Rewarded Surveys – The IDFA-less app monetization solution for iOS

With the newly released privacy enforcement changes in April 2021 by Apple on iOS 14, a lot of restructuring has taken place in the mobile apps ecosystem. In iOS 14.5 update, Apple introduced the so-called App Tracking Transparency (ATT) which gives people more control over their data and how they are used.

While there was a lot of skepticism on how the new policies will be received from the ecosystem, publishers started to adopt and experiment with the new ATT popup, to achieve the maximum conversions. Google also announced recently that within 2021 in an upcoming Android release, similar privacy enforcements will be used to provide more control to users on their data.

The initial assumptions on the expected opt-in rates were quite pessimistic as they seem to be eventually much higher than anticipated. According to the AppsFlyer report, current adoption rates of ATT in iOS apps reach more than 60% while opt-in rates reach up to 40%. 

Another interesting finding according to InMobi report is that budgets seem to be shifting for the moment to Android from the iOS platform. Brands and advertisers still rely on IDFA and therefore they are moving to Android until there is an alternative tracking solution for replacing IDFA and a better way on how to run successful iOS advertising campaigns.

Market Research – Monetizing without IDFA

With all the changes in the mobile apps marketplace and the new privacy enforcements, advertising budgets have shifted from AppStore and publishers’ revenue already received a big negative impact. To address this, publishers started looking for alternative ways and formats to monetize their content.

In Market Research monetization, IDFA is not used by clients, since clients rely mainly on the different demographic info provided by users within surveys. Therefore, available inventory of survey offers was not affected at all. 

“With no impact on fill rates based on the IDFA availability, Rewarded Surveys are becoming one of the main solutions for monetizing iOS apps.”

Personalised Vs Non-Personalised Surveys

With Pollfish latest iOS SDK, publishers can now monetize with Rewarded Surveys even when no permission is given by users to access the IDFA. If no permission is granted the Pollfish SDK will serve non personalized surveys to the user. In that scenario the conversion is expected to be lower but 100% of the user base can be monetized. 

The mobile apps landscape will be constantly shifting to new stricter privacy policies as new regulations around data privacy come into play in different countries and stores. Those changes are already having a significant effect on how ad campaigns can run effectively and target users and also on what kind of inventory is exposed to publishers looking to monetize. Monetization with Market Research and Rewarded Surveys is the main alternative to Ad Monetization and it will be come soon, one of the dominant formats in the space, not only because of the compliance with stores and unaffected fill rates, but also because of the high eCPMs that surveys can deliver.