BigAdda Plans On Making Ad Money While Zapak Offers Money For Playing Games!
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Two Online Startups BigAdda and Zapak both from the Reliance Entertainment stable are looking at different strategies for their future. While one is into social networking the other is into gaming. Quite different products having similar target audiences i.e. the indian youth.
BigAds Coming Soon!
BigAdda COO has been quoted saying “We are building customised solutions for advertisers such as building their own addas (informal clubs).” Besides for the Addas Bigadda also plans to have contextual display ads for advertisers. BigAdda had a massive launch with ads all over the idiot box and backed it with billboards across cities in India. Recently they claimed to have garnered 1.24 million registered users and have expressed their goal of reaching 10 million users by 2010.
While writing this post i came across an interesting post which questioned the need for Bigadda to put google ads (after all how much money returns do they bring?) when they may really compromise the user experience and take users away from the site. The post also raised questions on the interactivity level at bigadda with respect to groups. So it may be one thing having registered users and totally another thing having interactive users. It remains to be seen how bigadda scales going forward and whether it catch and keep users vs catch and release them.
Make Money Online on Zapak!
Zapak being the older (as in launched earlier) of the two has made a dent in the gaming market by doing a lot of different things be it tie ups with film stars, advergaming, innovative offline ads, online ads, TV ads, radio ads, Movie Theatre ads phew you name it and they have done that! Backed by huge marketing budget Zapak has left no stone unturned in its pursuit for the prime brand recall in the consumers mind.
Now it seems Zapak has taken the user incentive route to make the gamer play a game beyond just time pass or entertainment to earning some hard cash. Called as the ATM Cash games zapak has launched an interesting model of skilled based cash winning games. Though at first it may seem like betting or gambling cash games are actually skill based games in which the gamers can win money when they play many games win them. More on the cash games can be found here.
Currently the ATM cash contest is launched for the single player games but I expect zapak to extend this model to multiplayer games similar to moola.com where users will be able to bet with each other on their skills to win a game. It will be interesting to see how this works out for zapak as incentivising users to participate did get a lot of flak in the case of ibibo but atleast in this case zapak would benefit from the point of view of some increased game play and not plaigarised content which was the case with ibibo.
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Bribing users to play is a strategy which can work only in India – and it’ll definitely work better than the massive amount of Ad Spend Zapak has been doing. But then again to a parent company which is creating a record of sorts with their upcoming IPO of Reliance Power and mopping up crores in minutes….a couple of crores on ad spend is hardly anything.
@Eka While i agree that bribing users works in short term engagement I feel for a site loyal longterm userbase is far more valuable.
The catch and keep model of networking can even be applied to gaming in terms of building continued engagement. Besides for the number of registered users dont you think a metric like no of power users i.e. registered users who visit the site once a week or something users who spend 5 hours a week on the site would be a better metric for evaluating a campaigns success?
Paying money to users for playing is not like paying users to blog.,
For gaming, it will certainly improve user stickiness towards the site. Gaming is an entertainment , but blogging is more towards providing information,
IMO, it will definitely work
I think there’s a slight mistake in this entry.
Zapak offers cash prizes for a set of games. They need not be skill games. (e.g. Book Cricket)
There is a separate set of games where you pay to play certain tournaments, and compete against others and win the outcome of the games.