• by Colin Kirkland , April 2, 2025

At IAB's gaming ads-focused Playfronts, Discord's Senior Vice President of Product Peter Sellis shared new insights about the company's first year of the rewards-earning Quest ads format.

According to Sellis, Quests -- which allow users to earn avatar swag and in-game items by watching in-app video ads -- generated 70 campaigns with advertising partners over the past year, generating millions of rewards for gamers.

Initially designed as a communication platform for gamers to communicate and come together via voice, video and text channels in 2015, Discord is now aiming to provide gaming brands with the ability to better showcase trailers for new games and downloadable content.

As Discord doubles down on gaming, Sellis said, 93% of the platform's 200-plus million monthly active users play games -- spending a combined 1.5 billion hours each month playing across over 8,000 titles on PC alone.

At least half of these gamers are also speaking to their friends on a weekly basis via live chat on Discord, Sellis added.

Quests, which will be available on mobile devices starting in June, has become Discord's answer to helping brands and developers reach gamers as authentically as possible.

Over time, Sellis said, the platform’s gaming audience has expanded beyond young males with the rise of the internet and multiplayer games.

Advertising to Discord's gaming-first communities is challenging, according to Sellis.

“These people can spot Gen AI from a million miles away, and they are not going to hesitate to let you have it if they think it's lame,” he said. “Trust me, I work at Discord. It's in the name.”

Quests was also created in part to address the platform's growing Gen Z audience -- serious gamers with a distaste for traditional advertising. The rewarded ads format received a 10% average acceptance rate on Discord. According to Adam Bauer, the company's vice president of sales, this was a very positive result.

“We really wanted to do something with gamified advertising, making it fun to meet our audience where it is, right where they are, with something that engages them and then obviously gives the rewards back for investing their time with us,” Bauer said.

During his Playfronts presentation, Sellis noted that over half of Discord's Quests partners have returned for a second campaign, in reaction to positive user responses.