A new approach to advertising in which readers are asked to answer questions about displayed ads is helping a Polish publisher monetise content.

In an INMA Ideas blog, Burda Media Polska chief executive Maciej Klepacki says ‘questvertising’ – an approach based on the attention economy – appears to be a promising solution.

“Tough times are approaching for digital publishers,” he says. “Reduced traffic from search engines causes a decrease in revenues from traditional display advertising, including video ads.”

He describes questvertising as “something between a paywall and advertising”, where a user is asked to answer a question about the displayed advertisement to access the article.

To do this, they must notice the advertisement – fulfilling the attention parameter – and even understand its content.

He says the importance of attention as a metric for advertising effectiveness is growing, “and we, as media companies, can effectively monetise this attention. There is a very high chance a user who answers a question about an advertisement will remember its message, which can be verified in brand-lift studies.
“Tests on both real campaigns and scientific experiments show gigantic increases in brand-lift studies for campaigns implemented according to questvertising rules. The approach has recently even received a scientific publication in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers. The discussed experiment was largely carried out on portals belonging to our media company.

Klepacki says Burda Media’s implementation is based on cooperation with QuestPass, with which it has already completed more than 100 campaigns. One for a jewellery brand that was awarded in Poland’s Innovation competition, was based on zero-party data, which was an additional advantage for the advertiser. “The increase registered in the brand-lift study was as much as 21 percentage points,” he says.

“Changes in Google’s algorithms and the general popularisation of AI chats pose a serious threat to the entire online publishing industry. We will have less traffic, but what remains will probably consist of users more determined to read our texts than was the case with traffic from mechanisms like Google Discover.

“Therefore, as media companies, we should look for new revenue mechanisms that can raise our monetisation level for the impressions that remain. Questvertising appears to be such a mechanism, which can fill the space between low-revenue display ads and paid subscriptions.”