Monday, January 4, 2010

An introduction to, and background of Win.ly - Part 1

The initial idea for Win.ly arose several years ago.  I happened upon an instant win game that had a not uncommon issue, the game was up and live prior to when the marketing around it was really able to get organized.

So the end result?  The instant win game was very hard to find, but once you found about it, every play was a winner.


That's right.  There were so few people coming to play the instant win game that everyone won.

The reason this happened has a lot to do with the way most promotion firms run their instant win games.  (More details on this in a later post).  Suffice to say for now that there is generally an allocation of prizes per day.  So if less people came in that day than there are prizes, everyone wins.

This obviously doesn't happen too often and when it does, it's very hard to find about.  But it leads to another conclusion.  What if a game is getting low traffic for other reasons? Maybe not so extreme as the above example, but let's say it's only getting 500 visitors per day and giving away 50 prizes per day.

Every instant win game play then has about a one in ten chance of winning.  That means if you played the instant win each day you would only have to play for about a week and a half (on average) to win a prize.

That led to wondering how many games are the opposite--getting tens of thousands of visits per day for a small number of prizes.  Making the chance of winning almost zero and any time spent paying a complete waste.

In part two, I'll describe how all the pieces came together and the Win.ly rating engine got started.

In the meantime, stop by and visit Win.ly and check it out.  Drop me a note if you have comments, I've been known to give out free Premium subscriptions for valuable feedback. :)

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