Arkadium’s InHabit adds interactive content to any story, starting with sports

Arkadium is launching a new product called InHabit, which can automatically introduce polls, quizzes and games that are tailored to each article.

When we’ve written about Arkadium in the past, we’ve talked about them as a casual gaming company, but CEO Jessica Rovello told me her team has become focused on one specific aspect that business, namely “providing visual interactive content to publishers.” And InHabit is the next step in that strategy.

“Working with these 450 publishers, what we continued to hear from them was they wanted to see if there was any way if we could make all of the pages on their sites … have the same level of interest and engagement that we were seeing from pages that our games are on,” Rovello said. “The product that we created solves this major issue: How do you take any article and make it instantly more visual and interactive?”

To do that, Arkadium’s editorial team has created a library of what it calls “factives” — basically, the aforementioned polls, quizzes and games. Then InHabit scans the content of every article from its publishing partners, and when it finds a good match, it plugs in a relevant factive.

For example, Arkadium has been testing InHabit with Sports Illustrated, so this article about the NFL draft includes a poll showing salary information for four wide receivers and asking “which WR delivered the most bang for the buck last season?”

Rovello noted that factives serve as templates where different teams, players and other data can be plugged in, so a single factive can have thousands of different variations depending on where it’s being embedded.

She emphasized that if Arkadium doesn’t have a relevant factive for a given article, it just won’t show anything. It can also turn off factives for certain subjects, say if a player gets embroiled in a particularly controversial or sensitive piece of news.

In beta testing, Arkadium says that 17 percent of users who saw a factive clicked on it. And among those users, session time increased 100 percent.

The initial set of factives is focused on sports, with finance on the way, and more topics after that.