The Wall Street Journal - March 16, 2000
By William M. Bulkeley, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
What's in a Game? Net Quizzes Draw Key Data for Advertising
The New York Times Web site invites readers to match wits to guess Academy Award winners. Sandbox.com (www.sandbox.com1) says it will pay $10 million to anyone that guesses the winners of every game in the college basketball championships.
Inspired by the quiz-show craze on television, more and more Web sites
are using games and quizzes to lure readers and to keep them longer --
which can pay off in more advertising. Several game developers have already
built small businesses enlivening sites from Yahoo.com to Oxygen.com, a
popular Web site for women.
But e-tractions Inc. (www.e-tractions.com2),
of Bedford, Mass., thinks it can do more. In addition to developing a portfolio
of games and quizzes to sell to Web companies, it has also written software,
called GameServer, that analyzes the quiz-takers' answers to learn information
about them that can be used to sell them products or steer them to other
parts of the site.
e-tractions has "a simple idea, but I think they could really build
their business because it's integrated with the applications and it serves
a business purpose," says Judy Hodges, a research manager at consultant
International Data Corp., Framingham, Mass.
'Guess the Resume'
One e-tractions customer is WebHire Inc., a Lexington, Mass.,
company that provides services to human-relations executives over the Web.
Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, WebHire's director of marketing, says e-tractions
quizzes "are a good way to bring people in and personalize the information."
Games under development include "guess the resume" in which participants
try to identify a famous person based on e-tractions creation of an early
career resume.
Michael Gauthier
An "HR IQ" test under development will start out by polling readers
on their experience with issues like starting salaries for receptionists
or time needed to find a new financial analyst. Then the participants will
be asked to guess what the average answers in the survey were. If someone
answered a question about the tenure of a Java software programmer as just
a few months, WebHire might offer to sell them a program on employee retention.
Another survey might ask, "What is the hardest job to fill?" Depending
on the response, WebHire might suggest a list of recruitment Web sites
appropriate for those people from its database of 2,000 job sites. WebHire
charges companies to place recruitment ads and run searches for employees
using its specialized Webcrawler.
Michael Gauthier, the 43-year-old cofounder and chief executive of e-tractions,
is a one-time management consultant who was most recently president of
MGA Software Inc., a maker of simulation software for the aerospace and
automotive industries. After selling the company in 1998, Mr. Gauthier
started thinking about forming a business that would spruce up Web sites.
While looking for office space he met Stephen Curran, 35, a former game
designer for Gametek Inc. who had recently left Miami in search of better
schools for his children and investors for the e-mail game idea he and
his wife had developed. Mr. Curran, who had developed Wheel of Fortune
and Jeopardy versions for video games, became vice president of creative
development. His wife, Elizabeth Curran, became chief financial officer.
e-tractions prices its service at $20,000 to $50,000 to develop several
games for a Web site, and $10,000 a month thereafter for using GameServer
to handle quizzes and to feed information about the quiz-takers back to
the clients.
Customized Games
Mr. Gauthier says e-tractions can freshen a site with a new game monthly
from its library of more than 40 game types. He says e-tractions technology
allows it to produce games that are customized to preserve the look and
feel of the Web site.
An e-tractions trivia game called Propaganda will have a pushy, insulting
cartoon character as its host on MathSoft Inc.'s FreeScholarships.com
Web site for college students (www.FreeScholarships.com3).
That is in keeping with the site's comic-book-style motif. One diabolical,
double-multiple-choice question asks quiz-takers to identify which of this
group -- Faith Hill, Lauryn Hill, Prof. Harold Hill, or Benny Hill -- is
any one of these: a "British singer, comedian, member of Parliament, or
horticulturist." Choose any of the 15 wrong answers and the game produces
this message: "Duh ... try again. Benny Hill is a British comedian."
e-tractions has "a unique and powerful technology," says Gerry Kaufhold,
an analyst with Cahners In-Stat Group, Scottsdale, Ariz. "A lot of information
gathering can be done when someone is interested in a game... By feeding
questions in the right order, they can figure out a lot of demographic
information without violating privacy."
Tiffany Bass Bukow, chief executive of MsMoney.com, a San Francisco
concern that plans to launch a Web site later this month, saw e-tractions
at a trade show and immediately started negotiating a contract. She says
the games will be a centerpiece of a subsidiary site for teenage girls
to be called MissMoney.com.
e-tractions has proposed a "The Price is Right"-type game where girls
can guess the cost of items from Frigidaires to Ferraris. Ms. Bukow says
ultimately she would like to see a game where girls describe the lifestyles
they want and then "analyze the type of job they need to afford that. If
you want a BMW and to live in the Marina district, you'll need an engineering
degree and a Stanford MBA."