Influential app

A SMALL Shetland internet business has created an online stir with an app that generated almost one million installs in just over a week.

Andrew Irvine of CU Marketing said he was just experimenting with creating Facebook apps when an idea developed a life of its own.

“I made up a list of 100 albums and created an app where people can say which of them they own. The quiz title is ‘100 Influential Albums – very few people own 70 or more. How many have you got?’

“The list is made up of some of my favourite albums and a few others picked up from various lists on the internet.

“The only relevant website domain name I could find was www.influentialalbums.com, so I just went with it.”

Since then the app has been shown on Facebook over 68 million times, 708,092 people have installed it and 335,382 have shared their results.

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The website has at least 547 other websites linking to it and has had 1.48 million unique visitors so far.

“I’m no expert when it comes to music. For me, the whole point of doing this was to learn more about Facebook apps.

“I had no idea it would annoy music buffs so much that they would write blogs about it and post their comments about it on hundreds of music forums.

“Some of the comments have been very amusing for us, there was one that said the development must have taken some ‘big marketing bucks’ and a couple of people said that the app ‘must have been created by the director of HMV to clear some old albums’.

“Little did they know, the total ‘marketing bucks’ spent was £8.14.”

CU Marketing Ltd is owned by Andrew and his sister Christena Irvine. It is a small company with no employees.

The Influential Albums website – www.influentialalbums.com
The Influential Albums app page – www.facebook.com/influentialalbums
The Influential Albums app – www.facebook.com/appcenter/influential_albums