Candy Crush Monetization and Virality

http://papers.traustikristjansson.info/?p=223

by TraustiThor • 13 years ago

11 18 13 years ago

papers.traustikristjansson.info

You missed an important viral driver. You can't play beyond level X without friend recommendations or paying for the privilege.

That feature annoyed the hell out of me but its certainly been beneficial for the popularity of the game. I stopped playing it at that point

TraustiThor8• 13 years ago

Ah, cool. Thanks for that pointer. I did not play that far.

smartician• 13 years ago

FYI, that page is being blocked by AVG Antivirus. It's detecting a "Blackhat SEO" threat.

um304• 13 years ago

Yes, I just saw "Exploit Blackhat SEO (type 1720)" by AVG and the browser refused to show anything.

TraustiThor8• 13 years ago

Hi, I just scanned it with:

http://www.avgthreatlabs.com/website-safety-reports/domain/t...

and it came out clean after I removed those Viagara links. However, I'll go through and harden my wordpress setup.

davidpardo2• 13 years ago

I don't know if it's on purpose, but there're a lot of spammy links in that page. I wouldn't visit.

TraustiThor8• 13 years ago

Thanks for pointing this out! I found the spammy links in my wordpress header.php file and removed them. I don't know how they got there.

davidpardo2• 13 years ago

Works OK for me now. All in all, good post.

AlexeyBrin2• 13 years ago

If you show the webpage source you'll see hidden divs that contains Viagra links and other things ...

There are two possibilities:

1. OP website was hacked and he has no idea.

2. This page was purposely build with these SEO "enhancements" and the OP knows.

I would love to hear an explanation from the OP about this :).

TraustiThor8• 13 years ago

Hi, I am the owner of the website. I must have been hacked it here are spammy links! How do I get rid of them?

AlexeyBrin2• 13 years ago

It usually depends in what CMS your website is written (like WordPress, Drupal etc ...). You could also ask your web hosting provider if they can help you with cleaning up your website.

Personally, I use a static website generator and I've never had any security problem. I can't give you any particular advice about how you can clean up your website, you could post a question on StackOverflow or do some Google searches once you know in what CMS your website is written.

(From your page source code it seems that you are using WordPress, do some research about cleaning up an infected WordPress site. The first thing that comes to mind is to always keep your WordPress updated to the latest version ... this, however, won't help you now.)

TraustiThor8• 13 years ago

I found the spammy links in my header.php wordpress file and removed them. Apologies! I must have been hacked.

krapp2• 13 years ago

Is your wordpress installation up to date?

TraustiThor8• 13 years ago

It is now...

pstack• 13 years ago

I don't understand the popularity of Candy Crush. It's just a less complex variant of Bejeweled style games. Mobile gaming is littered with them. I played for the better part of an hour before hitting the eject button, but plenty of people in the gaming press are enamoured with and addicted to it.

Hell, I even understood the popularity of Rovio's Artillary-like far more than this.

It just goes to show that you don't need a good idea to be successful. Just throw enough dumb ideas to the wind and, eventually, something will sail.

TraustiThor8• 13 years ago

I agree that the game itself is not really better than bejeweled or other similar games. It's the manipulative social strategies that they use to get people hooked and get people to spread the game to their friends that differentiates it from previous games. You can't argue with their success!

Candy Crush Monetization and Virality

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