Rhino wrote:
Targetting 20s and teens is fine and dandy. Using social media to help do so is a good idea even. It's just trying to make it into a cool social event for those groups or indeed others that is pointless. At least for the trivia channel anyway. That may fly for short term poker players but trivia is never going to be cool or attract those who care about being perceived that way by the younger set. However cool and hip some players may be - although I have met precious few who are - their playing trivia sure as hell isn't. No amount of match the rap star Six rounds will change that either. All you can get is trivia geeks of any age. Not focusing on that group and not slanting your appeal to them is the silly part.
Which is exactly why they should be targeting high school and college academic teams, people who visit FunTrivia and other Jeopardy like sites, etc.
They have correctly identified the continuing need to addict their players to their game. Competition and the subsequent rush from it is often lost when people graduate from either institution.
There are tens of thousands of young nerds nationwide that could be targeted who are much, much more likely to play.
And, for what it's worth, many college academic teams have a "Trash" league which is exactly the pop culture stuff Buzztime is throwing in -- might be able to get those people with the pop culture questions, depending how you target it.
With a realistic playerbase of only a few thousand, it doesn't require picking up more than 1% of those players a year to sustain their current numbers.