NewsEgg

General Description Hatch a custom newsbeast by feeding your NewsEgg a steady diet of AP stories. The more you read each week, the faster your egg will grow and hatch.

Players swipe news content to feed a digital egg, track their egg's vital signs, share the content they read and collect unique beasts.

Technical Aspects: HTML app built with javascript.
- Drag and drop interface
- AP webfeeds defined and launched.
- Facebook login and sharing implementation
- Central data repository for storing user preferences
- Data rules for tracking user metadata

Design: Player selects and swipes news content from the News Feed in drag and drop interface to feed the NewsEgg.

Player can then read and share their selected story in story page with ad unit. Players can explore different types of content with the goal hatching a unique beast that reflect their consumption.

If player returns and feeds the egg enough times, the egg will grow and eventually hatch.

Win: The egg hatches and displays a unique beast that reflects the mix of content they have fed the egg. The unique beasts are collected in a hatchery where the player can see which friends have won the same beast. The player can then start feeding a new egg.

Loss: The player does not feed the egg sufficient content and a broken egg is collected in the hatchery. The player can then start feeding a new egg.

Editorial Aspects: Breaking news typically drives high engagement and traffic to AP content.

NewsEgg bridges the gap between breaking news events to drive more daily consumption and higher frequent return visits. It also encourages readers to explore a more diverse universe of content.

NewsEgg generates ad impressions on content, builds AP’s brand recognition with news consumers and encourages social shares.

The app's feed-based design allows it allows for easy implementation and customization by topic, region or language. It would be easy to whitelabel the app, allowing AP members to customize feeds and build their own NewsEgg game.

Planning: NewsEgg would be relatively low-cost to implement because it relies on existing AP content feed technology.

One developer would be able to build the app infrastructure. We would need custom design work to build the game skin adequately.

We estimate NewsEgg could be produced within 4-7 months for $125,000-$200,000 with a fulltime product manager and developer and part-time designer. The product manager would interface with our ad team and member services to build out business opportunities.

Team Members: Paul Cheung - Global Interactive Editor
Nathan Griffiths - Interactive Producer
Kellen Henry - Mobile/Digital Producer