Most publishers asking about rewarded ads vs. interstitials are really asking the same question: "I want the eCPMs of a premium AD format without the bounce rate that kills my engagement." Both formats can deliver that. They just get there through very different user experiences, and the wrong choice in the wrong context will cost you more than you gain.

This is a decision we help publishers make every week. On a calculator site in the US last quarter, the same 1,000 high-intent sessions generated an average eCPM of $39.20 with standard interstitials and $61.50 with a content locker running rewarded demand. In Germany, on a similar traffic profile, the numbers were $28.80 vs. $49.20. The gap is not subtle.

But the eCPM is only part of the picture. The format you pick shapes how users feel about your site for the rest of the session.

The Short Version

If you have time for one sentence: rewarded ads are user-initiated, interstitials are not. That single difference explains most of what follows in this article, including why the two formats produce such different revenue, user behavior, and long-term engagement outcomes.

What Interstitials Actually Are

Interstitials are full-screen ads that appear between content states. Page transitions, app navigation, between levels in a game. On the web, the most common placements are:

• Between an article click and the article landing
• Between page loads in multi-step flows (quizzes, paginated content)
• Sometimes as a Google Ad Manager "anchor" interstitial on mobile

They are technically an IAB standard format. Google's interstitial guidelines describe them as transition ads triggered by user navigation, skippable after 5 seconds, frequency capped to once per 60 seconds in most setups.

The format works. Interstitials occupy the entire viewport, which means advertisers pay a premium for the uninterrupted attention. On mobile, eCPMs are often 5-10x what a banner on the same page would earn. That is why Google pushes interstitials so heavily in their auto-ads product: they genuinely move the revenue needle.

The cost is user experience. An interstitial is an interruption, by definition. A user clicked a link expecting to read an article and got an ad instead. Even a 5-second skippable interstitial is an interruption. And interruption is what drives ad blocker installs, bounces, and the quiet decline in return visits that you only notice 90 days later in your retention cohorts.

What Rewarded Ads (Content Lockers) Actually Are

Rewarded ads flip the psychology. Instead of interrupting the user, they offer a deal: watch a short video and you get access to something you actually want. A recipe. A calculation result. An ad-free session. A premium article. A file download.

The user clicks a button. The ad plays. The reward unlocks. Because the user initiated the transaction, they watch it differently. Completion rates sit at 85-95% versus 2-5% for banner engagement, and because advertisers prefers completed views rather than uncertain impressions, the economics are transformed.

Rewarded ads used to be a mobile-gaming format. That is where they were invented and that is where 99% of the IAB and Google documentation still points when you search for them. The web version, where the unlock is content instead of in-game currency, is relatively new and still misunderstood. We call ours Content Lockers because "rewarded ad" sends most publishers straight to the gaming context, which is not useful for a calculator site or a news publisher.

The format shares three things with interstitials: full-screen video possibility (not required), skippable after 5 seconds, frequency capped. Everything else is different.

The Honest Comparison

Below is the comparison I run through with publishers before they pick a format. It is not exhaustive. These are the six factors that actually decide which format wins on a given site.

A few notes on these numbers. The eCPM ranges come from a mix of public benchmarks and what we see across the publishers we manage. They are honest averages, not cherry-picked highs. Your numbers will depend on geo mix, user intent, and how well the format is integrated. US-heavy traffic sees the top of the range. Eastern European traffic sits well below the floor. This is not a secret, but it is rarely stated in format comparison articles written by vendors trying to sell you something.

The bounce rate impact is the one most publishers underestimate. We onboarded a tool site last year that had been running Google auto-ad interstitials for 18 months. They assumed the interstitial revenue was pure upside. When we turned the interstitials off and replaced them with a content locker on the result page, their total revenue went up 34% in the first week. Why? The interstitials had been silently increasing their bounce rate, which reduced sessions per user, which reduced total impressions across the whole site. The "high-CPM" format was eating into every other format's performance. This is a pattern we have seen at least five times and it is rarely discussed.

When Interstitials Actually Make Sense

I am not going to tell you interstitials are bad. They are not. There are specific cases where they outperform rewarded ads or where a content locker simply will not work:

• Multi-page content flows where the user is already navigating between screens. The interstitial slots into an existing transition the user was already making, so the interruption feels less jarring.
• Gaming and casual content where users are used to the format and the content itself is a "break" from real life.
• Low-intent traffic where there is no obvious "valuable moment" to gate. If users are just browsing, there is nothing to lock behind a rewarded mechanic.
• Sites where you have no technical capacity to implement a custom trigger. An interstitial is a simpler integration. Paste the tag, Google handles the rest. Content lockers usually need a custom trigger tied to a site-specific event.

If your site fits those conditions, run interstitials with tight frequency caps and stop reading this article.

When Rewarded Ads Win

Everywhere else, in our experience, rewarded ads produce more revenue and less damage. The canonical fits are:

• Tool and calculator sites where there is a clear "result moment" worth gating. A mortgage calculator result is something the user actively wants. They will trade a 15-second ad for it.
• Recipe sites where the full recipe or ingredient list is the payoff. Bonvivani.sk saw eCPMs 10-30x higher than banners on this exact placement, with no measurable impact on organic traffic or engagement time.
• Sports publishers where a live score, full statistics table, or lineup reveal is the high-value moment.
• Finance comparison sites where the comparison result itself is what the user came for.
• News and editorial sites that want a soft paywall alternative. Not every user will pay a subscription. Many will "pay" with a rewarded video to read a premium piece.

In each of these cases the format works because the user has already told you what they want. They clicked the "calculate" button. They scrolled to the recipe card. They tapped the match score. You are not inserting an ad into their session. You are offering a trade at the moment the trade is most valuable to both sides.

"The mistake I see most often is publishers picking a format based on what their competitors run, not based on what their users actually do on-site. Interstitials made sense for news sites ten years ago because people navigated between pages constantly. On a modern tool site, most sessions are single-page. There is no interstitial moment, but there is a huge content locker moment at the result. The format has to follow the user behavior."

-- Danka, Yield Manager at Nuwara Labs

QUOTE BY:

Danka Pohankova

Yield manager

Go to LinkedIn

The UX Argument, Honestly

A question we get at every discovery call: "Will rewarded ads hurt my user experience?"

The honest answer is that any ad format can hurt UX if implemented badly. A content locker that fires on every pageview, at every result, with no frequency cap, will annoy users just as much as a badly-placed interstitial. The format does not save you from bad judgment.

What makes rewarded ads different is the ceiling. A well-implemented content locker is frequency capped to once per session or once per day, skippable after 5 seconds, and only fires when a high-value ad is actually available to serve. If the demand partner cannot fill with a premium ad, the locker does not show at all and the user just gets the content. The floor experience is "user sees nothing unusual." The ceiling experience is "user watches a skippable video to unlock a result." There is no middle case where the user is forced to sit through a low-quality ad because the system cannot find a premium one.

Interstitials do not work that way. They fire on navigation regardless of the ad quality, and a user who clicked a link expecting content now has a 5-second delay whether the ad is premium video or a low-CPM fallback. The worst case of an interstitial is meaningfully worse than the worst case of a content locker.

I am not sure this difference is as big as it feels to me. I have only seen it measured carefully on a handful of publishers we manage directly. But every time we have measured it, the pattern has been consistent.

Which One Should You Pick?

If there is a clear moment in your user journey where your content itself is the reward, run a content locker. If your site is a navigational experience with natural transitions and no obvious locker moment, run interstitials with tight frequency caps. If you are somewhere in between and want to hedge, test rewarded interstitials.

And in most cases: test both. Run a two-week A/B on a segment of your traffic. Measure total site revenue, not just the revenue of the tested format. Measure bounce rate, return visits, and session depth. The format that wins on total site revenue across those metrics is the format that belongs on your site.

We wrote a longer piece on how content lockers generate 20-30x more revenue than banners that covers the implementation side in detail. If you are running interstitials today and suspect they are leaving revenue on the table, that is a reasonable next read.

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