Reward videos - the future of advertising?

jigglybean

With 'Crossy Road' making over $1million with incentivised video adverts, is this the future for a successful formula with free apps?

Matt Hall explained that “We wanted it [Crossy Road] to be free, so that everyone has a chance to play.” To make money, they devised a monetisation system inspired by NimbleBit's puzzler Disco Zoo.

“I played Disco Zoo and thought that video ads were a really good way to earn money without getting into people’s faces. We just needed to figure out a fun reason for players to watch them,” Hall said.

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Having played the game, it's not totally generous with coins(to purchase different characters) but there's no start up adverts, ads after death - nada.

Every 20-30 mins you are reward free with random coins (10-100 I have had) and if you watch a video, you earn 20 coins. Chartboost recently about reward video adverts in their latest SDK and this could have a good impact until the advertisers bring their rates down due to over supply!

Thoughts?

BigDave

thanks for sharing

Chunkypixels

Combat Monsters by Rubicon Mobile used a similar system of rewarding users for watching adverts, and it seemed to work quite well from a players point of view... Wasn't in your face, and didn't impact gameplay, so felt like it was a fair and honest system of monetizing the game.

I guess as with all advertising it's as much down to how the individual developer uses it, but in the case of Combat Monsters it seemed to be a well implemented system of advertising.

iamcartez

@BlackCloakGS‌ Just curious, are we able to use the reward videos, or is it just the static and video interstitials? I would do a quick test but I'm at work... in a cubicle, 10000 feet underground with spotty underground wifi.

Hopscotch

@iamcartez‌, as mentioned in the other thread, rewarded videos require the handling of callbacks via an external server. GS does not support this at the moment. We have a solution for this but it is quite involved. Matching up the user with the callback from Chartboost is the tricky part.

jigglybean

Incase anyone missed this.

Braydon_SFX

@iamcartez said:
BlackCloakGS‌ Just curious, are we able to use the reward videos, or is it just the static and video interstitials? I would do a quick test but I'm at work... in a cubicle, 10000 feet underground with spotty underground wifi.

I'm interested in this too. I hate ads, but I will actually watch a video ad if it gets me that extra 20 coins I need to purchase something in-game. So those video ads work well.

Thanks for the find, @jigglybean‌ !

robertkdale

Very Interesting!

robertkdale

Can we do this with GS?

Hopscotch

@robertkdale, implementing rewarded STATIC Chartboost ads is relatively easy, given a backend server.

Rewarded video ads (which GS does not support yet) is possible but quit involved (in man hours, not so much the tech).

That is why I suggest everyone up-vote the following feature request

http://bugs.gamesalad.com/show_bug.cgi?id=315

so life can be easier for us all.

Rewarded ads is a very fair and lucrative way to monetize your apps.

Braydon_SFX

@Hopscotch said:
robertkdale, implementing rewarded STATIC Chartboost ads is relatively easy, given a backend server.

Rewarded video ads (which GS does not support yet) is possible but quit involved (in man hours, not so much the tech).

That is why I suggest everyone up-vote the following feature request

http://bugs.gamesalad.com/show_bug.cgi?id=315

so life can be easier for us all.

Rewarded ads is a very fair and lucrative way to monetize your apps.

Voted!

jigglybean

@Hopscotch said:

Rewarded ads is a very fair and lucrative way to monetize your apps.

Crossy Road devs just made $1 million from using these kind of adverts - so personally, this is a 'no brainer'

gingagaming

Maybe if we invlove @Dan_Chartboost‌ he maybe able to persuade GS at a higher level....

RedRobo

Sounds like they have lots of time for the small guys, I like that. Wish Google would take a leaf out of their book!

The video ads sound great....I've added my vote to the cause

KC_Games

Voted. I would totally watch a 15 sec ad to get that upgrade and I think my users would too. This could have a tremendous impact on our monetization as devs

RondoRocket

Voted... seems like a great way to implement ads and get people to watch.

robertkdale

@Hopscotch I just voted!

robertkdale

Hey guys. I just received a very interesting email from the bug report. From GameSalad.

whaselden said:

You can use Chartboost video ads already. You just need to enable it in your Chartboost dashboard for your ad campaign.

jigglybean

These are standard video ads, not rewarded ones.

robertkdale

OH?

8bitninja

So, GS - what's the word on rewarded video?

app_sauce

@8bitninja said:
So, GS - what's the word on rewarded video?

Agree its a feature that cant come soon enough. But, gs has said that its on the list they are working on. Check out this recent thread http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/89092/chartboost-reward-videos-in-time-for-christmas#latest

8bitninja

Cool! Thanks, @app_sauce

Clock

This has been mentioned many times in the forum. GS team doesn't have time for this. It's not their first priority.