The one-paragraph version
An offerwall is a list of paid actions. A user picks one, does it — installs a game and reaches level five, signs up for a trial, finishes a survey — and the advertiser pays for that action. You keep a share and credit the user in your own currency: coins, gems, points, whatever your economy runs on.
That is the whole product. Everything else is plumbing: matching the right offers to the right user, proving the action happened, and moving the money without either side being able to lie about it.
How the money moves
Four parties, in order:
- An advertiser wants installs, registrations or completed surveys, and will pay a fixed amount for each one.
- We hold thousands of those campaigns in one catalogue and serve it as a wall.
- You, the publisher, put that wall in your app and reward the user.
When the action completes, the advertiser confirms it to us. We check it is real, work out your share, write it to a ledger that only ever appends, and send you your own signed postback so you can credit the user. That last step is the one that matters to your users: it usually happens in under a second, and it carries a signature so your server can tell it came from us rather than from somebody with a browser and your URL.
What it earns
Wildly more than a video, per completion, and wildly less often. A rewarded video pays a fraction of a cent and anybody will watch one. An offer pays somewhere between ten cents and twenty dollars and a small percentage of your users will ever finish one.
The two are not competitors. A video is filler for the impatient majority; a wall is where the users who actually want the currency go. Apps that run both usually find the wall is a minority of sessions and a majority of revenue.
When it is the wrong tool
Three cases, honestly:
- Your audience is tiny and untargeted. Offer availability depends on country and device. A few hundred users spread over sixty countries will see a thin wall and conclude your app is broken.
- Your currency is not worth anything. If a user cannot see what a hundred coins buys them, they will not spend twenty minutes earning them.
- You cannot take a postback. Crediting by hand does not scale past the first week.
What to look at first
Completion rate per offer, not revenue. An offer with a high payout and a two per cent completion rate is a wall full of disappointed users. Everything else follows from that number.