After a seven-week test, Discord has officially launched Orbs, a system of virtual rewards that users earn for interacting with advertising campaigns. The new tool is designed to incentivize first-time purchases and encourage Nitro subscriptions.
After a seven-week test, Discord has officially launched Orbs, a system of virtual rewards that users earn for interacting with advertising campaigns. The new tool is designed to incentivize first-time purchases and encourage Nitro subscriptions.
According to TechCrunch, the platform has completed beta testing of Orbs. This is a new internal currency of Discord, which can be obtained after completing the so-called Quests — tasks related to viewing or clicking on interactive advertising materials. For example, participants can watch a game trailer or familiarize themselves with a product to receive an Orb bonus.
Accumulated Orbs can be exchanged in the internal Discord Shop for cosmetic digital goods: a three-day Nitro subscription, profile visuals, avatar animations, an Orbs member badge, and other little things. According to the developers, users have already earned and spent millions of Orbs during the beta phase.
The most interesting thing is that Orbs worked as a marketing tool: during the testing period, the number of first-time purchases in the Discord store increased by 16 times. At the same time, 79% of users who purchased something had never spent money on Discord before. In addition, 70% of the participants in the experiment did not have a Nitro subscription, so the company can use Orbs as a «bridge» to attract new subscribers.
For advertisers, Orbs opens up a new model of audience engagement: Discord offers Quest campaigns without the need to create your own reward system. This can be especially beneficial for brands that want to natively integrate with the platform’s youth audience.
Discord is expected to scale this system in the future and make Orbs part of a larger advertising ecosystem. This could also help the company prepare for an IPO, as it seeks to show investors that the platform can monetize not only through subscriptions, but also through interactive advertising.
Discord has long struggled to find a balance between maintaining community loyalty and implementing profitable monetization models, and Orbs could be just the compromise that allows the company to make money without imposing traditional advertising.
We previously wrote about how cybercriminals are massively abusing the custom link mechanism in Discord, redirecting users to fake servers with info stealers that steal data to access crypto wallets and browsers.
