Quiz Show

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If you use Gmail, you probably have noticed an ad showing up more than you might expect. Given its prominence and the seeming lack of relevance to your conversations, you might have wondered whether Coffeefool.com was more fool than coffee lover. I don’t drink enough coffee, and I have yet to see them advertise on any of the regular ad networks. So, while I, and any other who, begrudgingly acknowledge them every time Google seems to select their ad to headline in our inbox, they remain a mystery. If I knew how they managed to do what they did, short of doing a site specific buy on Gmail, I would not write about them, I would be off trying to create my own fool. One company, though, seems to have figured out the mystery. At first I didn’t think much of it, except to recognize that a different advertiser had made its way into heavy rotation. Like Coffeefool, I assumed their ad didn’t apply to me. I’m a slacker, but I’m not a mom, so why would I wonder whether I’m a slacker mom.

Click on an ad for are you a slacker a mom, and you go to a quiz run by Chatterbean. Quiz sites have always seemed to have a following. The development of them (from what little I’ve seen) reminds me a lot of the development of content generation online. Content was historically pushed to us. About.com hired tons of writers to provide us information, but it was info someone else created for us. We all had opinions too, but before someone made it simple stupid to publish them, only a few made the effort to self-publish. The same holds true with quiz sites. Most of the early quiz sites pushed them to us. The sites came up with the offbeat topics that sucked us in to completing it and forwarding it on to our friends. Push sites are like the head of content. It’s a lot of volume covered in a rather narrow number of topics. The breadth comes in the tail. It comes by not telling others what they should read but letting them do it themselves. It’s the classic, "If you build it, they will do all the work and you will sell for millions."

As far as sites go, an About.com or TheSpark.com style site won’t get as much organic traffic today as it once did (excluding indexed search). The beauty of direct response though is that it relies entirely on pushed content. If you can come up with a revenue model, you can push all you want, despite larger trends. Think of Tickle.com. If you searched for an IQ test you could find one, but we all took it because they put it there right in front of us. After you took it, in a model similar to online dating, the company attempted to upsell you on a more in-depth quiz and access to other quizzes. With media costs having risen, Tickle doesn’t advertise like they once did, but that doesn’t mean quiz based advertising has died. Like many forms of online advertising, it just needed to evolve. Incentive companies use quizzes to get people through a reg path; ringtone guys use quizzes to get initial clicks, but none seem to use quizzes as a lure for lead gen. And, that’s what makes Chatterbean so interesting.

Chatterbean doesn’t offer anything you couldn’t find in any number of sites. Its quizzes are a mashup of countless quizzes. It’s not a subscription site like Tickle, a hub for self-publishing like, MTV purchased, Quizilla, or a Web 2.0 widget site taking the self-publishing of quizzes and polls to profile pages. Of the three types, it most closely resembles Tickle because people don’t go there on their own. After seeing the front page, you might think they do, but don’t let that front page fool you, which is pretty much why it looks the way it does. No, people go toChatterbean because they’ve clicked on an ad. They want to know, for example, whether they are a slacker mom. But, just who is a slacker mom? Could it be someone that feels as though they don’t do enough or would like to be empowered to do more? And who might have an interest in some of their other top quizzes; who might wonder if they are normal, fun, right-brained? After you stare at the pages long enough, it starts to fall in place. The quizzes should be called, "Are you interested in online education?"

While the whois info doesn’t make it clear, I’m pretty sure that Chatterbean is, if not owned at least, run by Quinstreet. Almost every ad on the page promotes a Quinstreet run education related lead generation ad. And, if you complete a form, instead of getting your results right away, you get a step by step explanation of the results accompanied by a co-reg style ad for more online education. To a direct response, lead gen guy, it’s brilliant. In today’s overcrowded space, it’s harder and harder to get leads. So, why not first target your audience, get them interacting with you and subtly promote and intertwine the product about which you really care. I probably wouldn’t have thought Quinstreet one to do this. Like many of their sites, they might have purchased this, but the company has a well-known, but not so well-known, content production division, and it certainly has the search experience, so it could very well have originated from within. It’s a wonderful application of taking head content and pushing it out to the tail of Internet traffic, getting the traffic you want, at a low price, without having to compete directly against others for it. This might not make coffeefool.com any clearer, but it certainly opened up my eyes about online education lead gen.

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