• by Tameka Kee , July 15, 2008

Pangea Media, parent company of the online quiz sites Quiz Rocket and Quibblo, was one of thousands of third-party application developers that reaped the benefits of the massive demand for the 3G iPhone this weekend.

iPhone and iTouch users downloaded more than 10 million apps in the wake of Apple's opening of the iTunes store to third-party developers and the 3G iPhone launch. And Pangea Media's location-based polls were available as part of the WHERE application from uLocate.

With WHERE, iPhone owners can access a number of location-based widgets--including ratings and reviews service Yelp, as well as a GasBuddy, which finds the least expensive gas station within a given radius. The Pangea widget lets users participate in polls like "which city has the best Chinese food" and then displays the results geographically. iPhone owners can see how their responses fare in comparison to people within a 10-mile range and beyond.

Since the WHERE app bundle is both free and without ads, the benefits for Pangea's inclusion stem from building a critical mass of users. According to Seth Lieberman, founder and CEO of Pangea Media, iPhone users have conducted an average of 10,000 polls per day in the wake of the app's launch.

"Polls and quizzes are a great free service, because people are always looking for games and things to distract them while they're waiting somewhere with their phone," Lieberman said. He said that the iPhone application was the first step in Pangea's mobile strategy, and that there would be a number of advertising options available once there were enough users to satisfy marketers' reach requirements.

"The mobile angle dovetails nicely with our core ability to do demo and psychographic targeting from our online quizzes," Lieberman said. "Eventually, there will also be the option to do sponsored polls and banner-related campaigns, but we need to be careful about rolling out ads so that we don't run afoul of the carriers."

Advertisers including ABC, MTV and Circuit City have already tapped Pangea to run poll-related campaigns. The Boston-based company's sites attract tens of millions of unique monthly visitors, and offer banner- or sponsorship-based campaigns on a CPM basis. Pangea Media also offers market research (mining the data from multiple polls by region, gender and other demographics), as well as custom lead-generation packages.