Appodeal rewarded videos

[Markus_Ranner]

I have a couple of questions about Appodeal’s rewarded videos:

1. Is anybody running rewarded videos successfully? I can’t seem to find much information in the documentation about how to implement them correctly.

2. What’s the benefit of using rewarded videos instead of just showing interstitials and rewarding the user from viewing them?

@agramonte, maybe you have this knowledge?

[agramonte]

1. I am. In my apps, I use dynamic configuration to switch the advertising network. I have attached my code.

2. The eCPM of rewarded video is usually higher than interstitials and you might have 2 sets of settings: Rewarded are not skippable and in my case, you can fire them over and over again. Interstitial I only show every 2 minutes and you can skip them.

appodeal.lua.zip (1.0 KB)

[Markus_Ranner]

I knew I could count on you! A million thanks!

[anon63346430]

Reward ads require the user to opt in to view so people don’t complain about the ads if the reward has at least a small value to the player. Interstitials just annoy players as they gain no reward from being forced to view them.

Also, reward can be shown at any time but interstitials must only be shown on scene transitions.

[XeduR]

agramonte and SGS pretty much answered this, but the answers ought to be connected.

i.e.

Rewarded ads are to be explictly used for instances where the user initiates the ad and they will be provided some in-game reward following the completion of the ad. Because rewarded ads don’t bother users who don’t want to see them and because those players of yours who do see them actively want to see them, they are the most valuable ad format with the highest conversion rate.

I’ve said this before, but I hate ads 99.99% of all ads, be it in TV, Interwebz, games, etc. but even I enjoy rewarded ads. A well implemented rewarded ad leaves the user feeling happy instead of annoyed, which is habit forming.

[Markus_Ranner]

Thanks for the replies guys. I do understand the difference between forcing the users to view ads vs rewarding them for doing so.

What I didn’t understand is why rewarded videos is a specific ad format. I mean, why can’t you just use interstitials the same way? Ask the user to view an ad in order to get a reward, then show the interstitial, and finally reward the user?

I thought that using “true” rewarded ads required some kind of backend implementation to handle the rewards, which is why I haven’t bothered with it. But I understand from you that is not the case, at least not when using Appodeal?

[BDC]

@Markus_Ranner

Certainly in the case of AdMob rewarded videos I get a callback and can then reward the user once they’ve viewed a completed video. If the user attempts to quit an AdMob rewarded video ad before completion, then the user gets a message saying that they will not earn the reward if they don’t complete the ad. If attempting to use interstitials in place of rewarded ads then with some ad networks the user can simply quit the interstitial before viewing to completion.

As it happens, Vungle has an option to force view completion on interstitial ads and I’ve used Vungle and standard Vungle interstitials as rewarded videos. However! The force view option on the Vungle console stopped working for me so consequently I can no longer user Vungle interstitials as rewarded videos. I hope that all makes sense and helps!

[Markus_Ranner]

@BDC Yep, I have that same experience from Vungle’s “force view” option for interstitials. Was running only Vungle before I switched to Appodeal.

What I meant by backend implementation is something like this with Vungle: https://support.vungle.com/hc/en-us/articles/204374244-Can-I-use-server-to-server-S2S-callbacks-for-rewarded-ads-. Feels overly complicated to me, and reading stuff like that is what has scared me away from rewarded ads in the first place, thinking it required a lot of work to setup.

Regarding users quitting before viewing the ad to completion, I didn’t see that as much of a problem and figured I could just reward them anyway. But I guess that will have a negative impact on the eCPM in the end.

I will definitely try to implement the use of Appodeal’s rewarded videos asap.

[XeduR]

It’s really all just about the implementation.

If an advertiser is more likely to have a user see their ad, have a more positive reaction to their ad and have them more likely watch the ad to the end, it’s worth a lot more to them.

Similarly, if the developer is giving the user free stuff for watching ads, they also want to make sure that the user actually watched the ads. You may not have seen users quitting the ads as as issue, but for advertisers, it’s a big issue.

That’s really all there is, interstitials are a cancellable nuisance and rewarded are an opt-in full ad.

[Markus_Ranner]

@agramonte From your code sample: Any reason for calling canShow() for rewarded videos and isLoaded() for other ad types? I can’t seem to figure out the difference between the two and when to use which…?

if adType == "rewardedVideo" then
    local isLoaded = appodeal.canShow( "rewardedVideo", "rewarded" )
    return isLoaded    
else
    local isLoaded = appodeal.isLoaded( adType )
    return isLoaded
end

[agramonte]

I use the top one to check for rewarded videos and the bottom one for everything else. In Appodeal placements determine the frequency ads are shown. The full-screen setting dictates the frequency of both rewarded videos and interstitial.

So the default placement has Rewarded videos off and a frequency of 2 minutes.
The “rewarded” placement only has Rewarded on and a frequency of 1 second.

The word “rewarded” in the first line is for the rewarded placement that only shows rewarded ads.

rewarded placement:

default placement:

[Markus_Ranner]

Ok, that makes sense. Didn’t know that you could control the impression interval from the dashboard. Thanks for explaining.