• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 4, 2009

Pangea Media has tapped into Netflix's database of more than 100,000 movie titles to build thousands of quizzes based on a variety of movie themes through an API the rental site released in October.

Quizzes are posted to Web sites Pangea built to support Netflix. Movienachos.com and movieiqtest.com went live in January. Built with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind, Google has indexed about 100,000 pages, so customers can easily find quizzes and content through searches on engines such as Google, Live Search and Yahoo.

Pangea has about 7 million monthly unique visitors. Last year the company created 60 million quizzes. Built with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind, the Netflix branded sites that launched six weeks ago have about 100,000 pages indexed by Google, so consumers can find quizzes about content they search on.

Taking the concept a step further, Pangea designed an application that enables movie buffs to create their own quizzes and post them to blogs and social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, or build a Web page and send tweets to Twitter followers who might want to take the test.

The ability for consumers to design and post quizzes creates "a sort of viral branding" campaign, said Michael Hart, director of engineering at Netflix. "We get a multiplier effect on releasing the API," he said, adding that users who click on the quizzes are funneled to Netflix and are offered a free trial.

That multiplier converts clicks into subscribers more often than not, Hart said, but there are other economic factors at play that drive down the cost of advertising on the Web. "We are a low-cost entertainment option," he said. "Our acquisition cost is much lower now than it had been in the past. This has turned into a low-cost way to acquire new customers."

Hart said since launching the API, Netflix has registered about 3,000 applications developers. Most have been developed for mobile. Within the first few months, 10 mobile apps surfaced, mostly to manage Netflix accounts on the BlackBerry and G1. Rottentomatoes.com and The New York Times online movie review page now have a button to add movies to the Netflix cue within the sites.

As for Pangea, some time this year the company will have the ability to tell Netflix the movies that drive people into subscriptions through the quizzes.

"Quizzes change an ad campaign from a monolog to a dialog because it creates interaction with consumers," said Seth Lieberman, president and CEO, Pangea. "Our goal with the quizzes is to drive subscribers to the Netflix service."

Lieberman said Pangea does not collect personal identifiable information, but with the data could integrate a lead generation campaign that feeds data into Netflix's CRM system.