Advertising Rewarded

Nobody likes being interrupted, especially with something irrelevant to their interests. Advertisements that interrupt a user’s experience typically don’t suffer from ineffectiveness, but can create a negative brand impact. That negative impact can be reflected directly to the brand being advertised.

We’re looking to change that.

Rewarded advertisements that offer paid or premium content for free, in exchange for viewing an advertisement, work well as a two-way street to keep the app developers and their users happy. And who doesn’t like to be happy?

It all starts with one simple idea. Rewarding users… with advertisements! It sounds just crazy enough to work, doesn’t it?

Our users actually want to see ads, it’s how they progress through our app.

This encourages a user to spend time engaging with an advertisement that they otherwise might have rolled their eyes at.

Think about your favorite (or least favorite) drinking game. Your “punishment” for doing poorly is a tasty swig from the drink in your hand. But, that's hardly a punishment, right? That’s what makes drinking games so much fun, kids!

Mobile advertising is being used in the same way, where we feel “punished” for having to click through an ad, just to keep playing. Even though it’s not much of a punishment, especially for the free stuff we’re getting because of it, we still roll our eyes all the same. That negative impact on the brand can be worse than a user just ignoring the advertisement.

netTALK, a telecom provider, has partnered with Tapjoy, a monetization platform and ad network, to provide free international calls on smartphones in exchange for viewing an ad.

Rob Barnett, head of strategic partnerships at Tapjoy, said consumers have shown they want mobile content and services to be free. Consumers are much more willing to engage with ads to earn content than they are to pay for it.

We’ve flipped the idea of advertisements, and we use them to reward players in our app. The advertisements our players see are not only targeted specifically to each player, but are used to reward them with in-app currency that they can use to redeem free prizes. It’s like we’ve given them their favorite drink, based on what we know they enjoy, and we let them take a sip every time they do well.

A sports fan uses our app for the free sports gear, but finds sports-related content and products that interest them along the way. Users have thanked us for helping them find fun, new apps and services they never would have known about if it weren’t for our rewarding platform.

Believe it or not, this simple idea makes everybody happy.

We like making people happy.

Read the full article about Tapjoy and netTALK here.