Background
In 2019 Tanguy de La Villegeorges, Nicolas Hardy, and Yves Benchimol sought to develop an app that would motivate users to leave their office desks and spend more time outside. This is where the concept of WeWard was developed, the WeWard app motivates users to take more steps daily by offering them cashback for visiting partner shops or museum locations in the users area. For all of the users steps and on location purchases, the user then receives rewards which they can then cash out. Today WeWard is one of the most used apps in France.
Challenge
As the pandemic raged on, 2020 restrictions limited the scope of the WeWard walking and brick and mortar redemption model. This led WeWard to consider expanding their revenue streams to include more in-app earning experiences. After evaluating the opportunity Tanguy believed adjoe’s Playtime to be a perfect experience to complement their core step counting business.
Solution
In order to boost revenue WeWard added adjoe’s time-based rewarded ad unit Playtime. Playtime continuously rewards users for their time spent playing 3rd party mobile games. Similar to the users step count rewards, Playtime offers users rewards for their continuous mobile achievements throughout their day.
Impact:
WeWard’s inclusion of Playtime into their user experience resulted in a significant increase in revenue. This makes adjoe’s Playtime the single largest revenue stream outside their core business currently making up 30% of overall revenue. What makes the experience complementary is that similar to taking daily steps, Playtime offers users the chance to monetize the activities they are already engaging in outside of the WeWard app. Giving WeWard the chance to turn their users’ habitual mobile behavior into a stable new revenue stream.
Tanguy and Yves didn’t want to deviate from the original WeWard mission of sending users outside and from their test with Playtime they found that by including mobile games into their app they did not have to compromise. WeWard found that Playtime did not cannibalize their original business but rather gave their hyper active users, which represents approximately 15% of their user base, another chance to grow their rewards wallet. WeWard found that this subset of users has been driving the significant revenue increase delivered by Playtime. Founder Tanguy describes those who engage with Playtime as some of their most active and strong users in the app.
Playtime’s complementary experience also drives additional app opens. After some minutes of gameplay in an app installed through Playtime, users then receive a toast notification to inform them of their earnings in the WeWard app. This drives the user back to WeWard to collect and also re-engage with the WeWard offerings. The Playtime integration resulted in 10% uplift in app opens an engagement of the hyper engaged users. The Playtime mechanics help build an additional bridge to keep users loyal to WeWard and ready to earn even more rewards.
What makes Playtime a key partner for WeWard is the ad unit’s ability to take a small portion of their hyper engaged users and expand their app engagement into a significant revenue stream. This allows WeWard to focus more on the original mission of the app while effortlessly keeping their hardcore users engaged and generating more revenues.
Looking Forward
As WeWard continues to be one of France’s top used apps, Tanguy and Yves look to how they can grow beyond their core French and Belgian user base into new countries. As for the adjoe and WeWard partnership, we plan to continue growing together as the app launches in new countries like Spain, the United Kingdom, and Germany before growing into more global markets.
