Online gaming has overtaken email as the number two online activity, according to a new study by Nielsen. Online gaming was only outpaced by social networking, the most popular sites being Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Unlike browsing brand websites for information, users increasingly seek an engaging experience on the web — creating an opportunity for brands, marketers and developers to capture and monetize incredible audiences.
For marketers, social networking is a must-have in the marketing toolbox, but soon we might want to add the growing category of games. In fact, Americans spend nearly a quarter of their Internet time on social-networking sites and blogs. However, the big mover was online gaming — which accounted for 10 percent of time spent and eclipsed e-mail, which dropped to 8 percent from 11.5 percent. The rise in online gaming isn’t just from game-addicts because nearly half of all Americans online spend some time playing games.
Adding the number one (social networking) to the number two online activity (gaming), you have a powerful result: social gaming. Social network gaming developers, such as Zynga are extraordinarily profitable. Zynga, the creators of Farmville and Mafia Wars, will bring in over $500 million in revenue this year, according to Inside Network, through small user payments of virtual goods. And large companies are also seeing the green in the online gaming category. Disney recently announced its acquisition of Zynga’s competitor, Playdom, the Mountain View maker of games Sorority Life and Mobsters, for $563 million. There are also rumors of Google going gaming, which is in discussion with social gaming networks:
Farmville and Mafia Wars are powerful ways for developers to engage and monetize users, but how are brands marketers entering the game? Social game developer, Bunchball, seeks to bring brands into the social gaming fold, using the “participation engine,” Nitro. Bunchball leverages participation tools, such as polls, sharing, ratings, comments, quizzes, audio and other tactics, to open communications between brands and consumers. The social gaming developer lists Comcast, NBC, SyFy, Pink and Hasbro as clients.
Have interesting examples that merge social gaming and brands? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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The youth generation are becoming ditto heads and getting deeply involved in trivia while our environmental issues and real world politics are getting more sharply divided. We have devolved our tech into more escapist trivial junk to have the fine minds of these developers having to waste there skills on finding clever ways to have the user buy more junk to pollute the world. We should be using these tools and skillsets to resolve the problems that soon will engulf these same developers into a wasteland in Real life as well as digital life. Capitalism once again will ruin this too. So work your 50 – 80 hours of code a week. And for what reason? To have a 3d 50 inch digital flat screen on your wall. But you wont be able go out because it is too hot or polluted or flooded or your even broke. BANKRUPT Dudes! Play away to neverland!