As network effect increasingly accelerates, internet services are putting more stress on two core essentials: the number of user and the number of interaction. If a service fails to garner sufficient volume to support it, it is hard to sustain the service for the long term. Upon concentrating on the quantitative growth, business models become simpler than before, which are designed on advertisement. There were diverse pricing strategies based on versioning a few years ago. Even though versioning is still effective in some multimedia services and cloud services such as Amazon kindle and Evernote, the internet service industry is swirled by abundant data made from lots of users and their interactions.
How is it possible to grow rapidly? In order to intrigue users to keep visiting a website or sticking to a service, services are required to be more fun and useful. In other words, user engagement is based on entertaining absorption and informative usability, shortly entertainment and informative contents .
First and foremost, entertainment drives users to become interested and, as a result, it makes them visit or use services repetitively. Game is a genre where this characteristic is obsessively highlighted. This will be dealt in detail afterward so let me jump to the next one.
Information is another variable to increase engagement. This is also known as usability in a way that most people need to get the right information that they want. Information has various kinds of contents range from human network based information to professional knowledge. Actually, what matters is not what the information means but how it is obtained.
There are mainly two ways to accumulate information: crowd sourcing and internal build-up. By stimulating users’ interests to record something, such as writing a review on restaurant and posting comments on movies, people unconsciously take part in behaviors to file up information. Yelp and Foursquare are very representative cases that demonstrate how to effectively intrigue users’ interests.
Generally, there are two ways for users to conduct repetitive actions to build up information. One is compensation and the other is peer-pressure. Compensation lets people to become satisfied with performance or result from their behaviors, which are closed related to entertainment or professional job. Gamification like Badge in Foursquare or a respected position called as a power blogger (influential blogger) were highlighted to draw attention from internet service users to make their own area and manage it.