Rewarded vs Interstitial Ads: eCPM, CPM & Web Game Revenue

Rewarded video ads carry higher eCPM than interstitials because the advertiser is buying a completed, opted-in view rather than a forced impression. Interstitials win on volume — they fire automatically at transitions, so they produce more impressions per session at a lower CPM. Most web games earn more by running both, with a hard frequency cap on the interstitial.

The interesting question is not which format is “better.” It is how many impressions of each your game can absorb before players stop coming back, and what each impression is actually worth in a browser. Those two numbers decide your revenue, and they behave differently on web than they do in a mobile app.

CPM, eCPM, and Why the Two Formats Are Priced Differently

CPM is what an advertiser pays for a thousand impressions of a specific placement. eCPM is what you actually earned across a thousand impressions after fill rate, completion, and mediation take their cuts. For a single always-filled placement the two converge. For rewarded video they can diverge sharply, because a rewarded impression only becomes billable when the view completes and the reward callback fires. If you want the full mechanics, our breakdown of how CPM and eCPM are calculated covers the arithmetic.

The pricing gap between the formats comes from what the buyer receives:

Rewarded video delivers a user who chose to watch, with sound on, watching to the end because a reward depends on it. Brand and performance buyers both bid up that inventory. Completion is verifiable, which is why rewarded is one of the few formats where the advertiser is paying for attention rather than for a pixel that loaded.

Interstitials deliver a full-screen impression the user did not ask for. Viewability is usually excellent — the ad owns the whole screen — but intent is zero, and skip-enabled interstitial video gives many users an exit after a few seconds. Buyers price accordingly.

That means a game with fewer rewarded impressions can out-earn a game with many more interstitial impressions, or not, depending entirely on the ratio. Revenue is eCPM multiplied by impressions per daily active user, and the two formats move those variables in opposite directions.

How Rewarded Video Earns Its eCPM

A rewarded placement is a trade the player understands: fifteen to thirty seconds of attention for something they want right now. That structure produces three effects that show up directly in eCPM.

First, completion. Because the reward is contingent, users who start a rewarded view almost always finish it. Non-completed views are not billed, so the impressions that do count are the high-value ones. Second, demand competition. Video inventory with verified completion attracts video budgets that will not touch display, which is why rewarded CPMs on web sit well above standard banner and display rates. On AppLixir, rewarded video delivers $4+ CPM against the $0.50–$2 typical of web display — roughly a 2–8x spread on the same traffic.

Third, engagement rate is a lever you control. Rewarded impressions per DAU depend entirely on how well the reward is wired into your game loop. A continue after death, a hint in a puzzle, a 2x coin multiplier at the end of a run, a time skip in an idle game — these get used repeatedly per session. A vague “watch an ad for 50 coins” button in a settings menu does not. Two games with identical traffic can differ by an order of magnitude in rewarded impressions per user purely because of placement design.

The practical implication: if your rewarded eCPM looks fine but rewarded revenue is small, the problem is almost never the ad unit. It is that too few players are opting in. Our guide to eCPM optimization for web games walks through placement density, reward value tuning, and fill behavior.

How Interstitial Ads Generate Revenue

Interstitials monetize attention you already have. They fire on game logic — level complete, game over, round transition, return to menu — and every player who reaches that trigger sees one, subject to your caps. No opt-in means no opt-in rate to optimize, so your only volume lever is frequency, and frequency is exactly the thing that damages retention.

Interstitial revenue therefore comes down to a single design question: how many times per session can this game interrupt a player before sessions get shorter and Day 1 retention slips? In short-session games — one-minute arcade runs, .io matches, hyper-casual loops — the answer is higher, because players already expect a beat between attempts. In longer-session strategy, simulation, or narrative games, the answer is close to zero, and forcing it costs more in lost sessions than it earns in CPM.

Three rules keep interstitial revenue from turning into churn:

Never mid-action. Trigger only on a state change the player initiated or expected — the level-complete screen, the restart tap, the return to lobby.

Cap by time and by event. A minimum interval between interstitials plus a cap per session is more robust than either alone.

Protect the first session. Suppress interstitials entirely for new users until they have completed a few levels. First-session interruption is where churn concentrates.

Interstitial video — the full-screen video variant, often skippable after a few seconds — prices between static interstitial and rewarded. It gets you video demand without an opt-in gate, at the cost of a skip rate you do not control.

Rewarded Interstitial vs Rewarded Video: The Third Format

A rewarded interstitial is a hybrid: it appears automatically like an interstitial, but it announces an incentive up front and gives the user an immediate opt-out. Watch it and you get the reward; close it and you continue anyway, without the reward.

The difference from a standard rewarded video is who starts the interaction. Rewarded video is user-initiated — the player taps a button because they want the reward now. Rewarded interstitial is system-initiated with consent attached — the game decides the moment, the player decides whether to stay.

That makes it useful in one specific situation: your game has natural transition points but no obvious in-loop reward hook. An endless runner with a clear “continue” moment does not need it. A card game or a browser-based puzzle collection where the reward has no natural home often does, because the format creates the opt-in moment for you.

The trade-off is honest: opt-in rates on rewarded interstitials run below user-initiated rewarded video, because you interrupted rather than being asked. Anyone who skips produces no billable completed view. Treat it as a supplement to a rewarded placement, not a replacement for one. The distinction between incentivized and non-incentivized inventory is covered further in our comparison of rewarded and non-rewarded video ads.

Side-by-Side: Rewarded, Interstitial, and Rewarded Interstitial

Attribute
Rewarded Video
Interstitial
Rewarded Interstitial

Who triggers it
The player
The game
The game, with opt-out

Reward given
Yes, on completion
None
Yes, if not skipped

Relative eCPM
Highest of the three
Lowest per impression
Between the two

Impressions per session
Set by opt-in rate and loop design
Set by your frequency cap
Set by cap, discounted by skips

Completion behavior
Very high — reward depends on it
Skippable variants lose viewers
Split between watchers and skippers

Retention risk
Low; often neutral to positive
Highest — scales with frequency
Moderate

Best-fit games
Any game with a spendable reward
Short-session, high-restart loops
Games without a natural reward hook

Main failure mode
Reward buried, low opt-in
Uncapped frequency, churn
Poor timing, high skip rate

Web Games Are a Different Market From Mobile Apps

Most eCPM figures circulating for these formats come from mobile app inventory, and they do not transfer cleanly. The reason is simple and worth stating plainly: Unity Ads, AdMob, AppLovin and ironSource are mobile SDK networks. They do not serve web inventory. If your game runs in a browser — HTML5, WebGL, an .io title, a Telegram mini app, a game embedded on a portal — those networks are not an option regardless of what their published benchmarks say. Our comparison of the major rewarded video networks sets out where each one actually operates.

What changes on web:

No install. There is no app store, no SDK compile step, no review cycle. Integration is a script tag and a completion callback, which is why an afternoon is a realistic estimate rather than a sprint.

Traffic is portal-shaped. Much of it arrives through distribution platforms such as Poki or CrazyGames. Those platforms are where your players come from; rewarded video on your own domain, your itch page, your Telegram build, or an embedded partner site is additional inventory sitting alongside them, not a replacement.

Consent is non-optional in the EU. Browser inventory needs a proper TCF framework or European demand simply does not bid. AppLixir ships TCF 2.3 and GDPR compliance built in through Didomi, so consent signals pass through to demand instead of silently suppressing it.

Scale exists. Web rewarded is not a niche experiment — AppLixir serves over 100 million monthly impressions across web publishers, with a 5,000 DAU minimum threshold to onboard.

For current web-specific ranges on ARPU, CPM, and engagement rate, see our web game monetization benchmarks rather than extrapolating from mobile app numbers.

Choosing Your Mix: Session Length, Caps, and Placement

Short-session games

Runners, .io matches, arcade loops, hyper-casual browser games. Players restart constantly, so transition points are frequent and expected. Rewarded video belongs on the continue/revive and on an end-of-run multiplier. Interstitials belong on the restart, capped by a minimum interval so a player who dies five times in two minutes does not see five ads. Here the interstitial can be a meaningful share of revenue because impression volume is genuinely high.

Medium and long-session games

Strategy, management, simulation, idle, RPG. Sessions are long and restarts are rare, so interstitial volume is low anyway — and the interruption costs more than it earns. Lean almost entirely on rewarded: time skips, resource doubles, extra rolls, temporary boosts. These games often support several rewarded views per session without any friction, because the player is the one asking.

Content sites and non-game publishers

Rewarded video works outside games too, gating downloads, article access, tool credits, or premium features. There is no session loop to interrupt, so interstitials are the wrong instrument; the rewarded exchange maps cleanly onto a paywall alternative. We cover the patterns in rewarded video ads for website monetization.

What to Measure After You Ship

Format eCPM on its own tells you very little. Track these together, per format, weekly:

Impressions per DAU — separately for rewarded and interstitial. This is the volume half of the revenue equation and the one you control through design.

Rewarded opt-in rate per placement — a continue button and a shop-doubler will differ enormously. Kill or relocate the placements nobody uses.

Completion rate — a sudden drop usually signals a creative or player-experience problem, not a demand problem.

Fill rate by geography — tier-1 traffic and the rest of the world behave differently; blended fill hides both.

ARPDAU, plus Day 1 and Day 7 retention — the only pair that shows whether an interstitial frequency change was actually worth it. Our practical tips to improve ARPDAU covers the levers in order of impact.

Change one variable at a time. Raising the interstitial cap will lift this week’s revenue and can quietly cost you more in retained users next month; you can only see that if retention is on the same dashboard as revenue.

FAQ

What is a good eCPM for rewarded video ads on web?

It depends on geography mix, fill, and completion, but the useful reference point is the gap against other web formats. Rewarded video on AppLixir delivers $4+ CPM where typical web display sits at $0.50–$2. Tier-1 traffic sits above a blended average and emerging markets below it, so judge your number against your own geo split rather than a global figure.

Do interstitial ads pay more than rewarded ads?

Not per impression — rewarded is priced higher because the advertiser gets a completed, opted-in view. Interstitials can produce more total revenue in short-session games purely through volume, since every transition is an impression. In longer-session games they rarely do, and the retention cost is real.

What is the difference between a rewarded interstitial and a rewarded video?

Who starts it. A rewarded video is user-initiated — the player taps a button to get the reward. A rewarded interstitial appears on its own at a transition, offers a reward, and lets the player skip. Opt-in rates are lower on rewarded interstitials, so it works best as a supplement in games with no natural in-loop reward hook.

Can I run rewarded and interstitial ads in the same web game?

Yes, and most games should. Put rewarded on the moments where players want something, put interstitials on a capped subset of transitions, and keep at least a couple of minutes between any two ads of any type. If you are running a game on a distribution portal, rewarded video on your own build is additive inventory alongside it — see how the AppLixir integration works for the script-tag and callback flow.

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