We originally started AdNectar to serve brand advertisers, but we've now found that our publishers are greatly benefiting from integrating our system. In addition to a new revenue source and the data our API provides, it turns out users actually prefer branded over generic virtual items.
Nir Eyal
AdNectar was born out of a class project at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in January of 2008. The founders are all avid social network users and we wanted to see if we could discover the optimal way for advertisers to reach consumers in a way that felt authentic and organic, and yet was scalable to a mass audience.
I think my worst habit is struggling with technology, even though I know how this stuff works, I need to bring conscious thought into how I use.
One of the common myths is that when you have kids you can't really have adult relationships, that kids come first. We don't think so. We actually think that we have to take care of ourselves individually. If we can take care of ourselves, then we can become better partners for our spouse.
The market for religious apps is fiercely competitive; searching for 'bible' in the Apple App Store returns 5,185 results. But among all the choices, YouVersion's Bible, funded by LifeChurch.tv of Edmond, Oklahoma, seems to be the chosen one, ranking at the top of the list and boasting more than 641,000 reviews.
Don Draper-style advertising is really only available to the biggest brands out there. It's only commodity goods that use those kind of messages because they have to differentiate goods that are really hard to differentiate between - Shell gasoline versus Exxon, Coke versus Pepsi, Sprint versus T-Mobile, it's all the same thing!
What Facebook wants to create an association with is every time you're bored, every time you have a few minutes. We know that, psychologically speaking, boredom is painful. Whenever you're feeling bored, whenever you have a few extra minutes, this is a salve for that itch.
The cold truth is that the best products don't always win. Many times it's - the products that have the ability to keep users coming back and using them without conscious thought and using them out of habit are the ones that keep us coming back.
The more professional opportunities came my way, the more time I spent away from my friends - the people I truly cared about. Maintaining friendships with people to talk to, depend on and enjoy takes time.
AdNectar specializes in deploying branded virtual items across top social networking properties and applications. Virtual items are images sent to communicate a message between users of social media.
If the food of friendship is time together, how do we make the time to ensure we're all fed? My friends and I have recently come across a way to keep each other close. It fits into our lifestyles despite busy schedules and a surfeit of children. We call it the 'kibbutz.'
It is reasonable to think that the more readers put into the Bible app in the form of small investments, the more it becomes a repository of their history of worship. Like a worn dog-eared book, full of scribbled insights and wisdom, the app becomes a treasured asset not easily discarded.
The Bible app is designed to make absorbing the Word as frictionless as possible. For example, to make the Bible app habit easier to adopt, a user who prefers to not read at all can simply tap a small icon, which plays a professionally produced audio track, read with all the dramatic bravado of Charlton Heston himself.
Habits can be good or bad, whereas addictions are always bad.
The most habit-forming products are intra-day behaviors. We take out Snapchat or Instagram or Pinterest multiple times a day.
Everything I write is meant to share what I'm struggling with. I hope that it helps other people. I benefit from that a great deal because I always hear new ideas from my readers. It's a very symbiotic relationship.
Google is one of these products that I think is incredibly habit-forming, and it's the kind of product that shows this characteristic of something that we use with little or no conscious thought.
I wanted to create a toolkit which I would have wanted as an entrepreneur to use these principles of psychology in product design. Some startups totally forget the trigger. In some, the action is too complicated. Others don't have a variable reward, which maintains mystery.
The more readers use the Bible app, the more valuable it becomes to them. Switching to a different digital Bible - God forbid - becomes less likely with each new revelation a user types into the app, further securing YouVersion's dominion.
