Gamification

One of the most enduring challenges any Internet marketer faces is getting users to come back regularly and engage on their website. In other words; loyalty. Social gaming companies and a few very popular consumer web services have gotten extremely good at creating loyalty, where loyalty rate is defined as Daily Active Users (DAU) / Monthly Active Users (MAU). Yet when you look at loyalty rates on the rest of the web, they look downright abysmal. According to data from Nielsen, of the top 2,000 biggest sites in the US, only 21 of them have a loyalty rate better than 25%. In fact the average loyalty rate among the top 2,000 US sites is less than 7%. Do some quick math (7% * 30 days) and that means that on average their “active” users are only visiting their site two days out of the month. ...

Wow – that was cool. Thanks for the help with the experiment in the post How To Score 30 Minutes With Me . Tons of great feedback – both in the comments, by tweets, and by email. In case you missed the post, I decided to offer one 30 minute session with me per week for the next four weeks in exchange for 10,000 Feld Gelt. At least one person found the “Purchase Feld Gelt” option (which I’ve since disabled, at least for now) and bought 9,995 Feld Gelt’s for $10 valuing my time at around $20.01 / hour! Oops. ...

Long ago I concluded that life is just a video game. We fly on airplanes to get mileage points so we can get free stuff and or level up to get more priority. We used to get green stamps (when I was a kid) whenever we bought stuff so we could get free stuff (most of it shitty, but free). Our credit cards have points programs (and lots of free miles), we get credit (implicit and explicit) eating at the same restaurants over and over ago, and when you buy a dozen cups of coffee at the coffee shop down the street from my (they still keep track of it with note cards and one of those funny metal punch things) you get the next one free. ...

Today our portfolio company BigDoor launched the first ever gamification plugin for WordPress. The plugin will allow a WordPress site owner to add leader-boards to their site as well as reward users with badges and points when they leave comments and check-in. It is a great way to incentivize repeat visits and help build a community on your site. The BigDoor team has built a powerful gamification API, but until recently it required a programmer to implement it. The team continues to make big strides in making gamification more accessible by streamlining and simplifying the process of adding points, leader-boards, badges and virtual goods to a site or app. BigDoor is progressing toward what they call the “15 minute install”. Their new WordPress plugin takes about an hour from download to being live on your site, but this is a big step toward making gamification, badges and leader-boards more accessible for bloggers everywhere. ...