BitBurst’s story started back in 2015 when brothers Jan and Ben Asbach identified an opportunity to revolutionize how market research firms collect data while improving the experience of survey participants. This is where BitBurst and its focus on user-oriented rewarded surveys were born. Since its 2017 launch, Bitburst has grown into a leading supplier in digital market research worldwide. The Germany-based company prides itself on its unique approach of running its own platforms and providing publishers with a complete survey monetization solution.
The company’s biggest app, Poll Pay, drives users to interact with surveys and earn rewards in return and has drawn in more than ten million downloads and one million monthly active users worldwide. With the success of its Poll Pay app, today BitBurst has developed its technology into the BitLabs SDK so that app publishers can also harness the power of rewarded surveys.
In a highly competitive mobile market, BitBurst looked to diversify its monetization stack with some new sources of ad revenue – and find an additional monetization mechanism for its surveys. It needed a solution that differentiated itself from traditional offerwalls – namely, because a third-party offerwall would threaten cannibalizing the publisher’s own core business.
BitBurst knew that the time its users spend in an app is both precious and limited – that’s why it needed to find the best solution to complement its user experience and also help further expand its revenue. For BitBurst, prioritizing user experience – as well as an ad experience – that is user-centric, effortless, and enjoyable was key to match its user-oriented model. This meant avoiding intrusive ad formats such as interstitials that would alienate its users – and opting for a user-initiated app flow.
BitBurst saw adjoe’s Playtime as a solution distinctly different from offerwalls and other ad units in the market. And it offered exactly what BitBurst was after: a nonintrusive ad experience initiated exclusively by users. The publisher was reassured that the ad solution wouldn’t cannibalize its core survey business – besides Playtime’s model and offering being game-centric, its value proposition is vastly different. And on top of that, BitBurst was drawn to Playtime’s direct premium demand from the world’s leading mobile gaming advertisers.
The German publisher could capitalize on Playtime’s strong user engagement metrics during high-demand usage times – such as over weekends and over special public holidays (such as Christmas and Easter). By combining its surveys with adjoe’s Playtime, the publisher would guarantee that its survey’s impressive engagement metrics on weekdays could go hand in hand with Playtime’s power to engage users on weekends.
Based on this strategy, BitBurst would optimize the offers’ visibility in its app and maximize its revenue. It would also promise a new-and-improved user experience by offering an enjoyable and fun way to earn rewards besides surveys. Ultimately, survey participants would have the chance to catch a break from completing surveys by using games to earn rewards on weekends.
The publisher quickly identified that users enjoy having a different attractive offer in the app – and that they were driven further into the app when given the chance to play games through Playtime after completing various survey sessions. In fact, 35 percent of BitBurst’s Android users engage with Playtime on a daily basis – and these users boasted a higher engagement in their app relative to other users, resulting in an approximate ten-percent increase in user engagement. BitBurst also saw an uplift in its ARPDAU of 20 percent, enabling it to additionally increase its ad spend for user acquisition – and expand its user base.
Speaking of impressive financials, BitBurst experienced promising revenue growth – particularly, in Germany and France markets – after adding Playtime to its app Poll Pay. Delivering on its promise, adjoe’s time-based ad unit generated incremental revenue on top of the publisher’s existing revenue stream and boosted its overall revenue by around ten percent. With high eCPMs, adjoe has ended up becoming the publisher’s biggest ad revenue stream on Android.
What’s in the pipeline for BitBurst? Aside from planning to launch new apps, BitBurst is continuing to focus on improving the way apps monetize by bringing the survey technology and inventory that made Poll Pay successful to third-party app publishers. This new technology will help their partners effortlessly improve their current survey utilization in a matter of hours. As for the adjoe and BitBurst partnership, you can expect to see continued collaboration as BitBurst expands their portfolio of in-house apps.
