If you’re one of the million-plus who have been playing HQ Trivia daily, you’ve probably wondered how they make money. If you’re invited anyone to the game and had to explain it to them, they probably had the exact same question immediately. Well, now we know how they will make money, and it unsurprisingly comes from corporate sponsorship.
Last night, I played the 9 P.M. EST HQ game like plenty of others, and like plenty of others I lost pretty quickly. I put my phone down and forgot about HQ for a bit, until I got a notification about 45 minutes later, claiming that another game was about to happen. This game was sponsored by Nike, and sported HQ Trivia’s biggest jackpot ever: $100,000. The game was hard, and the second question became the earliest savage question in the history of HQ Trivia according to host Scott Rogowsky. Most importantly, though, we now know how HQ plans to make money.
HQ Trivia Corporate Sponsorship
So, last night’s Nike-sponsored game topped out at not far under 2 million participants. This means that even if they ponied up the entire $100,000 jackpot and another few hundred thousand to HQ along the way, they still got their message in front of a captive audience of over a million and half people on the cheap. I would be very surprised if this was the last Nike-sponsored game we saw from HQ Trivia.
We already know it won’t be the last sponsored game, because a Ready Player One-sponsored HQ game is coming soon too (on Wednesday). The jackpot will supposedly be $250,000, which will be much bigger than the previous record of $100,000 (set last night). Warner Bros. is apparently giving HQ Trivia 3 million dollars for the pleasure of sponsoring this game, but it’s unclear whether that will cover jackpot costs for future sponsored games or not. Regardless, HQ is making enough money for a few hundred days of regular jackpots from this deal alone.
HQ Will Be Profitable
If this is their business model, and if they get deals like that Warner Bros. deal every few weeks, and if they don’t raise their regular jackpot above, say, $25,000, HQ Trivia will be easily profitable pretty much instantly. Of course, things could change, but as long as they’re getting a cool million players per each game (at least for the nightly games, that is), they should have no problem pulling in more sponsors. That’s good news for anyone who wants to get rich from playing a trivia game on their smartphone.
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