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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Gaming Traffic's High ScoreMonday, July 13, 2009 As content brands from Readers Digest to AARP continue to push their online “arcade” and gaming areas to drive traffic and increase stickiness, the common Internet users seem to be playing along. This core category of online entertainment increased its reach to 87 million U.S. visitors in May 2009, up 22% over the same month in 2008, according to comScore. The spike is especially significant considering that overall Internet audience growth over the last year has been relatively flat. The 22% increase in gaming audience represents a real shift in online habits. Users are making casual gaming a routine part of their online experience. Publishers that can find more and more innovative ways to address this growing taste for diversion should be able to capture their audiences in ways other content does not. As it has for years, Yahoo Games remains top of the charts, attracting 19.4 million users in May, up 6% from last year. Electronic Arts, which runs the popular Pogo.com casual games site, has closed in on Yahoo, however, by increasing its audience 34% in the last year to 18 million uniques. While Nickelodeon’s kids-oriented magazines are winding down through the end of this year, its massive catalog of gaming titles attached to its TV programs is thriving, with 14.8 million uniques. Nick-owned AddictingGames.com is responsible for another 11.8 million. Curiously, one of the few leading brands to lose some gaming audience over the past year was Disney Games, which was down 3% to 11.7 million. Disney Games and Club Penguin are the chief destinations for Disney branded titles, but the company’s Disney Family properties, which is attached to the pregancy, parenting and family magazine titles, also has a trove of casual games. While casual games sections have become standard at most women’s service sites in the past year, the game is changing as titles now proliferate off-site to widgets and mobile. ComScore traffic numbers reveal that distributed games platform MochiMedia achieves a reach of 16.9 million on a vast collection of other sites. Increasingly, social networks have become a popular location for branded game play as publishers create widgets and Facebook apps that let games and attached advertising travel into user’s profile pages. Nick’s AddictingGames just announced it would extend its gaming brand into a line of mobile titles for handsets. NYTimes.com, USA Today and Parade magazine have all created iPhone versions of their popular crossword and arithmetic games. If users are already coming to the games area of a branded media site, then they are showing a preference for casual play within the familiarity of that brand. After all, massive alternatives like Yahoo and Pogo are available. Publishers should be looking to extend that brand credibility into their audience’s gaming experience elsewhere and bring advertisers with them. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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