HQ Trivia Teams With ‘Ocean’s 8’ to Offer $88,888 Prize Pool
By Todd Spangler
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Warner Bros. is back for its third sponsored HQ Trivia game — with players of the popular app competing for a prize pool of $88,888 to promote the release of “Ocean’s 8.”
The special game and “Ocean’s 8” tie-in will go live Tuesday, June 5, at 9 p.m. ET. In a nod to the movie, players will only have to answer eight questions — instead of the normal 12 — to win a cut of the cash.
The female-heist film, which opens June 8, stars Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Rihanna, Helena Bonham Carter, and Awkwafina. For Tuesday night’s game, HQ Trivia also says it will give give out “88 Extra Lives to 8 lucky HQties” — the term coined by host Scott Rogowsky for the app’s users — to let them stay in the game if they’ve missed a question.
WB’s deal with HQ Trivia, worth an estimated $3 million, kicked off in March in a promo for Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” with a $250,000 prize pool. It followed that last month for Dwayne Johnson-starrer “Rampage,” which kicked up the kitty to $300,000.
Since launching last August, HQ Trivia now attracts more than 1 million live viewers daily who compete in the 12-question elimination-format competitions. Its peak number of concurrent players so far is 2.38 million on March 28, for the “Ready Player One”-sponsored game. The app’s popularity has turned Rogowsky, the stand-up comedian who’s the regular host of the HQ Trivia games, into a demi-celebrity.
HQ Trivia runs the games weekdays at 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. ET, and on the weekends at 9 p.m. ET. The questions are created by a team of writers, researchers and fact-checkers, and the trivia gets harder as the game progresses. Players must answer each multiple-choice question within 10 seconds — a time limit designed to make it nearly impossible to launch a Google search for the correct answers.
The live trivia game’s minimum prize pot is $5,000 and sometimes it offers much larger pools, as in the WB-sponsored events. The prize money for each game is shared among all users who correctly answer all 12 questions (or in the case of the “Ocean’s 8,” just eight).
HQ Trivia’s parent company, New York-based Intermedia Labs, was founded by Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll, two of the founders of Vine, the six-second video app acquired (and then shut down) by Twitter.
For now, HQ Trivia’s main revenue stream is from sponsorship deals like the one with Warner Bros. Intermedia Labs in March announced $15 million in venture-capital funding led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund with participation from previous investor Lightspeed Venture Partners.
