Study: User Demand for Offerwalls Creates a Huge Monetization Opportunity for App Publishers

Over the past decade, the mobile app ecosystem has evolved at breakneck speed. As mobile apps become more embedded in our day-to-day lives, user behavior grows more nuanced and complex. Some of the biggest shifts have occurred with respect to pricing models — today’s consumers expect apps to be free, while still offering a path to premium content. Years after its inception, the free-to-play model remains profitable, but diverse strategies are now necessary to monetize every user segment. For mobile developers, the key is to use all the tools at their disposal — chief among them, offerwalls.

Mobile offerwalls are in-app advertising units that monetize users through rewarded engagements. New research, including survey results from over 16K+ Tapjoy Offerwall users and data from the Tapjoy network, suggests that offerwalls continue to play a vital role in mobile app monetization. Though the format has been on the market for over a decade and is already adopted broadly, publishers are reawakening to its full potential thanks to consumers’ interest in — and downright demand for — the increasingly popular ad unit. To understand the value of offerwalls, we dug deeper into these three questions:

• How do consumers interact with offers regionally and globally? We assessed the performance of various offer types from July to December of 2019. We also investigated the revenue-generating potential of apps that use offerwalls alongside Rewarded Video by reviewing data from Q4 2019.
• How does offerwall engagement affect existing IAP revenue? We reviewed platform data from July to December of 2019 to understand how Tapjoy Offerwall users engaged with IAPs.
• How does offerwall engagement relate to in-app retention? We extracted retention data from July to December of 2019 and compared the retention rates of Offerwall users and non-users.

Overall, we discovered that offerwalls provide substantial benefits for developers, users, and advertisers alike. Here’s what we found:

1. Non-IAP spenders love mobile offerwalls

Nearly half of all mobile offerwall users — 45% — said that if a mobile game suddenly removed its offerwall, they would stop playing after they ran out of virtual currency. Furthermore, 30% said they would continue to play without making an in-app purchase.

2. There’s no one-size-fits-all monetization strategy

According to recent industry data, just 12.3% of users ever complete IAP. Meanwhile, in a survey run in the Tapjoy offerwall, 88% of users say they like having rewarded advertising options alongside IAP.

3. Offerwall users love CPE offers, and CPAs are growing in value

Cost Per Engagement (CPE) offers, in which a user is rewarded for both downloading a new app and completing a specific activity or event within it, account for 84.5% of revenue for Android publishers. On iOS, new restrictions prevent CPE offers from running, which has resulted in a 35.8% increase in advertising spend on CPA offers since the change, opening a new window of opportunity for iOS publishers.

4. Offerwall and video are an effective combo

On average, we saw that Tapjoy publishers that use the Offerwall alongside Rewarded Video generate 114% more revenue than those using Rewarded Video alone.

5. Offerwalls complement the IAP ecosystem

On average, just 4.7% of Offerwall users also convert on IAP, proving that offerwalls primarily monetize non-spenders. This aligns with reports we’ve heard directly from publishers, who say that IAP revenue has remained steady or even increased following Offerwall implementation.

6. Offerwall engagement correlates to strong retention

Retention among Tapjoy Offerwall users is 2-3X higher than non-users at the 7, 14, and 30-day marks, proving that an app’s most loyal users enjoy rewarded offers.

When it comes to F2P, offerwalls are here to stay

Overall, the data we uncovered suggests that offerwalls will play a big role in the future of F2P. If your app has a currency-based economy, an offerwall could unlock a whole new revenue stream with virtually no heavy lifting from your team. For the full results of our research and even more offerwall insights, download the full 2020 Ultimate Offerwall guide today!