Online quizzes were the most shared format on the internet, but then they quietly went away. A 123-year-old German publishing house might have found the missing piece.
Key insights
- Rewarded ads on Marianne’s quizzes earned more than16x the eCPM of Burda’s standard programmatic display, on inventory that previously earned far less.
- Viewability across the portfolio was ~99%, and two-thirds of ad requests were filled, well above average when rewarded ads were used to unlock other content.
- Time spent increased 22%. Bounce rate decreased. Core Web Vitals were unaffected.
“Can We Guess Your Age By Your Taste In Movies?”
“What City Should You Actually Live In?”
“What Kind Of Dog Are You?”
These were some of the most viral BuzzFeed quizzes published in the 2010s and taken by tens of millions of people across the globe.
At the time, it seemed like half the internet was taking a quiz every second.
Then it faded. Not because readers stopped liking quizzes. They never did. It faded just like its biggest online propagator because there wasn’t a business idea other than driving engagement for engagement’s sake.
A quiz costs real editorial time to write. Display advertising on that quiz earns roughly what it does anywhere, which, by the mid-2020s, was not much.
Well, display ads might not save quizzes today, but rewarded ads for the web are doing a pretty good job.
The 123-year-old German Burda’s Czech division, BurdaMedia Extra, might have cracked the code on how to turn quizzes into real revenue.
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Why the Czech arm of a German publishing house Hubert Burda Media went looking
Hubert Burda Media runs around 500 media brands across more than a dozen countries, employs roughly 10,000 people, and makes more than half its revenue digitally.
BurdaMedia has been publishing in Czechia since 1991, mostly lifestyle magazines: Elle, Marianne, Apetit. In 2023, it merged with Extra Online Media to form BurdaMedia Extra. It reaches more than four million Czechs monthly.
Marianne is the flagship of the lifestyle side. A monthly magazine aimed at women. A mix of intelligent reading, humour and lifestyle, meant to inspire and entertain. Online, marianne.cz reaches just over a million real users.
One of the most popular formats on the site have been the quizzes.
“What was it like to live under socialism?”
“How do interior colors affect our psyche?”
“Can you recognize a European city by its famous landmark?”
After each question, the correct answer is displayed together with the percentage of quiz takers who chose the correct answer, and then you get an overall score.
And this is where the cooperation between BurdaMedia Extra and FatChilli was born.
The missing piece was monetization; cue rewarded ads for the web
The rewarded ads for the web format is a straightforward trade. In this case, the reader wants to take a quiz online; first, they were offered a short ad to watch.
No subscription prompt, no registration wall, no trick. They just wanted to take the quiz, and because their format was so engaging, they did not mind watching an ad.
Put well-produced quizzes behind rewarded ads for the web, and it turns out to be a recipe for success.
Before committing a flagship publication to the new ad format, Burda tested it on its other lifestyle online publication lifee.cz. After the initial success, the format was rolled out to the rest of the portfolio.
Across Burda’s Czech sites, the rewarded ads on a Marianne quiz earned on average sixteen times the price of average eCPM standard programmatic displays.
Although quite normal final eCPM prices for rewarded ads, a steep difference to the display ads the publisher is using for its sites.
The reason is not mysterious. A banner is an interruption a reader tolerates. Rewarded ads are, in a way, a transaction a reader agrees to, on a page where they have already told you what they want.
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Exceptional results
On Marianne, 66.7% of ad requests were filled, which for the rewarded ads format is exceptional. Viewability across the portfolio ran at 98.81%, which is way above standard display ads.
After the initial fine-tuning, the price floor was raised from €20 to €25 on half of Marianne’s traffic. The trade is the familiar one: refuse the cheaper bids, lose some fill, gain some price.
Fill slipped a little, from 70.1% to 65.2%. But blended eCPM went from €23.15 to €28.43 and request RPM from €16.26 to €20.08. So the floor went up for 100% of the traffic.
"We knew our audience loved our quizzes; for the longest time we just haven’t had any better options to monetize them. The moment we saw what rewarded ads on our quizzes could earn, that calculation changed completely."
Hubert Gall, Programmatic Strategist, BurdaMedia Extra
“We knew our audience loved our quizzes; for the longest time we just haven’t had any better options to monetize them. The moment we saw what rewarded ads on our quizzes could earn, that calculation changed completely.”
– Hubert Gall, Programmatic Strategist, BurdaMedia Extra
With such high fill rates (Note: for rewarded ads in our tests with various publishers, we have only seen up to 20 percent fill rates), it was expected that the sessions in which readers watch the ad would decrease.
We have seen publishers with successful conversion rates up to 98%. For Marianne, it was still a staggering 58% on average. Meaning every 3 out of 5 readers ended with the ad watched and the quiz unlocked. Less than 4% started an ad and abandoned it partway.
Of the readers who pressed play, 96% watched to the end.
What’s more, the Core Web Vitals metrics did not change negatively and even improved during the test with the rewarded ads.
Bounce rate on the quiz pages decreased and the average engagement time rose. So the pages with the locker on them performed better on engagement than the pages without it.
It also matches what we have seen everywhere we have run this. Readers who will never subscribe are not offended by being asked for a few seconds of attention.
The quiz version of that bargain is easier still, because the reward is immediate and the reader already wants it.
What this means if you have an old quiz template gathering dust
The takeaway is not that quizzes are a growth hack. It is narrower and more useful than that.
A quiz is now, on the evidence here, capable of earning something like sixteen times what a display banner earns on the same site, from the same reader, in the same month.
That changes the maths on a whole category of content that publishers abandoned: quizzes, personality tests, calculators, compatibility checkers, score reveals.
Anything with a moment where the reader wants a specific thing and will wait a few seconds to get it.
Five takeaways for publishers
- Put the lock where the reader already wants something. The reward has to be the thing they came for, not something you have decided is valuable on their behalf.
- Stop optimising the ad. Start optimising the offer. If more than 95% of your started ads complete, the format is not your problem. Your play rate is, and that lives in the locker copy and the quality of what sits behind it.
- The newsroom now holds an ad revenue lever. Just let them know you have a better way to monetize quizzes. Don’t worry, readers still love them if done well.
- Raise your price floor. If you started somewhere, it doesn’t mean you cannot go higher.
- Measure the reader experience and let the data settle the internal argument. Ours came out neutral to positive on every metric that mattered, which is usually enough to end the debate.
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