Ad offers unquestionably work when it comes to monetizing a game or app that features virtual currency, but certain ads appearing on the networks can develop unsavory reputations or just seem inappropriate to software targeting young users. To solve this problem, Super Rewards has developed a new piece of backend technology to let developers deal with this anxiety over offer platforms bringing inappropriate ad content into otherwise wholesome games: the Offer Management Console.
Super Rewards CEO Jason Bailey describes the Offer Management Console with the metaphor of a dial. Turn it all the way to the left and every type of offer on the Super Rewards network appears in your game or app. As you begin turning the dial to the right, content begins slowly being filtered out of the offers that will appear to users of your game or app. If you turn it all the way to the right, then only the most highly regarded offers appropriate to the broadest range of user ages will appear in your game or app.
Of course, as a client turns the dial of the Offer Management Console to the right, the total number of offers available to users of the app narrows. Bailey notes that clients using the most highly-filtered settings may not monetize their game or app as quickly as someone with the dial set all the way to left, but may be able to make more money with Super Rewards in the long run.
"What we're finding from a monetization perspective is that if you crank the dial all the way to the left, you tend to burn through users quickly," said Bailey. If you crank to the right you'll make less immediate money but over time users are more likely to complete more and more offers and have a longer lifetime value."
The idea is that when developers step in to filter offers according to the nature of their app, then users are more likely to get to accept offers they're really interested in and return to accept more offers later. It also reduces the chances of a user blaming a bad Super Rewards ad offer experience on the developer or whatever brand an app might be representing. Bailey hopes to use the Offer Management Console to dramatically extend Super Rewards's reach into many types of apps that might not otherwise be willing to use ad offers to monetize.
"This would be a tool for big brand publishers to have a much more user-based platform. There's talk in the industry that offers are spammy and are getting people to sign up for subscription services," said Bailey. "You can imagine that if someone has a poor offer experience, the headline isn't going to read "Super Rewards rips off little old lady," it's going to say, "World of Warcraft rips off little old lady." We need to protect the brand of our bigger publishers."
Bailey says that the Offer Management Console is a feature that other players in the space aren't yet offering. He blames this on the competitive nature of the business, with every network feeling like it has to make sure it's offering the greatest quantity of offers. Most developers decide which ad offer platforms to use after brief testing periods and tend to interpret slow performance as bad performance. What's good for an impatient start-up that needs to generate immediate revenue can much less desirable to bigger publishers concerned about the long-term value of their brands, though.
According to Bailey, Super Rewards has some partners lined up who can't be announced yet, but who signed with Super Rewards specifically because of the Offer Management Console. He calls them "very recognizable names," and singles out youth virtual worlds and brands catering to the 30+ crowd as major new client types Super Rewards is courting.
The real question here is if being the first ad offer platform to move to protect big brand-name publishers will give Super Rewards long-term clout with big name clients. Bailey admits that the feature isn't difficult to implement technologically and that it probably won't be long before his competitors are offering imitations of it. By being first, Bailey hopes Super Rewards builds up its own brand-- as the ad offer platform that really cares about preserving brand reputations.
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