Advertising and Games
Games is a market viewed as having huge potential for advertisers. Last year, Microsoft’s acquisition of Massive - a firm devoted to in-game advertising - was a pre-emptive strike by the Redmond behemoth to grab its share of advertiser revenue.
Today, according to Red Herring, Google has purchased Adscape for a relatively measly $23 million. It’s ‘measly’ only in comparison to other recent valuations and purchases in the internet space such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. Adscape, is believed to have patents for in-game advertising that Google can leverage in the future. Wired’s Monkey Bites blog writes that in spite of analysts predictions of future larger deals with firms like Electronic Arts (which owns Pogo.com), this may be it for Google and games for a while.
Also today, in the Wall Street Journal, Hearst and Arkadium (subscription may be required) announced an agreement where up-and-coming Arkadium will make online casual games for Hearst’s many online properties. What does this mean from the Advertiser perspective?
Video games and online games are incredibly ’sticky’ - or addictive. If an advertiser can have its media around a game that a user is willing to play for hours on end, the value is obvious. Sites like Yahoo! Games, Miniclip and Pogo know this very well. In addition, games drive up a website’s overall ‘time spent’ number, a key competitive metric for websites, as players engage with their favorite solitaire, mahjongg or role-playing game such as Neopets.
For many advertisers, the future advertising ‘game’ will be in-game and played with increasing importance.
-- Tiffany Sumner
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