A rewarded-ad prototype that turns involuntary attention into a voluntary, verifiable exchange — then tested it with real users and let the evidence decide the business model.
Attention in mobile-game advertising is usually involuntary — users see the ad whether they want to or not, and standard metrics count impressions, not attention. An ad that is seen but not processed has no value, and everyone in the chain knows it.
Would users willingly trade their attention if the value exchange was explicit and verifiable? Not "can attention be forced" — can it be earned, and can the platform verify that it actually happened?
A rewarded-ad interaction where the user opts in, processes the brand message, and the platform verifies that the user physically and mentally engaged — turning a passive impression into an intentional, measurable act.
Because the interaction pays for attention, it has to be hard to fake. Verification steps are randomized so a scripted "watch" doesn't pass as a real one — the reward model has to survive adversarial users.
Shipped as a live web prototype in days, not months — HTML5/JS front end with Supabase persistence, deployed on Cloudflare Pages. The experiment needed a real, running product, not a mockup.
93 real users, randomized between the rewarded variant and the baseline. Average engagement roughly doubled — users who chose to engage stayed engaged. The behavioral signal was real and reproducible within the test.
The number proved attention can be earned. It did not prove the business works. That distinction — between a behavioral result and a business-model result — is exactly where most prototypes quietly die.
Users, game developers and advertisers each needed something different from the same interaction. I mapped the incentive triangle before writing another feature — and found the misalignment was in the model, not the UI.
Instead of iterating on the ad experience, the next experiment became a tiered reward model — a business-model question, not a feature build. The experiment's job was to redirect where effort goes.