Rocket Ads
You have probably entered a frequent-flyer number at check-in, or tapped a loyalty card at a supermarket. Collecting points is not a Japanese habit. It exists in every market.
What differs is where the habit lives.
If you buy rewarded inventory in North America or Europe, the picture in your head is probably a panel inside someone else’s game. A user opens it to top up on coins, finishes something, and leaves. It behaves less like a media property and more like a tactic.
In Japan, that panel is a destination. People go to a point site the way they would open a shopping app, and one of those sites alone has more than 14 million registered members (Ceres, 2026).
So the useful question is not where your offer is placed. It is what else that person is doing while they are there.
Three habits, one person
Among people who already use point sites, earning is not one activity. It is several at once.
In a survey of 5,468 such users, 91.9% said they earn points by answering surveys, 74.8% through online shopping, and 52.7% by watching video. The question allowed multiple answers, and the totals make the point: these are not three groups of users (GMO Media, 2025). The year before, in a separate wave of 3,109 users, 79.7% named shopping, 63.7% surveys, and 47.9% games and quizzes (GMO Media, 2024).
One caveat worth stating plainly. These respondents were recruited from the users of one operator’s affiliated point sites, not from the general public, and a later wave of the same survey skewed heavily older and male. So read this as a description of how an engaged point site user spends a session, not as a profile of Japanese consumers, and not as a single profile that holds across every point site. Age mix in particular differs by operator: the largest site reports its newest members concentrated in their twenties and thirties.
The picture that falls out is a person who answers a few survey questions, buys something through a rebate link, watches a video, and somewhere in that session decides whether to start your game.
Your offer is not listed next to a bank app
It is worth clearing up a common assumption. Point sites are organised by category. Games sit with games, shopping with shopping, financial services with financial services. Your title is not displayed beside a credit card application.
The competition is not for screen space. It is for the same session.
That distinction changes what you are optimising. You are not trying to look better than the other games in the games category, most of which your user will never open. You are trying to be worth starting at all, by someone who already has three easier ways to earn something today.
That session is getting busier
Two figures from the operator’s own disclosures show the direction.
Moppy passed 13 million members in May 2025 and 14 million in March 2026, which Ceres describes as its fastest such span to date. Cumulative points granted to users passed 70 billion in December 2025 and 80 billion in July 2026 (Ceres, 2026). A second major operator reports more than 9.5 million cumulative members of its own (GMO Media, 2026), and Yano Research projects Japan’s overall points service market at 3.4 trillion yen by fiscal 2029 (Yano Research, 2025).
Users are also not loyal to one site. As we covered in an earlier piece, 82.2% of respondents in one large poikatsu survey used two or more point services in parallel (GMO Media, 2026).
One point is worth about one yen, and points convert into roughly sixty destinations, including electronic money, gift cards, airline miles and bank transfers into cash (Ceres, 2026). A user finishing your tutorial is not earning a token that only works inside games. They are earning something that pays part of a grocery bill, which is why the comparison with a survey is a fair one from their side.
What actually clears that bar
Here is the part that works in your favour.
A survey pays and ends. A shopping rebate pays and ends. Neither leaves the user with anything afterwards. A game is the only thing on that list that can still be worth their time once the points have landed. That is not a disadvantage to compensate for. It is the one structural advantage a game offer has, and most campaigns spend their energy somewhere else.
Two things follow.
The reward has to be legible, and amount is only part of it. The same 500 yen is a different proposition at “ten minutes from now” than at “seven days from now”. Time to payout and certainty of payout carry real weight for someone who has easier options in the same session.
And the first session has to justify itself. A user who came for points and found the opening tedious will complete, cash out, and go answer a survey. A user who came for points and found something they enjoyed stops thinking about the points. In our experience this is where rewarded campaigns are won or lost, more often than in the payout figure.
Before you go live in Japan
First, can a user understand your completion condition in one line?
Second, can you state in minutes how long it takes to go from install to reward? If you cannot, neither can the user.
Third, have you run that path yourself, end to end, on a new account in Japanese?
Fourth, is there something prepared for the moment immediately after the reward lands? That moment is the retention question in miniature.
Fifth, does your first session give the user a reason to come back that has nothing to do with points? That is the one thing a survey cannot offer.
Japan’s reward media are mature consumer services with millions of members and published disclosures, used by people who treat points as part of a household budget. Designing for that is a different exercise from buying a panel inside another game.
This is why Rocket Ads connects advertisers directly to Japanese local reward media rather than through an intermediary layer. Knowing how these users actually spend a session is what makes a well-designed offer possible in the first place.
For more data and insights, explore our articles on rocket-a.com or follow our LinkedIn page.
If you’re planning UA in Japan or want to consult on your current campaign strategy, reach out anytime.
