IMDb banks on trivia
Kai Ryssdal: IMDb, the Internet Movie Database. It’s pretty much the place to go for anything and everything motion picture and entertainment-related. IMDb.com gets millions of hits, but parent company Amazon has yet to figure out how to make a profit of it.
So today IMDb unveiled a way to do that, by putting all the data in that database to work. Marketplace’s Nancy Marshall Genzer has more.
Nancy Marshall Genzer: IMDb’s plan begins with a mobile trivia game. There’s a celebrity photo match, where you try to guess the star in a fuzzy picture or match a movie poster with a film.
I tried a few questions with the game’s creator Kintan Brahmbhatt. First I had to identify which movie this quote was from.
Kintan Brahmbhatt: You are about to enter another dimension.
Marshall Genzer: I’m going to say “The Twilight Zone.”
Brahmbhatt: All right.
Once I got the “Twilight Zone” quote right, I wanted another question. And another one. That’s the idea: addiction. The app, for iPhones, is free at first. It comes with hundreds of questions to answer. But once you’ve gone through those, you have to pay 99 cents to download more. There will also be some ads on the bottom of your screen.
Larry Weber heads the W2 marketing group. He says IMDb’s trivia game is a start.
Larry Weber: I think they’ll get some cash, but I don’t think it’s going to be panacea that they think.
Weber say IMDb will need to go further — using product placement in the game or sharing user information with sites that sell movie tickets.
Ken Doctor is a media analyst with Outsellinc.com. He says trivia games can pay off, when you combine them with coupons and other prizes to keep players coming back. Doctor says these games marry technology with human psychology.
Ken Doctor: What do we like to do? We like to say, ‘Hey I bet you don’t remember who that actress was?’ Poomp. Right?
Yeah, it’s addictive being right. Almost like:
Twilight Zone: A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind.
I’m Nancy Marshall Genzer for Marketplace.
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