Ads on demand by gamification

I was in the middle of playing a video game called hay day created by supercell when I noticed a very interesting way of making a user view ads willingly without interruption.

Usually on every site, you tend to see that the only benefactor of an advertisement is the platform itself because they get the reward of users viewing or clicking the ads while the user gets stuck with the entire inconvenience

Hay-day gameplay summary

For those that don't know the game; it's basically a game about managing and growing an inherited farm. You get to grow plants, collect produce from livestock to which you use as ingredients in the different processing machines you purchase and setup such as diary factory, bakery, pie-oven for producing cheese, bread and pie respectively to which you can sell of to customers and make money... and the circle continues.

Problem with most ads

Most ads on apps or websites just spring out of nowhere and interrupts whatever it is you're doing, in some cases, you even loose context of what you were doing before the ad.

• It disrupts your flow
• While trying to click out or close the ad, you sometimes unexpectedly get redirected to the ad page
• Some apps make you watch the entire ad by hiding the escape button until the ad finishes

Gamification is the way

Here you get incentivized to watch the ad, that way both party benefits. Heres how

Step1: User clicks pie oven to pick what to bake
You can already see a bacon pie in one of the production slots with the time it will take to finish baking it with a mysterious button beside it

Step2: User clicks the mysterious button
You get informed of the value you'll get by watching ad, which is slashing 50% off the production time of the pie

Step3: User clicks activate button
User starts to watch ads. Notice the text below the playback area that reads Reward in 4 seconds to affirm to you that they'll deliver on their promise

Step4: User finishes watching ad
User sees another message confirming that their promise has indeed been delivered by displaying the reduced time boldly!

Step5: User is fully incentivized
User sees the promised time reduction after watching the ad

Conclusion

There are a lot of ways of actually integration this sort of gamified system for displaying ads on your platform if we think hard and long about one question

How do we provide value to the user?

As long as you're able to find a way of rewarding users on your platform, you can get them to do anything you want, willingly ofcourse