After dominating the Latin American app market, Trivia Crack (brainchild of game creator Etermax) set its sights on the U.S. By customizing the content and advertising experience for the U.S. market and designing a user-friendly interface, Trivia Crack has amassed more than 150 million downloads.
Goals
Turn the Trivia Crack app, which is very successful in Latin America, into a successful brand in the U.S.
Provide users with a free, innovative, and attractive app
Monetize with AdMob ads
Approach
Created relevant, local content
Designed a friendly UI and social dynamic to promote competition among friends and family
Customized the advertising experience with banners and interstitial ads
Results
More than 150 million downloads
The most downloaded free app for 66 consecutive days in Apple’s U.S. App Store
In case you haven't spent hours battling your friends and unlocking badges in Trivia Crack, here are the basics: Trivia Crack is one of the most popular apps in the world, having been downloaded more than 150 million times. It held a top-rated spot in the Apple, Google Play, and Amazon app stores for months.1
"We have demonstrated that great technology advances are possible outside of Silicon Valley," asserts Máximo Cavazzani, CEO of Etermax, the company behind the game.
Trivia Crack took the crowded trivia market by storm with a laser-like focus on three key priorities: a user-friendly interface, relevant local content, and social interactivity. With this solid foundation and a corner on the Latin American market, Etermax turned its attention to the U.S., optimizing users' ad experiences and ensuring its app was a place where brands could reach consumers.
Developing the app for success
From the beginning, Etermax has been focused on succeeding where many other app developers have failed: user interface. Instead of building the app from a developer's perspective, Etermax built an app that users would love spending time with. Cavazzani says, "While other companies only create games, we create concepts. Trivia Crack was created from scratch with the idea of a TV show and a line of toys; therefore, we paid a lot of attention to the design and creation of endearing characters."
Getting to 150 million downloads happens one user at a time. Etermax's leaders knew that reaching that kind of traction on a massive scale would require creating customized, local content. And lots of it. So Etermax took its massive database of high-quality questions and translated it into 18 languages. But the company didn't use big translation companies. Instead, Etermax worked with local translators in each country to ensure that the integrity and nuances of each country's dialect came through. This earned fans and advocates from all over the world.
True to its name, Trivia Crack users can't get enough of it. Etermax attributes this addictiveness to social interactivity. Users can challenge their friends across seven categories, helping friends across the globe finally determine (and brag about) who knows the most country capitals.
Adapting for a new market
When Etermax turned its focus to the U.S. market, it customized not only Trivia Crack's questions and content, but the user's ad experience as well.
Because less than 20% of the population in Latin America has access to a bank account, Etermax's monetization strategy for Trivia Crack had been focused on ads, not in-app purchases. In the U.S., most users have bank accounts that can be easily accessed while playing the game. Now, "50% of our revenue comes from in-app purchases," explains Cavazzani.
By focusing on the needs and tendencies of U.S. users, Etermax made Trivia Crack the most downloaded free app in the Apple App Store in the U.S. for 66 straight days.
Expanding ad inventory with Google AdMob
A key component of Trivia Crack's monetization will always be ads. And in May 2015, Etermax announced that it selected Google AdMob as its exclusive global mobile monetization platform. Etermax ad inventory will now be available only to advertisers on the Google network, growing its footprint extensively. "We are excited to partner with Etermax to bring our global advertiser demand to one of the world's largest game developers," says Jonathan Alferness, vice president of product management at Google.
AdMob offers Etermax the tools to promote, analyze, and monetize all its apps, including Trivia Crack, on mobile devices worldwide. "With AdMob, we can ensure that we will profit from our ads all over the world," says Paul Del Pin, sales and marketing director at Etermax.
Mobile app ads reach consumers anytime, anywhere
Etermax understands the appeal that apps like Trivia Crack hold for brands in our increasingly mobile-run world. "Mobile video games offer innovative and positive experiences; users spend more time on their mobile devices than on any other and pay more attention to mobile media, increasing their ability to remember the content they see," shares Ezequiel Mottillo, creative director at Etermax.
According to digital analytics from Millward Brown, people use their mobiles device for 2 hours and 31 minutes each day on average; that's more time than they spend watching TV. It's no wonder, then, that apps that encourage use over and over again are the most successful.
Del Pin concludes, "The challenge for brands and agencies today is to accept a paradigm shift in terms of advertising investment, giving mobile the importance it deserves. Advertising through apps is a key way to solve the dilemma of how to reach their clients in today's context."
