In November last year, Microsoft announced support for interstitial video ads which typically enable developers to put video ads of 20-30 seconds in their Windows app or game and typically offer up to 10x the eCPM (value per thousand views) vs traditional banner ads.
This makes it a very valuable tool for app and game monetization as far as the developers are concerned. Today, Microsoft is taking it a bit further and introducing interstitial banner ads with the latest Microsoft Store Services SDK update. This has been the one of the top Windows Dev Center feature requests since video ads launch.
What are interstitial banner ads?
Interstitial banner ads are a very popular way of monetizing apps and games because they offer much higher eCPMs than standard banner ads. They can earn up to 8-10 times more than standard banner ads for the following reasons:
- Full user attention: The full screen ads grab the full attention of users.
- Larger surface area: The increased real estate provides advertisers with more options to show content that attracts potential customers.
- User engagement: Interstitial ads require user action to move away from the ad and hence the user engagement is always high.
Mobile Interstitial Ad Sample
Tablet/Desktop Interstitial Ad Sample
Where are interstitial banner ads available?
This new ad format is available in the latest release of the Microsoft Store Services SDK for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps for Windows 10.
If you haven’t started monetizing your app or game with ads using the Microsoft Store Services SDK, this is a great time to start. We have lined up some advertising networks to enable interstitial banner ads to earn good revenue for developers, and we will continue to on-board more networks to increase the earning potential of this and other ad formats. To learn more about the options for adding ads to your apps with this SDK, see this article.
How do I get started?
Since we are in beta, please mail out to [email protected] for onboarding your app or game to the beta program. Once you have an interstitial ad unit created by us, you can continue with the following steps to incorporate into your app or game.
To add an interstitial banner ad into your game or app, use the InterstitialAd class from the Microsoft Store Services SDK. If you are already familiar with the steps for adding interstitial video ads to a game or app, the process for adding interstitial banner ads is nearly identical. The only difference is that when you call the RequestAd method to fetch an ad, you specify AdType.Display for the ad type (this is a new enum value in the latest release of the SDK).
For more information, visit this page
