Commentary

Videos: The Game...or...Wow, You Really Don't Know Jack!

Smurf

I knew I was getting in over my head when the video quiz at Dailymotion started asking me which classical music riff was heard throughout Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. Or when it asked me to ID the ten second clip of a French film only an NYU film school graduate might remember. I thought I was a movie buff, but it turns out I don't know Jack.


But it is fun trying. The technology behind the video site's DailyQuizz is not as fancy and polished as the great SceneIt series or the recently revived "You Don't Know Jack" video games. Nevertheless, these are novel and addictive uses of video assets that gives Dailymotion some unique editorial chops. Some of these higher level quizzes are damned hard. Someone back there is doing serious curating.


The series launched this week leading with a Valentine's Day theme. There are standard categories for Georgraphy, Movies, Music, Sport, TV Shows and Video Games. Fair warning, the multi-lingual site has some of the contests in French. Yes, that is "La Quizz Castevania." But we found English versions of most. The interface may ask for multiple choice or fill-in. Answer faster and you get more points and climb the leaderboard.


Combining video with gaming at a video portal offers good prospects for advertisers, although none are visible yet in the Dailymotion project.  Trivia games are incredibly sticky to begin with and allow for skinning or wrapping the game environment in an advertiser's message for long exposure time. In the early days of online gaming, ads performed poorly because most people were measuring in clickthroughs, which required a gamer leave the experience they loved. Bad idea. Flash gaming has advanced, as have the ad models. Now pre-roll video often is placed before the game experience or the rich ad unit allows for interaction without leaving the experience. A video trivia contest surely would allow for short (please - really short) pre-rolls or mid-rolls inserted amidst the questions.   


The Dailymotion video quizzes also engage the social element in a way that may be uncommon for many content sites. With leaderboards and Facebook sharing of content, users get drawn into a community or at least have an awareness of community.

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