Native advertising has become a hot area for marketers, especially those looking to get past ad blockers and the tendency of customers to skip past advertising the moment they notice it. Native ads have become an important revenue stream for many media outlets, and a powerful performer for advertisers when they are executed properly. The New York Times and Netflix, for instance, created a powerful native ad about women in America’s prison system. The piece was written in a raw, journalistic style, and provided plenty of data. It was thoughtful and intriguing, even though it was created to help promote Netflix’s series Orange Is The New Black.

BuzzFeed is a great example of a media site that’s embracing native ads to great success. Buzzfeed (as reported by Ad Age) has create a network of native ads that’s growing every day. Ads like this one from VISA begin playing as soon as it appears in a Facebook feed and challenges viewers with calls to action like “Can you guess the fake ”

Native advertising is also gaining ground in the games industry, though in a different way. NativeX is a company that specializes in native ads for mobile games, and CEO Robert Weber believes the company is serving an important role. “Many mobile game developers are getting far better results from native ads that give their players virtual rewards for real ad engagement. This is where rewarded multi-offer ads work well,” Weber pointed out in an article on The Next Web. “For instance, many game developers offer their players a choice of either watching a video ad or downloading an app in exchange for in-game currency (see image below). While these are native ads, they look and act nothing like Facebook news feed-type ads, or content that’s indistinguishable from the actual game — in fact, their whole purpose is to clearly offer more content in exchange for ad engagement.”

“Typical click through rates for these kinds of units are well over 10%, with completion rates of 50 percent,” Weber continued. “By contrast, a typical clickthrough rate for ads on a newspaper website are closer to 0.3 percent. These reward-based ads have kept a lot of great indie game developers from going bankrupt, and even brought them enough revenue to start creating more games.”

Weber spoke with [a]listdaily to provide more insights on native ads for games.

Robert Weber

How does native advertising in games differ from regular ads that might get shown alongside mobile games

Native ads in games are designed to better align with the game publisher’s targeted user experience, typically including game-specific content (visual, audio and ideally rewards tied to virtual currency).

Are native ads significantly more effective than regular ads, particularly for games Can you cite some examples

Yes. When you combine rewards for users with improved, native design, results are significantly better for publishers.

To get a sense of how effective value exchange ads are, see the MMA research where CTR rates for value exchange video on slide 11 versus other non-native video formats (http://mmaglobal.com/files/whitepapers/MMA_Video_Benchmarking_Study_FINAL_v4.pdf).

Our native value exchange video ads and native interstitial ads drive even further CTR increases. For example, see the Lara Croft: Relic Run case study here. Across our native value exchange video ad publishers, we typically see CTR rates in the 10 percent to 11 percent range, almost four times higher than what the MMA research reported for standard value exchange video.

One of the concerns about native advertising — across a variety of media — is that when native advertising looks too much like the usual content, it may devalue the content’s brand. For instance, that when a native ad appears in The New York Times, that may confuse or concern some readers. Do you think this is a valid concern Does it apply to native advertising in games

I do believe some of the sponsored content native ads typically found in news and social apps can get a bit confusing at times. With our native ads in games, we don’t believe there is any confusion. We think one evidence supporting this is Conversion Rates for our ads. We don’t just see higher CTR rates than standard ads, we often see Conversion Rates being higher too. If there was confusion with our native game ads causing accidental clicks, we believe we’d see lower conversion rates.

What’s the future look like for native advertising in games

We believe we are still in the early days of native ads for games. At NativeX, we are investing heavily in our ad innovation lab to create innovative new native ad formats for games that deliver game changing performance gains for game publishers. Typically the areas we are exploring are our use of visual, audio and user experience modifications to increase the effectiveness of in-game ads.