By NYU Staff

For all the widespread interest that breaking news and investigative stories get on the web, it turns out that many readers just can’t get enough of something a lot simplier: a quiz.

Often overlooked by media experts, quizzes are drawing as much as 10 percent of many websites these days. It is a ratio that never tends to change, good economic times or bad. Art director from CNBC.com Freddie LaSenna says quizzes are rather simply prepared, drawn from sources as diverse as market movement and entertainment trend. But they tend to create a loyalship among readers that sites need.

“People want to take quizzes. It’s like a break from reading the market data,” Larsen says, “It offers something Bravo offers, which is entertainment.”

The idea comes from trying to engage readers to stick to the site, which is primarily composed of real-time market data, financial news and video interview clips from CNBC TV. Since Microsoft pays for all the CNBC.com page views at a fixed rate,  page views for CNBC.com, more so than for many other websites, is its bread and butter.

As a brainchild of CNBC’s digital directors Chris Larsen and Austin Bridge, the quizzes are to test one’s knowledge about things the website offers. So far the market quizzes are doing the best, according to Larsen.

Another key to the formula though, is to offer questions that readers  are good at. “While our readers like challenges, they want to feel smart,” adds Freddie LaSenna, Art Director of CNBC.com. But three things that might discount readers’ experience—poor user experience, poor text layout, too complicated. “We have to make it as simple as possible,” LaSenna says.

For CNBC.com, quizzes are not a dead-end road. It’s about interactivity. Aside from providing questions and answers, the quizzes draw in readers with related stories, videos and slideshows. Larsen considers quizzes as a distraction, an option people grab to entertain themselves while browsing through all other stuff. “Therefore it is important to take the chance to offer more ‘distractions’,” Larsen says, “it is the synergy we are looking for.” One example is the Coca quiz “The Many Myths of Coca-Cola,” which is linked with CNBC’s documentary “Coca-Cola: the Real Story Behind the Real Thing” to promote each other.

Another plus: the site is easy to manage. After a quiz is set up, no work on the backend is needed. It doesn’t take much energy to even set up a quiz, either. A typical story may take a few days of a reporter’s time but quizzes take four hours. Plus quizzes generate a lot more page views.

“It’s a much more efficient way to use our human resources considering revenue per staff,” LaSenna says. This is, essentially, an initiative to create brand loyalty and at the same time an online community.

There are other news sites that doing similar things, of course. New York Times has a popular Facebook page where they quiz readers about the Times daily headlines. The Wall Street Journal takes another route which is to post timely questions about certain topics and invite people to comment. What’s different about CNBC.com is they use the simplest form and least people to do the job rather than use a separate social media platform or design open-ended questions and have people monitor the comments.

“You should be grateful that you have them (readers). Whenever the readers finish one thing, lead them to the next. Don’t llose them,” LaSenna says.

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