HQ Trivia — A new age of entertainment
What is it? What’s next? When is all of this going to turn into an episode of Black Mirror?
In the depths of revision for my finals (now thankfully behind me) each day was structured with alarming rigidity. Get up, go to the library, maybe cry a little, go to bed — and of course, whenever that notification popped up just before 3pm and 9pm, try and win some cash on HQ Trivia.
If you know, you know: deeply unfunny yet strangely charismatic hosts, begging friends to use your code for an extra life, and inevitably crashing out after six questions because you didn’t know how deep the River Trent is.
If you are currently emerging from the rock under which you live and scratching your head at this, then wonder no more. Prepare to hop on the latest zeitgeist giving millennials an excuse to stare at their phones, in this Idiot’s Guide to HQ Trivia.
HQ Trivia is a live game show streamed directly to your smartphone. Players must answer twelve multiple choice questions of increasing difficulty, with only ten seconds to select the answer, effectively ruling out the possibility of using Google.
The app launched in the United States in August 2017 with a UK version being released in January 2018. HQ Trivia is available worldwide and can be played anywhere with an internet connection, but the versions are geared towards their specific countries. So, if you want to be answering more on Thomas the Tank Engine than Thomas Jefferson, stick to the UK version.
Sharon Carpenter, Shazza to her friends, is the primary host of HQ Trivia UK. Speaking to the BBC, she stated her belief that it is the live element of the app that has drawn, in its most popular game, two million players:
‘First of all, you’ve got this live component where anything can happen. It’s the same reason people love live TV, but this you can take wherever you are. You never know where the game is going to end up — and I think there is this element of the fear of missing out’.
Shazza is certainly onto something with that. The concept of having a portable game show, that you play in real time alongside your friends, as well as hundreds of thousands of people bleating away in the chat, is a large factor in the app’s appeal. If you miss the start of the quiz, you can only spectate, getting questions wrong in your head for a change, instead of on the app.
Of course, HQ Trivia’s biggest draw begins with ‘m’ and ends with ‘oney’. It is a free to download app giving players a chance to win real cash, typically split with other players who have fluked their way to answering twelve questions correctly. The cash prize can vary between £550 on an average UK game, to $300,000 on a special episode of the US version.
‘What a terrible business model’ I hear you cry. ‘They give it away for free and shell out thousands every day, with no traditional adverts? Surely they’re harvesting peoples’ data/organs or something’. Well, imagined reader, you’ve missed one crucial point: they’ve got loads of money to begin with.
HQ Trivia is the brainchild of two of the founders of Vine, Rus Yusopov and Colin Kroll. The pair launched Intermedia Labs in 2016, a New York based consumer video firm whose declared intention is to ‘invent the future of television’. Following Twitter’s decision shut down Vine in October 2016, Yusopov unveiled a new mobile social live streaming app called Hype, in the style of Twitter-owned Periscope.
As with Periscope, Hype allows viewers to watch people live stream from across the globe, receiving notifications when broadcasters are live and allowing for immediate feedback in the form of viewers’ comments. It’s similar to the Facebook Live function, but instead of watching Douglas and the lads chop pints before sports night, you can watch Olga in Vladivostok greet the sunrise with a traditional jig.
According to Yusopov, the team looked at which formats were drawing the most attention and found that game shows brought Hype broadcasters the most viewers. This led to the development of HQ Trivia.
After its soft launch in August 2017, HQ Trivia quickly drew massive engagement from players, as well as significant investment from firms and venture capitalists. In March 2018 it received $15 million in investment from venture-capital fund Founders Fund and is currently valued at $100 million. In November 2017, Yusopov spoke on their intentions for HQ Trivia’s monetisation strategy:
‘If we do any brand integrations or sponsors, the focus will be on making it enhance the gameplay. For a user, the worst thing is feeling like, “I’m being optimized — I’m the product now”. We want to make a great game, and make it grow and become something really special’.
Thus far, this has been the model that HQ Trivia has followed. There are no traditional adverts in the app but there have been some big money collaborations with other companies. One special show featured Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, promoting the upcoming Warner Bros. film, Ready Player One, where the prize was upped to $300,000.
Jeremy Liew, part of Lightspeed Venture Partners, a firm who have given HQ Trivia millions in financial backing, believes that the app’s success is a sign of the times. For Liew, HQ Trivia heralds a new generation of digital game shows, appealing to a developing audience whose preference is for the streamable and portable. In his view, Twitch is the digital descendant of ESPN and ‘post-cable’ financial news network Cheddar is destined to supplant CNBC.
This viewpoint certainly fits in with Intermedia Labs’ mission to ‘invent the future of television’, a future in which television ironically looks to be increasingly absent. As millennials spend more and more time looking at their phones than their TVs, Liew may prove correct in predicting this paradigm shift in entertainment. Content such as game shows that were originally exclusive to television now find huge audience engagement in the digital world and HQ Trivia, with its simple but effective format, could very well be a sign of things to come.
This piece was featured in The Zip Files podcast— an irreverent weekly 20–25 minute podcast to help the busy millennial catch up with all of the week’s most important tech news. Here’s the episode in which this piece was featured:
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