The online information source Answers.com has turned to creating a game based on its vast repository of data in order to draw traffic to the site.
Answers.com calls itself “the world’s greatest encyclodiction-almanacapedia” in reference to the information it holds on some 3.5 million topics. As an advertiser-supported service, Answers needs traffic to help boost its revenue stream.
A lot of people tend to use general-purpose search engines to find out what they want to know. Sites like Google and Yahoo own the majority of the search engine market, and are well-known names. To differentiate itself and create some buzz about the Answers.com site, the company created Blufr.
People may stumble across Blufr as an embedded item in a blog or other type of web site. The premise is simple – Blufr presents a statement, and the visitor has to decide if it is a bluff or not. After picking a choice, Blufr tells the visitor if they answered correctly or not, and displays their score.
There is no registration required to play the game, so a visitor can keep trying to call Blufr’s bluffs and build up the score. For example, did you know that auction site eBay was named that after discovering that the intended name, eBuy, was already taken?
If you believe that, you’re among the 56 percent of people taken in so far by that bluff.
The Blufr project shows a clever repurposing of an existing resource for marketing purposes. Answers.com has crafted an interactive piece of entertainment and made it freely available for others to embed and share.
Answers.com may need to complement Blufr with some other marketing initiatives to bring more traffic to its page-displayed advertising. The website draws from a variety of quality resources for its content, and that should be a selling point over a more general search that likely has spam links hidden amidst the organic results.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
