The frictionless paywall: How Parameter monetized reader loyalty without credit cards

Discover how a simple ad format (rewarded ads) turned a potential 40% year-on-year drop into significant revenue and eCPM growth.

Parameter is a regional news outlet located in Slovakia, publishing in Hungarian, serving the largest minority in the country. With more than 300,000 unique visitors monthly, it is the largest online news site in the country serving news in Hungarian.

Parameter also operates in a small town in the south of the country, which for almost twenty years was the bloodiest den of organized crime in the country.

In 2025, Parameter deployed the rewarded ads for web format with the help of FatChilli.

Rewarded ads for web are still considered a new ad format, and audiences are just starting to encounter them outside of their original home – mobile game apps.

Despite the novelty, publishers are seeing high interest from audiences for these rewarded ads. The value exchange happening is purely time and focus-based.

That means there is no need to set up a payment gateway, and on the other hand, website visitors don’t need to pull out their credit cards.

The most common use of rewarded ads is to use them to gate access to part of the content. It doesn’t just need to be an article lock. It can be a list of ingredients for a recipe, access to the comment section, or the ability to play online puzzles.

Parameter chose to introduce the reward for access to related articles. If a reader wanted to click through to the next story, a note appeared saying an ad needed to be played first to see the next piece.

The move made sense because the outlet has high-activity, loyal readers who like to read more than one story, and is among a handful of publishers on the market that get more than 10 visits a month on average from a single person. 

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Rewarded ads to the rescue

Like all publishers in Slovakia in 2025, Parameter was also looking at a drop in non-video display ads. 

In the first half of 2025, IAB Slovakia reported that advertising spending in Slovak media decreased year-on-year.

Keep in mind that in the Slovak advertising market, non-video display makes up more than a third of overall advertising spend.

Parameter was facing a 40 percent decline over the previous year and a 20 percent decrease in eCPM.

“The implementation was remarkably hands-off for us. It only took a couple of emails, and it was set up immediately. Almost everything was handled for us,” said Balint Barak, CEO and publisher of Parameter.

After two months of running rewarded ads, eCPM has grown more than 25 percent, and the overall revenue has also grown 26 percent compared to the time before, when rewarded ads were not activated on the site.

When setting up rewarded ads, publishers can decide the price floor. But unlike basic display ads, the eCPM prices are usually more than tenfold.

It is quite normal for FatChilli to recommend to publishers, when first testing rewarded ads, setting the floor at a minimum of €10 eCPM. Many have set it even higher, achieving eCPM prices of up to €40.

There are many variables, but it’s already clear that this is a significant step up from basic banner ads. The caveat is that rewarded ads are still a new format with fill rates usually in single digits or lower double digits.

What’s next?

As rewarded ads have proven to be successful, Parameter is already preparing a wider deployment to keep ad revenue growing despite the negative outlook of many publishers.

“One thing we haven’t tried yet is using rewarded ads to sell our own direct advertising. That’s definitely something we want to explore, because we see real potential in combining the format with our own commercial offers,” said Barak.

After that, the next logical step is to leverage the high loyalty of readers by setting up a rewarded ads-based access wall. 

Parameter does not have a paywall and is about to launch donations.

In a situation like this, it can be challenging to implement a hard paywall immediately without an intermediate step.

But given the success of the new ad format, the team is encouraged to explore how audiences would react to having to watch an ad before finishing reading whole articles.

Thanks to rewarded ads, Parameter’s overall revenue strategy got an encouraging boost that is helping them grow and become sustainable, rely less on grants and more directly on their audiences.