rewarded ads aren't undervalued, they're niche

roichaser

I'll bite on this. Everyone keeps going on about how rewarded advertising has these sky-high completion rates and engagement metrics, but honestly? That's a vanity metric if the scale is garbage. Built a platform myself for a B2B SaaS lead gen experiment a while back, tried incentivised video views. Sure, completion rates were 80%+, but the cost per completed view was through the roof and the people watching were just there for the prize. No real intent, no downstream action. The whole 'attention retention' argument falls apart when you realise it's forced attention, not genuine interest.

Mobile gaming apps? Yeah, it works there because the user is already in a reward-seeking loop. But outside that? In B2B or any high-consideration purchase? Users see through it instantly. They'll watch your thirty-second ad for five coins, then forget your brand exists. The 'active choice to engage' argument is a bit weak too - it's not active engagement with your message, it's active engagement with the reward. The advertising itself is just the price they pay.

Also, and this is the killer, you've got no existing scale or audience to test against. Nobody's going to care about your new platform because the advertisers need volume and the users need a sufficiently large prize pool to bother. It's a chicken-and-egg nightmare. So no, I don't think rewarded advertising is undervalued. I think it's overhyped for specific use cases and a massive time sink for anyone trying to make it work outside of mobile gaming.

justauser

It's tough starting out with limited ad experience - I've seen plenty of people build a solid site but struggle to get traction 😅. Scale is really hard without a decent budget. Completion rates do tend to be 80% or higher, but that doesn't guarantee conversions. Worth digging deeper into what actually works for your audience.

brandvoice

That's a great question - and yes, rewarded ads are huge in mobile gaming. I've worked with a few gaming clients on their email flows and they consistently see higher engagement when they pair in-app rewards with post-install follow-ups. It's almost like users want to feel that sense of earning something. Have you looked at how those gaming apps structure the offer? The key seems to be making the reward feel genuinely valuable, not just another transaction.

leadgen

Depends on your meaning of success.

Advertisers are typically focused on the end action (typically a purchase of some sort, or a micro [trans]action on the path towards a purchase)

Pure video views / completes aren't compelling if it's completely divorced from whether or not the user will take the intended action and savvy advertisers will take this into consideration.

Incentivized videos tend to have a low correlation between video views and actions taken. Over time this has turned into an industry-wide understanding that incentivized video is just not a good buy.

As an aside, unskippable video has similar issues.

As a vendor you're probably thinking of your "product" as units of complete video views but that is not how your customer will be thinking of it.

There's one situation where I think incentivized views could be worth it -- if you're a big brand interested in doing heavy brand awareness in a "cornering the market" kind of way, it's effective at getting people to watch the same video 30+ times over the course of a week. Which over time, if you believe in the subliminal/subconscious/mild brainwashing part of ... Frankly all modern video content (compared to the amount of stimulus a human mind was actually evolved to deal with), would be very effective. But that would be a pretty difficult client / set of clients to land since those folks are also usually shopping "premium inventory" typically, and you'd need to be able to offer significant & stable scale and get over the issue of inherent bias against what is considered currently, bottom of the barrel inventory. The scale problem is also not insignificant.

Personally I do think a lot of advertising does fall into that mild brainwashing/persuasion/Overton window thing, and consideration based advertising (where you actually talk about features instead of an emotional hook) has a finite limit to how many people it can convince, vs. the emotional approach. So maybe it is undervalued. But your client's marketing team would have to be very good at justifying that to their finance team etc. etc.

Sidenote -- this works for mobile app games promoting mobile app games because usually the price of the action is zero / close to zero, and/or the app actually makes money by selling ads. And there's high alignment in interest. But for non game advertisers I can't see it really working out

roichaser

Rewarded advertising isn't undervalued - it's more like overhyped by people who haven't run the numbers on real user behaviour. Nobody cares because the engagement is hollow. You're paying for a tap from someone who just wants the virtual currency or extra life, not a genuine lead. That's the part you're missing: low-intent traffic doesn't convert in B2B SaaS, period. I've seen it tank pipeline velocity every time someone tries to scale it. Sure, it works for mobile games or low-commitment apps, but if you're selling a £500/month subscription, rewarded ads are just burning budget on window shoppers. Happy to dig into the data if you want proof.

socialbutterfly

Honestly, I've seen this play out again and again 💸 The return just doesn't stack up for most campaigns. Even with mobile games - sure, they've built entire monetisation loops around dark patterns, but that doesn't mean the ad model suddenly becomes worthwhile for brands. The squeeze is still very real.

funnelhacker

Honestly, I've seen this space eat agencies alive. Rewarded ad networks outside gaming are popping up faster than anyone can vet them. The ROI looks clean on paper - low CPMs, high engagement - until the fraud claims roll in and you're left holding the bag.

You're paying users out of pocket, then the network reverses the payout because they detect fake installs or bot traffic. Meanwhile, your UA costs are already sunk. The anti-fraud tech you'd need to actually protect margins is eye-wateringly expensive. Most people go in thinking it's a free lunch. it's not. It's a margin trap.

sleepermode

The core issue is signal integrity. from a technical standpoint, rewarded ad inventory often introduces a motivational bias that degrades downstream behavioural data. In my automation work, I've seen that users engaging for a reward-rather than genuine interest-tend to exhibit higher bounce rates and lower post-click conversion quality. it's not that the format is inherently bad, but the incentive structure poisons the attribution pipeline. Marketo and HubSpot both struggle to cleanly separate incentivised from organic intent, so you end up optimising for vanity metrics unless you've got strict segmentation rules in place. That friction is why most experienced practitioners treat rewarded traffic with caution.