How rewarded video works
Rewarded video is a format inside the Audience Network, found mostly in mobile games. The app offers the player something they want — an extra life, a hint, in-game currency, permission to carry on — in exchange for watching an advertisement through to the end. The player chooses to start it, watches, and collects the reward. Your ad is the price of that reward.
Because the exchange is stated openly and the reward normally requires the video to finish, completion on this format runs far higher than on any placement people scroll past. That figure is a property of the deal, not a verdict on your advertisement, and confusing the two is where most of the trouble with this format starts.
Why rewarded video matters
Consent is rare in advertising, and here it is explicit. Nobody was interrupted; they accepted a trade. That makes it one of the few formats where the viewer is not annoyed with you for existing, which is worth something for a business trying to become familiar rather than trying to sell today.
It is also inexpensive inventory, and it holds the screen for the whole clip. For app promotion, for a message that only needs to be recognised later, or for building recall in a market where your name is unknown, that combination is genuinely useful.
Where rewarded video goes wrong
The trap is reading completion as engagement. What the person earned was the reward. Many of them are waiting out the clip the way you wait for a kettle, phone face up, attention elsewhere. Any report that ranks placements by completion will put this one at the top and tell you nothing you can act on.
The second problem is what happens after a click. The viewer is in the middle of a game they want to return to, so sending them to a long landing page or a form asks them to abandon something they were enjoying. Most will not. The third is context: your targeting still applies, but the moment does not — somebody who matches your customer definition exactly is, right then, trying to finish a level.
How to act on it
Use it for what it actually does. Awareness, recall and app installs suit it; considered purchases, quotes and lead forms usually do not. Put the message in the opening moments rather than the closing ones, because that is where the little attention on offer sits, and make the brand identifiable without sound.
Measure it on cost per result and on what those results did afterwards, never on completion or view count. If the objective is leads or sales, check the placement breakdown early and exclude the format rather than the whole Audience Network if it is producing volume without value. Where the objective is installs, this is one of the more sensible surfaces in the mix, and it belongs in the same conversation as your other app install ads rather than being judged against feed placements it was never competing with.