SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - December 21, 2010) - Collaborative publishing platform Wikia, Inc., has partnered with Widgetbox™, the leader in audience engagement and digital marketing solutions, to bring interactive ad campaigns to its communities of engaged readers and content creators who share interests across numerous topics -- from TV shows and movies, to video games, food, fashion, and environmental sustainability. Widgetbox's ClickTurn technology enables Wikia to develop interactive ads that combine video, real-time content updates, polls and social media to create more engaging and impactful consumer experiences.
Recent campaigns saw exceptional audience engagement results for ads that ran across the user-generated sites. For example, throughout October and November 2010, a life-simulation computer game's campaign used Widgetbox to add a video trailer to the unit that resulted in an astounding 13.3% ad engagement rate -- almost 7 times the industry standard of 2% -- with an average session time of 30 seconds. Additionally, the unit included a feed of entries to a blog contest where users were invited to provide feedback as to why they wanted to play the latest installment of the game. Users clicking on the blog tab in the unit were taken to enter the contest themselves and, if they submitted a blog comment, were rewarded with a custom "Achievement Badge" which would display on the Achievements page.
During the same period, a newly released DVD in a popular sci-fi franchise unit experienced an exceptional 8.2% engagement rate, with an average session time of 20 seconds and a click-through rate of 0.14%. These interactive ads included multiple videos and a poll question that changed daily (without requiring a heavy design change) to bring readers fresh, highly-relevant and new content each time they engaged with the ads.
Wikia was drawn to Widgetbox's ClickTurn ads because they go beyond traditional flash-based display ads to create more of a social media unit that is interactive itself, as well as offering the ability to engage with other channels such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs.
"The Widgetbox ClickTurn technology has helped us rethink the way we partner with advertisers: by embedding content and advertising messages together, we are able to offer a much more powerful ad vehicle. We can therefore deliver unprecedented levels of reader engagement with these highly interactive units that are both memorable for our community and effective for our advertisers," said Adam Carey, Senior Director of Ad Operations at Wikia. "Because of the high engagement levels of our ClickTurn ads, we've used the technology to create our own ads that help drive traffic across a range of our wikis."
Wikia community members are extremely active on wikis pertaining to their interests, and their enthusiasm often spills over to numerous topics across other channels. With Widgetbox, Wikia helps community members easily discover other wikis of interest through exposure to the rich units that include wiki RSS feeds and embedded content.
"Wikia has reinvented the old way of content publishing, so it makes sense that they would take a similar approach to the way they bring ads to their readers. Rather than focusing on click-through rates as the primary metric of success, Wikia aims to measure success by the ability to reach and engage with the right audience in a more effective way," said Will Price, CEO of Widgetbox. "Wikia community members demand relevant and engaging content, and the publishing platform has been able to capture this community enthusiasm with our rich ad technology."
About Widgetbox
Widgetbox is revolutionizing how companies deliver the latest Web innovations to their customers. Widgetbox's products are powered by the Widgetbox Engagement Platform, a cloud-based, highly scalable application development and deployment system. The world's top brands and publishers leverage Widgetbox to better serve their customers. Based in San Francisco, the company is backed by the world's leading venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, NCD Investors, and Harrison Metal.
Widgetbox Engagement Platform and Ripple Live Updates are trademarks of Widgetbox. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
About Wikia
Wikia is the definitive place for people to collaboratively pursue their interests and share their knowledge on the web. Using Wikia, anyone can form new communities around any subject they love or participate in over 160,000 existing communities by reading or contributing new content. With more than four million pages of rich content, Wikia's communities are the most authoritative information about any topic on the Internet. Launched in 2004 by co-founders Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, Wikia attracts more than 35 million global unique visitors per month and is a Top 100 Internet site according to Quantcast.
Contact Information:
Media Contact:
Melissa Biles
melissa@launchsquad.com
415-625-8555