Kwanzoo, a new startup launching today, is looking to help increase your advertising revenue by embedding your ads in small quizzes. The site features a bank of over 50,000 questions spanning categories that include video games, sports, and movies. Users can try out the questions at the site’s homepage, but CEO Mani Iyer says that the company’s primary goal is to create interactive ad units. The startup has already established partnerships with large clients including Meebo and Glam Media, who are reportedly seeing click through rates as high as 10x what they normally see from typical banner ads.
Users can build quizzes by searching for pre-written questions from their favorite topics or by inputting their own questions. Each quiz consists of five or ten questions, and don’t display an ad (or “call to action”) until after the questions have been completed. And while ads may not be readily visible when the quiz is displayed on a page, they are much better at grabbing the viewer’s attention than traditional banners, which users have trained themselves to ignore.
At this point Kwanzoo isn’t an ad network – it isn’t finding the ads that will appear on your site. Instead, you embed ads from other networks into your widget. For large publishers like Glam the site is employing a paid service with a three way revenue split (between publisher, ad network, and Kwanzoo), but in the future the site will also offer free widgets with a different revenue sharing scheme that has yet to be determined.