This weekend BigDoor’s co-founder and CEO, Keith Smith shared his thoughts about core metrics that really matter with the online publication Geekwire. Keith walked through the four KPI’s that every site should focus on: Loyalty, Engagement, Virality and Revenue. As Keith stated in the article, “The simplicity provided by these 4 golden metrics allows us to focus on the key drivers of our business, no matter the size and scale of our audience.”
We’re really excited about this Infographic that our designer Chad put together. We’ve been talking about the private beta of our Engagement Economy and today we reveal some early results. At BigDoor we have built a framework that focuses on the four things that matter most to online publishers: Frequency, Engagement, Virality and Revenue. Check out the results!
We wanted to share a great post on AdAge Digital from Judy Shapiro, the Chief Brand Strategist at CloudLinux. In “Why ‘Commerce’ Shouldn’t Be a Dirty Word in Tech Marketing” Judy explores social commerce and, how in it’s current state, the biggest piece missing is the sale: “Why does it seem like “cool” marketing technology and “commerce” are mutually exclusive?”
She makes several really great points in her post – we of course had to highlight her mention of BigDoor:
“Some of the cleverest tech companies are recognizing the huge market potential of merging local, mobile and social to drive commerce……take the example of a company called BigDoor. This is a tech company that creates mini toolbars based on gaming theory so every action lets visitors earn points redeemable for products. It’s the first toolbar I have seen that drives commerce forward (double hooray since most mini toolbars just enhance the share function).”
Thanks to Judy for the mention! You can check out more on her blog here.
Today our Co-Founder and CEO Keith Smith and our Director of Monetization and Implementation Tommy Lee are attending Ad:Tech San Francisco. We’re really excited to announce the launch of the BigDoor Engagement Economy with Cost Per Quest! The BigDoor Engagement Economy is a new way for sites to engage their users while monetizing their content. One of the initial pieces is Cost Per Quest, an entirely new, performance based, ad format meant to reward end users for their time and attention while engaging deeply with online brands. Quests are a critical component of BigDoor’s Engagement Economy and are sold to advertisers on a Cost Per Quest (CPQ) basis.
The BigDoor Engagement Economy is currently in private beta mode. Last week, in partnership with SpectrumDNA Quests launched with UGO Entertainment. The incredible team at SpectrumDNA worked their magic and has truly created a gamified experience that’s intrinsically a social loyalty program incorporating interaction with news and information, as well as a rewards system that is original, native and meaningful.
We talk to websites all the time and get the question about our rumored “hidden fees.” We truly believe gamification should be a profit-center for web publishers and app developers, not a cost-center so we offer our technology for free. However, in order to provide publishers a free platform as well as enable them to make money by using gamification, we realize we need a solution that works not only for publishers and end-users, but also for advertisers as well. We think that any solution that gives advertisers traffic, can make publishers money, and reward users can be an Epic Win! The BigDoor Engagement Economy will roll out to a broader network of publishers by Summer 2011.
Online website owners interested in learning more about our Engagement Economy and Cost Per Quest advertising pilot program can contact us. Additionally, those attending San Francisco’s ad:tech 2011 are encouraged to meet with Keith Smith (keith@bigdoor.com; @ChiefDoorman) and Tommy Lee (tommy@bigdoor.com; @pikopoki) during the event, April 11-13, 2011.
We wanted to let everyone know about this amazingly cool experiment Brad Feld is currently testing on his site. For those of you who don’t already know Brad, he’s the managing director at Foundry Group who invests in software and Internet companies (including Zynga). He was recently named the
“Most Respected Venture Capitalist”and he’s also one of our investors. For the next 30 days Brad will use the BigDoor MiniBar on his site to offer 30 minutes of his time as a reward for anyone who wants to exchange 10,000 Feld Gelt for the opportunity to speak with him. With the help of BigDoor’s MiniBar (white-labeled on Brad’s site), users have five easy options to earn Feld Gelt, including Check-in when visiting Brad’s site; Adding a comment to any blog post on the site; Sharing or Tweeting posts; ‘Like’ any post from the MiniBar and most importantly, the best way to earn Feld Gelt is when users click on links you have shared or Like links in your Facebook feed. Users can get started working their way up the Leaderboard for a chance at 30 minutes with Brad!
Update: Brad’s deal was so popular that it took about eight minutes to sell out! Brad mentioned there might be a new deal and we’ll update with any new details!
Tommy Lee, BigDoor’s Director of Monetization and Implementation, will be attending the GDC Conference next week! On Monday, February 28th, Tommy will be attending the Serious Games Summit track including “Pioneers, Promise and Possibilities,” and “Serious Game Summit Playfest (SGS Health).”
Additionally on Tuesday, March 1st, Tommy will be attending “Gamification 201;” “Deeper Problems, Deeper Gamification;” “Hyperlocal Game Design;” “We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges,” and the Great Gamification Debate.
If you’ll be attending GDC we’d love the opportunity to meet with you during the conference, just send an email to tommy@bigdoor.com. If you’re not able to make it to San Francisco, Tommy will be reporting back on Twitter @pikopoki or just follow us @bigdoormedia.
see more Epic Fails
So often in highly competitive marketplaces competitors find themselves in a race to the bottom.
This is certainly true on the Internet for both publishers and advertising networks. For publishers the name of the game is getting as many eyeballs looking at your site at the lowest cost. For advertising networks it’s about creating a profitable margin between the publishers who are constantly getting pitched better rates and advertiser’s who are always looking to cut their payouts.
With some notable exceptions, the eyeball, the actual user of the site, gets lost in the equation. We think the publishers who create the best and most interactive user experiences should be rewarded. Aligning advertising rates with the interactivity of a publisher’s user experience is the challenge that we, here at BigDoor, are working on right now. We like to call this the Loyalty Economy.
Rather than racing to the bottom, we want to be involved in helping our publisher’s race to the top. Racing to the top is about creating win-win-win monetization strategies that reward user loyalty and participation, rewarding interaction between publishers and users and building on that relationship to create value for trusted advertisers.
Recent events have amply demonstrated that when values are improperly aligned online advertising can become a vicious cycle of manipulative and deceptive advertising begetting poor user experiences begetting cynical and manipulative users.
If values are properly aligned then trusted advertising should beget better user experience which begets engaged and happy users in a virtuous cycle – a mutuality of value for everyone involved in the process.
–Patrick Murck
There has been a lot of talk recently about virtual currency, and rightly so. Points based systems took off in Asia years ago, and as is often the case the U.S. is just now catching up. It is our thesis that rewards (points, virtual currency, coins – whatever you want to call them) lie at the heart of a shift that is going to substantially alter the online entertainment industry.
The Challenge
There is a well documented macro trend under-way in U.S. consumer behavior as it relates to how we entertain ourselves. People are shifting their time from more traditional media (Newspapers, magazines, CDs, television and theaters) to the online world. Whether part of the cause, or in reaction to this move – the online world has built an amazing entertainment infrastructure within just the last few years. We’ve invested countless millions into in systems and content in order to make sure that users can be connected, entertained and can even personally express themselves in this exciting new world. We’ve improved the experience and are making the online world a truly great place for massive consumer entertainment. The problem is we are still using offline models for monetization. Until recently, in-content ads (that nobody wants to click on if they are in “entertainment mode”) and subscription models were the only two significant monetization methods employed by online entertainment related properties. But a new model is coming, and if we are going to make the online world a sustainable and healthy ecosystem for consumer entertainment, we have to embrace and evolve our methods of monetization to match these new experiences.
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