Julia Hong, Director of B2B Marketing, Mistplay starts our new educational series on the value and use of rewarded advertising with a quick history lesson.

Rewarded advertising has quietly become one of the most important tools in mobile gaming, shaping how players discover games, progress, and stay loyal over time. What started as simple offers exchanging attention for virtual currency is now central to many user acquisition and retention strategies. At Mistplay, we see how powerful those long term relationships can be. In Mistplay’s 2025 Mobile Gaming Loyalty Index, nearly half of mobile gamers said they had been playing their favorite title for more than a year, showing how durable loyalty can be when it is nurtured with the right experience and incentives.

From one-sided ads to a value exchange

In the first wave of free to play games, advertising was mostly one sided. Publishers monetized attention through banners and interstitials that interrupted play and gave players little control over when or how ads appeared. The value created flowed almost entirely to developers and advertisers while players were treated as inventory rather than participants in a value exchange. If a player wanted to avoid disruption, their only real option was to churn or pay to remove ads, which could feel like a tax on frustration.

Rewarded formats began to change that equation. By giving players coins, boosts, or currency in exchange for specific actions, developers moved from a one-sided model to a two-sided marketplace where everyone had something to gain.

Offerwalls: The first generation of rewarded UA

Around 2010, as early free-to-play titles took off on mobile and Facebook, offerwalls emerged as the first large-scale expression of the rewarded approach. Platforms like Tapjoy, Supersonic, and Fyber gave players a dedicated hub inside games where they could earn large bundles of currency by installing other apps, signing up for services or completing surveys. That made offerwalls one of the earliest forms of rewarded user acquisition for advertisers while also providing developers with a new monetization channel for players who might never make an in app purchase, and enabled cost per action tracking.

The drawback was that most early offerwalls were highly transactional. The message to players was simple: do this, get coins. Offers often lived outside the core game experience,

with long funnels and inconsistent quality, so the format felt bolted on and rarely contributed to genuine loyalty.

Incentivized app discovery and rewarded video

The next wave brought rewarded experiences closer to the game itself. Incentivized app discovery platforms combined user discovery, rewarded videos, and networked reach into a single system. ironSource focused on rewarded video and app discovery, Fyber specialized in monetization through rewarded ads, and Chartboost became known for early cross-promotion between mobile games.

These formats kept players inside the game ecosystem. Instead of sending them out to a browser or a long survey path, players could watch a short video, receive a reward, and jump straight back into the session. Rewards like extra lives, soft currency, or temporary boosts could be reinvested immediately into the game they were already playing, but the experience was still largely transactional, with limited personalization or sense of progression beyond a single session.

The birth of rewarded apps

From 2016 onward, a different type of product began to emerge: rewarded apps that connect players and games through ongoing incentives.

Mistplay was one of the first to focus exclusively on mobile gaming rewards. Founded in 2015, with an Android first app launched in 2016 and an iOS app added later, its goal was to align the value of time spent playing with how players are rewarded. Instead of paying only for installs, Mistplay introduced a model where players earn a currency called Units for minutes spent in-game or for specific engagement events, which can then be redeemed for real world gift cards. From the start, this was paired with personalized game recommendations so players discovered titles that fit their tastes rather than a random feed of offers.

Outside gaming, early platforms like Swagbucks and KashKick showed how task-based reward apps could drive engagement across surveys, shopping, and media. Mistplay took a different path by building a game-only ecosystem tuned to player motivations, which helps publishers reach audiences who are more interested in trying and sticking with new titles.

Under the hood, the tracking model reflects the same principle. On Android, rewards are heavily tied to actual playtime, while on iOS they are aligned more closely to in-game events. In both cases, the focus is on rewarding continuous engagement and spend, rather than one-time actions like an install or a single level completion.

Over time, rewarded apps have evolved into richer ecosystems. Features like sweepstakes, tournaments, and referral quests give players more ways to earn and compete, while an SDK that tracks playtime and engagement unlocks deeper insights into which genres, creatives and reward configurations generate high value, long-term players.

The evolution of these platforms to where they are today is making them more important to overall UA strategies. A recent Deconstructor of Fun article highlighted the channel is going start taking up a larger part of the marketing mix: "To date, loyalty programs have made up on average <5% of your average marketing mix but now with the right balance of scale and quality, and by selecting appropriate optimization events, loyalty programs will grow to 10%+ of the UA mix in 2025."

From history to foundation

Today, the rewarded ecosystem includes hundreds of companies worldwide and is an integral part of the toolkit for UA and growth leaders.

The most effective teams treat rewards as part of a full funnel loyalty strategy that starts with honest, aligned advertising and continues through onboarding, LiveOps, and long-term engagement. Rewarded advertising is no longer simply a way to pay players for attention. It is the connective tissue between how players discover games, how they progress, and why they choose to stay.

In the next article in this series, we will look at the rewarded ecosystem as it exists today, including how different models fit together, when studios should introduce rewarded mechanics and how to integrate them with LiveOps and lifetime value strategies.