Discord on September 29, 2026 put two advertising products in front of buyers: a campaign management platform that prices placements through competing bids instead of a fixed rate, and a mobile rewarded video format that pays players in Orbs after roughly 15 seconds of viewing. For now the platform is restricted to a select group of advertisers, with general access planned for early 2027.

In Short

Discord, the chat app popular with gamers, said on September 29, 2026 that it has built a tool companies can use to set up and run their own ads, plus a phone ad where players watch a short video and earn a reward after about 15 seconds. That matters for game makers and other advertisers, especially small ones, because buying ads on Discord has mostly meant going through its sales team at fixed prices. The price of each ad will now rise and fall with competing bids, although only a handful of advertisers can use the tool until early 2027.

Two products, one buying interface

Discord describes Ads Manager as its first-ever campaign management platform. According to Discord, the product gathers the whole campaign workflow in one place, from forecasting through building a campaign with objective-based bidding to monitoring performance through reporting. Advertisers can follow results in real time through first-party and third-party reporting and move budgets without waiting for a recap report, the company said. No third-party measurement or attribution partner is named in the release, and the "expanded targeting" it mentions is not broken down into parameters.

Access is the detail with the most immediate consequence. Discord calls the product self-serve, yet Ads Manager is currently available only "with managed access for a select group of advertisers," according to the company, while fully self-serve access is planned for early 2027. Smaller studios and marketers that previously needed a direct sales relationship to run campaigns are the stated beneficiaries. Until the general opening, most of them remain where they were. The headline of the release speaks of brands of all sizes; its body text puts that opening a quarter or more away.

Nabib El-Rahman, vice president of product, business at Discord, set out the intent. "We want advertising on Discord to work for a studio launching its first game just as well as it does for the world's biggest advertisers," he said. "Discord Ads Manager puts more control directly in advertisers' hands, while Video Quests give performance marketers a format that turns attention into action through an experience that feels native to Discord."

Video Quests

The second product is a format rather than a tool. Discord calls Video Quests a mobile-first, performance-focused rewarded video ad format "built for fast, repeatable interactions." Players tap, watch and earn Orbs, receiving the reward after approximately 15 seconds. The format is designed to drive consideration, according to Discord, by giving players time to engage, while the length of time a player chooses to keep watching gives advertisers a stronger signal of intent.

Orbs are Discord's own virtual reward currency. The company began testing them in May 2025, according to TechCrunch, as rewards redeemable in the Discord Shop for items such as Nitro credits and avatar decorations.

An image distributed with the release shows how the unit sits in the app: a card labelled "Promoted" and "Limited time," titled "The Last Meadow Video Quest," with the line "Watch the video to earn Orbs!" and a button reading "Watch 15s." Video Quests are bought through Ads Manager. At release the available objectives were impressions and clicks, with "additional objectives coming soon," according to Discord. No dates were attached.

Video Quests Reserve

The product sold under the Video Quests name since last year does not disappear. Discord said it is evolving into Video Quests Reserve, a premium, reservation-based offering aimed at what the company calls high-impact brand moments. Delivery and rewards in Reserve are tied to full video completion rather than to the 15-second mark. Pricing for Reserve was not described, although reservation products are conventionally sold on terms agreed before delivery rather than on bids cleared at the moment of serving.

Two formats now share one name and behave differently. One pays the player at about 15 seconds and is bought through a bid; the other pays on completion and is booked in advance.

Bids replace the rate card

Discord's account of the pricing change is brief. "Rather than a fixed CPM, ads compete in an auction with pricing that fluctuates dynamically," the release states. Advertisers can adjust bids in real time to balance delivery against performance while watching down-funnel metrics, according to the company, which calls the arrangement a dynamic cost model.

What the release does not give is the auction's rule. It does not say whether a winning advertiser pays its own bid, as under first price, or an amount set by the runner-up. It does not say whether reserve prices or floors apply, or whether they are disclosed. A minimum bid, a minimum spend and the weight given to predicted engagement when ads are ranked are all absent too.

Those gaps carry more weight in 2026 than they would have a few years ago. On Discord's description, its auction fits the Media Rating Council's definition of a closed-loop auction, in which a single platform hosts every function from bid to report. The MRC issued draft Digital Advertising Auction Transparency Standards in September 2025 and finalised them on January 29, 2026. Their closed-loop section asks auctioneers to disclose the auction type, report reserve prices before and after each auction and apply one floor to every buyer. Compliance is voluntary.

Opacity in platform-run auctions is also being tested in court. On August 31, 2026, the FTC and 22 states sued Amazon over about $20 billion in alleged hidden surcharges, alleging that the company ran a generalised second-price auction and then applied an undisclosed soft reserve on top of the result. Internal reports cited in the complaint show advertisers charged their full bid 79% of the time. Amazon rejects the case and says no advertiser ever paid more than a submitted bid. Discord is not a party to that dispute, and nothing in its release describes a comparable mechanism. Buyers entering a new auction in the autumn of 2026 have, however, a fresh reason to ask how its prices are formed.

Fifteen seconds and a 97% figure

The performance claim attached to the release rests on Discord's own data. Quests, the company's family of rewarded ad formats, have delivered a 97% median ad completion rate, according to Discord, which cites internal data as of June 30, 2026. Game studios have used the format to drive what the release calls "meaningful lift in game discovery." No lift figure, methodology or control design is given.

Two qualifications apply. The first concerns the metric. A completion rate records whether an ad played to its final frame, and rewarded formats produce high ones almost by construction, because the viewer has chosen to watch in exchange for something. Rewarded video sits at the top of most mobile eCPM tables because completion is near-guaranteed by design. Roblox's fourth-quarter 2025 shareholder letter put its rewarded video completion above 90% and viewability at 95% across more than 1,000 brands. On connected television, a 98% completion rate has been described to buyers as automatic rather than earned. Discord's 97% is in line with its category; on its own, it does not set the inventory apart.

The second qualification concerns scope. The 97% median describes Quests measured up to June 30, 2026, three months before the 15-second Video Quests were presented in their current form. In the new format the reward arrives at about 15 seconds, so anything watched after that point is voluntary, which is exactly why Discord treats watch time as a signal of intent. Completion is likely to look different there than in Video Quests Reserve, where the reward depends on reaching the end. Which number will a buyer see for which product? The release does not say whether Ads Manager reports watch time beyond 15 seconds, quartile completion or both.

Performance language, awareness objectives

Discord frames Video Quests as performance-focused, and the release says its advertising has evolved over the past year into "a measurable performance engine." The objectives available at release, impressions and clicks, sit at the top and middle of the conversion funnel rather than at installs, purchases or in-game events.

The lower end is being assembled elsewhere in Discord's product line. Digiday reported on August 21 that Discord was extending into lower-funnel advertising with Play Quest+, a format that moves rewards from time-based actions to event-based ones, tracked through the company's Social SDK and Events API across linked Discord and game accounts. Adam Bauer, Discord's global vice president of advertising, described the goal as a full-funnel product for game marketers. Electronic Arts' Battlefield 6 was lined up as the first Play Quest+ campaign for early September 2026, with 90% of Discord users playing games weekly.

The September 29 release mentions neither Play Quest+ nor play-based Quests. Whether event-based formats will be bought through Ads Manager, and on what pricing, is left open.

Managed now, open later

Discord is not the first platform to stage access this way. Roblox made video ads available to all brands in May 2024, with a self-serve Ads Manager from the start and programmatic buying promised to follow. OpenAI moved faster: its Ads Manager surfaced in April 2026 with the minimum spend threshold cut from $250,000 to $50,000, and on May 5, 2026 it opened to all US businesses with cost-per-click bidding alongside its CPM model. Less than four weeks separated a gated tool from general US access. Discord's stated window is longer.

A wider base of accounts can matter as much as larger budgets. Reddit's active advertiser count grew more than 75% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, growth in the number of buyers rather than in what each one spends.

Several commercial terms were left out of Discord's release: a minimum spend, the markets in which Ads Manager will operate, supported currencies, and whether agencies or demand-side platforms can reach the inventory through an API or programmatic deals. Roblox's rewarded inventory, by contrast, is available programmatically after Magnite secured exclusive global rights on January 6, 2026. Discord's release describes one buying route, its own.

Where 90 million daily users sit

Discord puts its scale at more than 90 million daily active users as of the second quarter of 2026. Comparisons are inexact because platforms define users differently. Roblox counted 151 million daily active users when Magnite took its programmatic rights. Reddit reported more than 130 million daily active uniques and $762 million of second-quarter advertising revenue.

Other gaming sellers count by the month. Overwolf's planning tool, shown on September 17, 2026, covers 113 million monthly consumers across more than 5,000 titles. Electronic Arts opened its games to brands in June 2026 on the strength of more than 1 billion EA Sports FC matches a month. Each of these sellers is packaging gaming attention for buyers who plan in reach and outcomes; each also reports largely on its own numbers.

Common definitions exist. The IAB published its Gaming Measurement Framework on June 26, 2025, setting baseline metrics for gaming ad formats. Discord's release does not refer to it and names no independent verification or measurement vendor for Video Quests.

Trust, safety and Brazil

Advertising inside a community app carries a particular risk. When Play Quest+ surfaced in August, Nicole van Zanten, co-president and chief growth officer at ICUC, warned that Discord servers run on trust and that people are there to play with friends rather than to be marketed to. Rewarded formats are built on the opposite premise, that an opted-in viewer is a willing one. Which reading holds will show up in the engagement data Discord chooses to publish.

Discord's video features have also drawn regulatory attention. Brazil's data protection authority ordered Discord on August 12, 2026 to switch off Go Live and every functionally equivalent video feature for users in the country within three business days, after concluding that end-to-end encryption applied to audio and video since March 2, 2026 left the company unable to observe what happens inside closed servers. Go Live is a broadcast feature for users, not an ad format, and the order did not remove Discord from Brazil. What it did establish is a precedent for suspending one format rather than an account or an app.

Neither country coverage nor age handling is addressed in the release. It does not list the markets where Ads Manager or Video Quests run, and it does not say how targeting treats users under 18. Roblox, by comparison, routed advertising to its youngest users through a single specialist when it named SuperAwesome its only third-party partner for under-13 advertising in June 2026.

What the release leaves open

Put together, the gaps are specific. The auction rule, reserve prices and any floor are undisclosed. So are the minimum spend, the markets covered and the third-party reporting partners. Reserve pricing is not described, and the additional Video Quests objectives carry no dates. How the 97% median was calculated, and whether it will be reported separately for the 15-second format, is not explained. Nor does the release say how Orbs rewards are funded per campaign, or whether existing directly sold campaigns move into Ads Manager.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Self-serve tools are how Google, Meta and Amazon each moved from controlled experiments to open markets, a pattern that resurfaced when OpenAI's Ads Manager appeared in April. Discord is now on that path. For game studios without a sales contact at the company, early 2027 is the date that counts; for those already buying, the more immediate change is pricing. A fixed CPM is a known cost. An auction price is a variable that depends on competition for the same players, which alters forecasting, pacing and the way budgets are defended internally.

Measurement is the second issue. Every figure in the release, from 90 million daily users to the 97% median, comes from Discord, and the reporting buyers will rely on inside Ads Manager also comes from Discord. That is normal for a platform auction. It is also why the MRC's closed-loop requirements and the FTC's case against Amazon matter to a buyer weighing a new auctioneer.

The third issue is position in the funnel. Discord's language points to performance; its objectives at release point to reach and traffic, while its event-based Play Quest+ sits outside the release altogether. Whether Ads Manager becomes the route for all of Discord's formats, or remains the route for video, will decide how much of a game marketer's budget it can compete for. Will the auction rules be published before the general opening? The release offers no answer.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Discord, the San Francisco communications platform, with Nabib El-Rahman, vice president of product, business, as spokesperson. The products are aimed at game studios, marketers and performance advertisers, including smaller studios that previously needed a direct sales relationship.

What: Discord Ads Manager, a campaign management platform with forecasting, objective-based bidding, real-time first-party and third-party reporting and auction-based delivery in place of a fixed CPM; and Video Quests, a mobile-first rewarded video format that pays players in Orbs after about 15 seconds, initially with impression and click objectives. The original Video Quests format becomes Video Quests Reserve, a reservation-based product with delivery and rewards tied to full completion. Discord cites a 97% median completion rate for Quests from internal data as of June 30, 2026.

When: The products were presented on September 29, 2026. Ads Manager is currently available with managed access to a select group of advertisers, and fully self-serve access is planned for early 2027.

Where: Inside the Discord app, with Video Quests built mobile-first, for an audience Discord puts at more than 90 million daily active users as of the second quarter of 2026. The release does not list the markets covered.

Why: Discord says it wants advertising to work for a studio releasing its first game as well as for the largest advertisers, while giving performance marketers a scalable, always-on format. The change moves Discord toward the bid-priced, buyer-operated model used by larger platforms, while leaving the auction rule, floors, minimum spend and independent measurement undisclosed.