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A friend of mine has been effectively a co-gm in a long running online game. I found a couple of cool ways to say thank you to him.... i am curious how the rest of you reward helpful players.

The most common thing I do to reward players is to give them a reroll that is good until the end of the current session. If they merit two or more, they vanish one per session unless used.

I have a GM game theory called the gimmie that I use.
Each player starts with a gimmie that they can cash in for something unique... "gimmie some extra gear" "gimmie this bonus skill" "gimmie a bonus spell" etc.
If you save your gimmie you can use it in play....This can be used for lots of things....(One example was a character had theirs, due to the dice rolls and actions of the group the situation had been totally botched and they were basically looking at a disaster of biblical proportions (infectious plague with a 74% leathality rate getting out into the city)...."Gimmie a way to solve this"....and the campaign continues with out a hitch)

Players who do helpful things can be given another gimmie or other 'deus ex machine card' (A player in a game was helpful, and was willing to give up their play time to accommodate the desires of a couple other players who were very much prima donna's....as a result they spent a lot of time 'off screen' 'implementing the fleet plans for the group'....and they got a code that they could use to summon reinforcements (once).
One time, one space battle....they could call for help and know that a task force of navy ships would respond.

A nice felt-lined dice roller.
Or pizza.
Pizza's good.

At the end of every session I ask each player who in the group helped make the game more exciting for them. They get to nominate one person each and the player with the majority of votes gets bonus experience points; usually 10% of whatever it will take to get to the next level, sometimes 20%. I award an equal amount of bonus points to the player that I think did the most to improve the session. It's been the same person on rare occasions.