users to pay for them initially, but as ad platforms have continued to develop alongside the introduction of in-app purchases, the number of options available to developers and publishers to generate revenue have greatly increased. 

It is in the interest of companies like Apple and Google to make their app store and ad platforms as flexible and effective as possible for their developer communities, since they themselves take a hefty cut out of every transaction that is made. In order to encourage developers to continuing prioritising Google’s app store as a publishing platform, Google have introduced a new type of mobile ad on their AdMob advertising platform - playable rewarded ads.

If you enjoy the occasional game on your mobile device you may have already come across rewarded ads, which offer the user a reward when they choose to watch an advert, e.g. an extra life, a power up, more playing credit etc. Rewarded ads are seen as a gentler, less disruptive way of exposing users to advertising (since they are optional), whilst still generating revenue for the app developer. Google reports that over 45% of the top 1000 games using their AdMob platform now use rewarded ads as a method of monetisation.

Along with a number of other innovations, Google has now announced the introduction of playable rewarded ads for their developer community to use. These will be rewarded ads that still offer the user an incentive to view them, but they will now be able to feature short playable games inside them. Playable rewarded ads are expected to drive greater engagement between users and ad content, allowing users to learn about the products being promoted in a fun way, whilst also receiving the satisfaction of a reward at the end of the process. Whether or not these incentivised playable ads actually increase the click-through rate (CTR) will be interesting to learn as the changes are rolled out over the coming months.

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