PopJax Debuts Viral Video Game For Avenged Sevenfold

Popjax Viral Video GameCasual gamers and hard rock lovers get the best of both worlds with a trio of new video trivia games featuring award-winning rock band Avenged Sevenfold (A7X). And San Francisco-based PopJax is the newly formed online entertainment company behind the games.

PopJax created the games by combining a barrage of online video clips, including footage from A7X's recent "Taste of Chaos" Tour, with dozens of questions about the band's history. Gamers compete to win memorabilia like autographed guitars, and can email their scores to each other or share the game via a Facebook application.

In the week since PopJax launched the A7X games, CEO and founder Doug Barry said that players were sending an average of 10 "challenges"--emails boasting their score and inviting friends to beat it--each time they played.

Barry said that the company builds portability into the games to up the viral ante. For example, gamers will find the A7X trivia amidst the hundreds of games on the PopJax site, at Avenge Sevenfold's home page, and of course, on Facebook. By giving players multiple ways to access the clips, the questions, their scores, and ultimately the brand behind the experience, Barry said that PopJax has brought the "emotional resonance" and "branding capabilities" of video to casual gaming.

"The power of casual games is that they're mass market and easy for people to play," Barry said. "But when you take casual gaming and wrap it in a video veneer, you have a viral tool that can also deliver ad impressions."

Barry said that PopJax is currently focused on accruing a critical mass of gamers and questions to keep them playing. The company has a staff of in-house and freelance writers that generate thousands of trivia questions related to the video clips that come from sites like YouTube and Veoh, in addition to questions that the players submit themselves. But he added that the core audience was already garnering attention from select advertisers. "The average visitor is spending over 20 minutes per visit," Barry said. "And though we don't have official demographic statistics yet, the audience is definitely skewing more female, and in the 25- to-45-year-old range. We're attracting the People and Entertainment Weekly crowd, and advertisers are recognizing the opportunity."

One monetization plan is to run pre-roll ads before each game, with other impressions available for when users return to the game board page (between video clips). Barry said that since players sign up to win prizes, PopJax can also develop targets based on game genre preferences like '80s pop, '90s action films, fashion, theater, and even political preferences. Meanwhile, creating branded games like the trio for A7X is PopJax's more integrated entertainment offering.

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