In-Game Ads Selectable by Users of Casual Games

Big Fish Games, with over 25 million unique visitors a month is planning on allowing their users to select which ads they want to see as they play their games.

Big Fish Games is a gaming site with hundreds of flash games oriented towards the casual gamer is owned by AWS Convergent Technologies. In order to maximize the revenue brought by the traffic and advertising click throughs are planning an opt-in system for advertising chosen by the people playing those games.

This is a smart move, not only do users select advertisements that they're interested in, and therefore more likely to convert upon, AWS/ Big Fish Games are getting valuable demographic and behavioral information from the users on the front end. Which will allow for more relevant and targeted advertisements.

According to MarketingVox, they've already secured Microsoft Live, Match.com, Western Union, Hoover and Walt Disney World as initial sponsors. This is not geared for the "hard core" or "nerd core" gamers, but the players who enjoy challenging puzzles and flash "twitch" games.

With this data, they can deliver contextual ads that enhance the experience of the user, maximize the conversion click throughs and allow the user to customize their experience, as personalization starts pervading through users' internet experience.

Most of the time when I mention in-game ads, I'm talking about PC or console games with billboards, or locations that represent real companies, or interactive objects like a bottle of Slurm that you can drink. The other kind of ad that is being looked at can be derived from your search and internet habits to deliver real time contextual ads into your game. As cleverly drawn from the excellent web-comic/ industry watcher site Penny Arcade. (Seriously, check them out, they're brilliant).

This kind of in-game advertising makes me a little nervous, not because it'll ruin the purity of dismembering zombies (an activity I heartily endorse), but because I am still not convinced that the companies engaged in the advertising will have the users' experience and best interests in mind.

Anyway, in-game ads are here, they're here to stay... lets just hope they do it right.

YouTubers Getting Paid, and a New Monetization Strategy

A little while ago, I wrote about some of the challenges of monetizing video. Undeniably, user generated online video (UGOV) is very popular and there's a lot of discussion about the legality, trademark issues, freedom of speech issues and ownership issues. Yet despite the details of UGOV, it remains a dominant form of media.

After Google acquired YouTube, there's been a lot of speculation to maximize the profitability, market penetration, user interaction and usability of the site. I have no doubt that of any company that would acquire YouTube, Google would probably be one of the few companies that could retain the philosophy of user generated and user focused content.

One of the steps to bring the users into a tempting accountability is the plan to share the profits from YouTube with the Tubers (potatoes?) I mean YouTubers... MarketingVox shares an article that, as Chad Hurley, the co-founder of YouTube says would "reward creativity" as the BBC News reports.

The fact that they didn't have to share the profit with its users most likely added to its success, which is measured in tens of millions of users. Now that they're going to change the monetization and revenue sharing model, it's going to have to split the profits with the uploaders. While the sharing details arent available at the moment, they say that they'll start rolling out the plans in phases over the next few months.

The second thing of interest is that YouTube is planning to roll ads before videos. While the plan for the video ads is to make them as short as possible, around 3 seconds, the details havent exactly been worked out.

Now, I'm not the guy who stands on the corner with a sandwich board that says "the end is near". But there's something about the second plan that bothers me just a little. The appeal of YouTube is that it's truly a user generated community that sometimes gets intruded by overly zealous companies who dont quite get the benefit.

If the balance is short ads for a little payout, then that might be enough. However, I think that there's something happening with YouTube that is chipping away a little bit from it's user focus. I mentioned before that UGOV is a feature and not an industry or a business model in and of itself and I think we're seeing that unfold now.

Google TV Beta Hoax - Too Bad Though, I'd Love It

From Google-Blogoscoped, they posted a video of how to get into Google TV's beta program.

They listed some of the creative ways that Google has engaged the community, some of the jokes they've done and generally, set the stage to soften the user's skepticality... then they drop the bomb.

This is the best kind of hoax, the kind that's almost believable, gives people what they want, and creates a fun buzz. Here you go, here's the video...

Defining Search Metrics: Search Engine Saturation

In my last articles about search engine metrics, I defined search engine presence as "the number of times a site shows across the search engines for a selected set of keywords". Next, I defined, explained and showed an example of search engine fluctuation as "the natural fluctuation of presence of the same selected set of keywords over time".

This time, I want to talk about the two types of search engine saturation. I'd like to defne search engine saturation as essentially "presence over the total data size". In statistics, the data size is represented by the variable "n". If the data size is a dozen eggs, then n=12. The data size of states in the US is n=50. In this case, we're measuring results over three search engines. "SE" = 3. If we included Ask.com in the results, SE would equal 4. However, at this point, we're only measuring 3 search engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo!.

The next part is the total number of results tallied. Since we're measuring the top 15 ranks in Google, the top 10 in MSN and Yahoo!. With this information, we can calculate the total data size for any data capture.

n= (# of keywords) * (15 Google + 10 MSN + 10 Yahoo!).

in this case:

n= (3)*(35) = 105

To calculate the saturation, you divide each presence by "n" to get the percentage of the search engines the site occupies as a function of the entire marketspace.

Domains	SE Presence	SE Presence	SE Saturation	AVG Saturation
www.apple.com	7	17	16.19%	11.43%
www.engadget.com	7	9	8.57%	7.62%
en.wikipedia.org	4	7	6.67%	5.24%
www.gizmodo.com	6	6	5.71%	5.71%
www.appleinsider.com	5	4	3.81%	4.29%
www.mobilewhack.com	5	4	3.81%	4.29%
www.thinksecret.com	7	3	2.86%	4.76%
news.bbc.co.uk	4	3	2.86%	3.33%
www.businessweek.com	3	3	2.86%	2.86%
appleiphone.blogspot.com	0	3	2.86%	1.43%
www.macworld.com	1	3	2.86%	1.90%
www.everythingiphone.com	5	2	1.90%	3.33%
gizmodo.com	4	1	0.95%	2.38%

Apple.com has a presence of 17, and divided by 105, the search engine saturation equals 16.19%, which represents the market share of the marketspace. This number will fluctuate as the results fluctuate. The saturation measurement is useful as a snapshot of the search engine space and a result of your campaign. However, what's really important is the trend of data. You want your presence to rise and you will want your average saturation to rise as well. The average saturation measures the health of the life of the campaign as the raw numbers of the presence fluctuate. In essence, it's a measurement that you can measure and quantify to see if you're doing well, or if you're trending down.

Each of these metrics have value in and of themselves, however, when taken as a whole, they start to give you a clearer picture of the life of the natural search campaign.

Lord of the Rings Online's Launch Gains Traditional Media Response

Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, brought to life by Turbine Games is going to be released on April 24 this year. This is the first time that Middle Earth, the legacy that launched and inspired the entire fantasy movement will be available to thousands of fans.

There are two aspects of this release that I've found interesting. I would argue that 2006 was the year that MMORPG's (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) became prevalent in the eyes of the public, the news, investors, futurists... and as a rumor that's been circulating, even interesting to Google. Last year, we saw what was once really only noticed by those of us who have *cough* geekier *cough* interests, are being noticed by a wider audience and are gaining credibility within more communities. The watershed event, I would imagine, is when Blizzard Entertainment announced that their game World of Warcraft has over 7 million subscribers, even more recently, they announced that they just hit 8 million. There were figures released that reveal that MMO's represent over 10 billion dollars in world wide spend.

Now, it seems that more traditional sources of information are reporting on launches of MMORPG's. From the New York Times, to Fox News, there is a lot of buzz about this game that doesn't come from the gaming industry. I think that this combines the fact that the story of Middle Earth and the brave free peoples in it, is universal and loved the world over and the fact that MMO's are quickly becoming big business. While amongst the true fans of Tolkien's work, there is some worry and skepticism that the online version of the game will dillute Tolkien's story, I think that as more and more people embrace their digital lives, the art of other people will find themselves online.

In 1955, Tolkien began to worry his creation had become a “vast game” for some readers. This was not good, he wrote, even “for me, who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive.” It seems that Tolkien would disapprove of his creation to be represented as a "game". However, I think that his use of the word "game" represents people who are taking his work as trivial, as mere fantasy and as something that, because it's not real, it cannot teach us anything valuable about ourselves. However, as we see science fiction, another aspect of the overall "fantasy" genre, we can see that often times, observance about the human condition can come from unlikely places.

This is what I think Tolkien meant when he worried that his creation was becoming a "game". In Turbine's MMO, they've assured the anxious, the excited people who love the story, that they're making the game reflect Tolkien's love, his detail and his message in the game. While there will be some departure from the canon, all the decisions that change the lore are, at least, faithful to the spirit of his work.

Back to the business of MMORPG's. When the game Star Wars Galaxies launched, there was very little response from the traditional media. The only outlets for information was from game related news organizations. However, because of the widely noticed success of World of Warcraft and Second Life, a launch that combines such a universal intellectual property and the timing of more media recognizing how big online worlds are, Lord of the Rings Online stands to have a significant entry into the MMO market. Time will tell if the players remain faithful to the game or if the skeptics will be converted... but at no other time has an online game gathered such an interest from the outlets that have traditonally ignored gaming (unless there was a scandal or controversy like Grand Theft Auto).

Following, is the preview of the game from Game Trailers' newly embedded player. Personally, I plan to be in Middle Earth with my friends, my digital friends and I plan to create my very own Fellowship.


Update: MarketingVox "The Voice of Online Marketing" has also picked up the launch of "LOTRO".

Business Intelligence Needs to Support the Front Lines

James Taylor, Vice President of Product Marketing/Management at Fair Isaac runs an excellent blog called Enterprise Decision Management. Recently, he posted about an article from Informatics about businesses not understanding business intelligence.

Nigel Rayner says:

BI has been around a long time and people do get returns out of it, but it has been technology and infrastructure driven and is not addressing the needs of senior management.

Mr. Taylor expands that comment to say that,

not only does it not address the needs of senior management, it does not support the needs of operational staff either. Not management, not analysts, but people working on the front lines helping customers. It also does not help the software that support customers.

When using business intelligence, it's always important to define the end results and the goals of the endeavors. Data that goes directly to the senior management doesn't necessarily mean that it makes people more efficient, infrastructure more manageable or the company more competitive.

BI (business intelligence) is the process of obtaining data from various sources, but that endeavor must be driven by the goals and real issues that companies face. One of the litmus tests of any BI driven decisions must be: how it helps operations from the bottom up.

This article has intrigued me, I added his blog to my RSS reader and I'm going to do some serious back reading on it. It seems that every article I read from him inspires a few questions.

Defining Search Metrics: Search Engine Fluctuation

LeeAnn Prescott, the research director for the US markets at Hitwise,
revealed that after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at MacWorld, that the search demand for the iPhone has superceded the search demand for the iPod. It's only a slight coincidence that earlier I defined the concept of "search engine presence" using the example of the iPhone.

That search engine presence measured the top ranking sites, ignoring position, instead focusing on ranking on a variety of terms, that dominate the search engines for a selected sampling of keywords.

Because I was explaining a concept, I chose to use a small sample of keywords that related to a topic that interested me. I used: "iphone, apple iphone, ipod phone". The results were as follows.

	1/10/2007
Domains	SE Presence
www.apple.com	7
www.thinksecret.com	7
www.engadget.com	7
www.gizmodo.com	6
www.appleinsider.com	5
www.mobilewhack.com	5
www.everythingiphone.com	5
gizmodo.com	4
en.wikipedia.org	4
news.bbc.co.uk	4
www.businessweek.com	3

These sites ranked for the preceding terms on 10 Jan. However, for the 4 weeks that ended on 20 Jan, Hitwise compiled the following top sites that had traffic from the term "iPhone".

Apple's sites receive over 50% of the traffic from the iPhone search, however, Engadget, by being one of the most trusted sites on consumer electronics and also having the benefit of ranking well across the board for the searches, received the 4th highest amount of traffic. Hitwise and my search engine presence tool measures two different things, I can only measure presence, Hitwise can measure traffic. While I know that I'm comparing apples to oranges, here's where we see the overlap of traffic and presence.

In the 13 days where I took my first measurements, the search engine marketspace has fluctuated. Supporting the idea that traffic and clickthroughs can influence ranking in the search engines. Notice that Apple and Engadget have a significant upsurge in their presence.

	1/10/2007	1/23/2007
Domains	SE Presence	SE Presence
www.apple.com	7	17
www.engadget.com	7	9
en.wikipedia.org	4	7
www.gizmodo.com	6	6
www.appleinsider.com	5	4
www.mobilewhack.com	5	4
www.thinksecret.com	7	3
news.bbc.co.uk	4	3
www.businessweek.com	3	3
appleiphone.blogspot.com	0	3
www.macworld.com	1	3
www.everythingiphone.com	5	2
gizmodo.com	4	1

We see EverythingiPhone.com, Gizmodo and ThinkSecret.com drop in their presence, we see Wikipedia increase their presence.

As the search for iPhones increase, as they have... that's created the circumstances for the search engines to continually shuffle the results, shuffle the ranks and shuffle the presence. However, what we have strong evidence for here is that ranks change, presence fluctuates and the environment changes. Therefore, it's vital for any company who has a search engine marketing strategy to keep tabs on the environment for their selected keywords and not just on the position or rank of just a few. If you dont notice the change, it's likely that you could be left behind.

While LeeAnn Prescott and I are measuring two different things, traffic vs. presence. The overlapping data as it applies to the search engines often complement each other and provide a larger picture of what's happening.

Thanks LeeAnn, your article was brilliant, informative and I enjoyed reading every bit of it.