How TAPinto Uses Games to Boost Local News Engagement

Nishant: This year we’re looking forward to having a lot of these conversations with people in the media industry and talking about games and publishing. Particularly with you, I’d love to explore the local news angle. Could you start by giving us some background about TAPinto?

Michael: Yeah, that sounds great. I started TAPinto 16 years ago. I created an all online local news site in New Providence, New Jersey. I wanted to do something where I could help with the community, do something I really liked to do, and I could see my wife and son. So I started this local news site in New Providence and within a few weeks, people in our two neighboring towns, Berkeley Heights and Summit, reached out to me and said, “Hey, we heard about this. Can you start it in our town?”

And I did. And I soon found myself running three local news sites myself and I’ve left my job in New York to do it full-time. And my original vision was just to grow those three sites. They traffic, their revenue, their content. Over a period of about two to three years, we did that and we built them the profitability. We were able to bring on a full-time editor and reporter. But I kept getting more and more requests from people to expand to their town. and I had to say no, because I couldn’t do any more local news sites myself.

I was thinking about how could we expand yet keep it really local. So about 11 years ago now, I just I I came up with this idea of applying a franchise model to a local news, which to my knowledge, had never been done before and hasn’t been done since. And so yeah. We started franchising where we provide the infrastructure, the support, the training, et cetera, and today we have about 95 franchised TAPinto sites. Most are in New Jersey, but we have a few in Florida, one in New York, one in Pennsylvania, and we can franchise them pretty much any state in the country.

We were looking for a way to engage our readers in something that wasn’t news and content-related. And that’s how we got to Amuse Labs.

Nishant: It’s a fascinating business model. Franchisees in publishing is not something I’ve heard of before. Just double-clicking on the process for sort of starting games – Could you just give me a zoomed-in picture of how those conversations started?

Michael: Initially it was thinking about how we can further increase reader engagement with TAPinto. Our sites are objective and we’re reporting the local news and I would say 90% of what we report is is positive, but it’s also important to give people an outlet to do something fun and yet still being able to to engage with their local news site. That’s how the idea for games came about. Then I found Amuse Labs and I thought it would be like the perfect fit for us because we could implement this across all of our sites. Our franchisees do have the option of opting out, but every single one has games on their site from Amuse Labs. What we also decided to do was in addition to building it onto the site, we also have it appear in our daily newsletter that goes out each of our for each of our sites. So people are getting their news and they can play the games right in the newsletter, which is great too. We are really happy with the partnership and our readers are playing the games, not only from the statistics of them playing the games, but we’ve got emails from readers, like “Hey, you know, I can’t find the games today!” and then we’re like, oh, here it is. We know our readers now really look forward to it too, which is great.

“It’s also important to give people an outlet to do something fun and yet still being able to to engage with their local news site. That’s how the idea for games came about. Then I found Amuse Labs and I thought it would be the perfect fit for us.”

Nishant: Talking about this a little bit from an editorial standpoint, what went into the game you chose to begin with? Did you start out being like you wanted to do a crossword?

Michael: We actually have an advisory council composed of franchisees. Once we decided on Amuse Labs, they’re the ones that vetted the games and they said they they give me feedback as to what games they felt our readers would most enjoy and those are the ones that we placed on TAPinto. I’m a crossword person, so I was glad to see that they chose that as one of the games. One of the things that’s really important here at TAPinto is we really take the input of our franchisees seriously.

Nishant: How do you go about sourcing content? Did you hire a crossword constuctor? 

Mike: We use the automated system that you guys have so don’t vet the game content, and you guys do a good job. Because of our model, we wouldn’t have the time to do it nor would we have the knowledge to do it. 
The standard puzzle experience works well, since our readers really seem to like it. So I don’t see us doing that.

One thing that we have introduced recently is the ability for businesses to sponsor the games. 
And so we’re hopeful that over the next year, there will be businesses in our local communities who will see the value of sponsoring it because their name will be attached to the games, I think is a really positive thing for them. We’ve added that to our media kit for 2025 so we’ll see what happens with that.

Could you give me an initial sense of how you imagine these sponsorships going, are you thinking of doing ads on the game pages? 
What would the sponsorship pitch look like to advertisers?

We would put a games block on the site and then we have the games block in the newsletter. 
The idea would be that it would say on the block itself in both places, “Sponsored by..” with their logo. And then when you go to the game’s page at the top, it would say “Sponsored by..” with their logo. The logo would click through to their website and that’s a clean way that doesn’t interfere with the reader experience. If I was a business owner in a related space, it’s a place where I’d want to be. Also, if I’m the owner where I’m a pillar of the community, giving back by sponsoring the game section is also a really good idea for a business.

“The customer service has been has been great. You guys are always very easy to work with, so we really enjoy the partnership.”

And finally, how do you like working with Amuse Labs?

The customer service has been has been great. We really love the product. A lot of other products cause issues for the website, like slow it down or cause conflicts. We didn’t have any issues like that with Amuse Labs, which was great. You guys are always very easy to work with, so we really enjoy the partnership. That’s great to have.