Discord’s new Nitro Rewards program, launched today, promises a host of new benefits for the platform’s premium users — but the new product is boosting Discord’s advertising flywheel, too.
Nitro Rewards represents an expansion of benefits for users who pay for Discord’s Nitro premium subscription product. Starting today, Nitro members will receive additional benefits at no extra cost, including a starter edition of Xbox Game Pass and discounts on peripherals and accessories from SteelSeries, Logitech, and KontrolFreek. Full details about the new Nitro member benefits, the specific percentage discounts offered by each partner, are available in Discord’s official blog post announcing the program.
“That really highlights the direction we’re taking with this, with Nitro Rewards launching next week,” said Discord co-founder and chief technology officer Stan Vishnevskiy in an interview with GamesBeat. “How do we extend the value of Discord and truly make it a must-have membership for people around games, but also in things people do around games?”
Discord’s messaging around the Nitro Rewards program is focused on the program’s benefits for the gamers who make up Discord’s core user base — but an unspoken part of the Nitro expansion is that advertisers on Discord will benefit as well. Nitro Rewards is not intended to pull Discord users away from the platform’s Quests advertising product, according to Vishnevskiy. Instead, the program has built-in incentives to encourage Nitro members to consume more ads. As of today, Nitro members will earn 20 percent more Orbs, Discord’s homegrown currency, when completing Quests, and will receive an automatic delivery of 250 free Orbs each month.
“You would assume that this is a product that paid users wouldn’t want to interact with,” Vishnevskiy said with regard to the relationship between Nitro members and Quests. “We actually see the opposite behavior, and it’s super exciting.”
Vishnevskiy declined to share specific details regarding the structure of the business relationships between Discord and the platform’s Nitro Rewards partners, but made it clear that Discord views its Nitro Rewards partnerships as mutually beneficial, rather than a pure extraction of value from one partner to another. To illustrate this point, he flagged the promotional benefits that partners could get from tapping into Discord’s highly engaged gamer audience.
“By really tapping into the ecosystem of these super passionate users, these companies get a lot of benefit: ‘If we can offer something to these users, especially the ones that are most likely to spend, such as Nitro subscribers, that is ultimately going to lead to great conversion for that as well,’” Vishnevskiy said.
For now, the Nitro Rewards program’s partners are limited to companies endemic to the gaming space. Much like Discord Quests have gradually expanded beyond gaming-endemic advertisers to promote films, television shows and services like Uber, Vishnevskiy teased an expansion of Nitro Rewards beyond gaming, although he declined to share any specific partners to come.
“Without giving too much away, you will probably in the future see things that are adjacent to gaming, but not directly related to it,” he said.
Nitro Rewards creates a lot of upside for Discord users, but any new product that disturbs the delicate balance between the platform’s users and its advertisers and third-party partners risks turning off Discord users who are drawn to the platform for its somewhat anti-corporate image, which has historically included relatively minimal implementation of ads.
“Our ambition with Nitro originally was that it should itself be additive, and most of the cases where it does gate something, it’s because it’s expensive to serve that thing,” Vishnevskiy said. “We’re adding more value into Nitro without taking away from the Discord product, so this is actually in line with that.”