While doing some research into social media gaming in view of writing a another one ( because let’s face it – SoulHunter was about as popular as a free bacon hand out at a pigs against animal cruelty convention ) and stumbled upon EmpireAvenue. After making some share trading type games before, I thought I would give it a go. The concept behind EmpireAvenue is simple – buying and selling shares in people based upon their online presence aimed at building brand awareness – like Klout, but instead of +K’s you trade with imaginary money. Initially, I got bored pretty quickly – the interface itself is pretty dull, though functional and I found myself wondering what was the point. I logged out and forgot about it.
A week later I stumbled upon it again, and logged in to see what had happened to my stock price. Not surprisingly, my stock worth had fallen and I imagined in some virtual boardroom my investors were angrily sitting around a big oak table calling me nasty names. So, I decided to have another go at it and started interacting with the site, doing missions, buying and selling people etc; Part of writting this post is conductive to see how it actually relates to getting real eyeballs on pages – the code in the first sentance of this post is a validiation code to get this blog [ EDIT : Code removed as I got verified, and it looked real ugly 🙂 ] verified – very interested to see if traffic increases or not once it gets verified. I noticed my stock price increasing steadily and I will say it is a strangely addictive experience.
As for using EmpireAvenue for brand awarness, I’m not sure I’m seeing a lot of return for the time spent ‘playing’ – I’m enjoying the ‘game’ ( note the quote marks 🙂 ) but don’t think I’m seeing any major pull from it – met a few interesting people, and read some interesting things but still it is earlier days, I guess 🙂 For those who have read this far, I guess it is probably a good idea to mention my profile – there is no affiliate code or anything like this lurking in the url, so feel free to have a look : BeebugNic on EmpireAvenue.
There is quite a large amount of data availible from an API – which is always a huge turn on for any web-based service. Well, atleast for me, prehaps I’m going odd in my old age. Might very well have a play around with that later and seeing if I can grab any interesting info from it 🙂 Anyway, I’m sure I will report back in a while with additional thoughts about EmpireAvenue.
And to reward anyone who got this far, here is my awesomely amazing peice of advice for playing EmpireAvenue :
Spam refresh on the homepage ( the one with the new users section ) – the moment you see any new user with a female avatar, buy 200 shares in them. Users who have a female picture in them will almost always start to shoot up very quickly – much quicker than male/no picture/slime monster pictures.
Thoughs/views and comments are always welcome 🙂 I’ll definately blogging again with any further thoughts 🙂
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