[...] “Year of the Online Game” – O Rly? By Wagner James Au | AnalysisGoogle is looking to get into games, according to CNN Money, and before this week is out, should be announcing a deal to buy Adscape Media Inc., and through them, work with publishers to feed ads through the Internet into their online games. (Presumably, the elevator pitch would be, “AdSense meets Xbox Live.”) This news, along with other ads-in-games news, comes just as a related question is gaining some currency through the blogosphere. “2005 was the year of the social network,” Jason Lee Miller of WebProNews recently argued, “In 2006, online video was the chief cause of acquisition hysteria. Will 2007 be the year of the online gaming site?” Miller points to the popularity of gaming sites with the Pacific Rim, accounting for nearly 25% of total traffic to entertainment websites. In this he’s citing Sandra Hanchard of Hitwise, who argues, noting the amazing popularity of the free, ad-driven MMORPG Runescape, “[I]t would seem that the online games industry is deserving of more attention by marketers and advertisers given its prominence in website visits.” Prism VentureWorks’ Nabeel Hyatt takes the meme football from there, comparing usage patterns between YouTube and game site Pogo.com, and comes up with some startling figures: while YouTube has far more page views and unique visitors, Pogo.com has a far higher Average Length of Stay. (About 40 minutes, compared with YouTube’s 10 minutes.) Finally, surveying all this buzz, Raph Koster of Areae pronounces it, “both terrifying and exciting.” [...]

[...] Jason Miller has an article which is mostly about whether 2007 will be the year of the online game — apparently he’s the initial source of the idea that Nabeel Hyatt was talking about. [...]

I think the gaming sites as a volume of traffic is often overlooked or ignored as irrelevant based on assumed demographics(the “only males between 16-28 play games” fallacy).

Whats missing or missed often is that gaming sites (I say many but not all because some sites spam advertising more than Myspace, which is actually almost amazing, yet sad) have time (length of stay) traction because they’re typically based on content that has depth or deal with subject matter tanjentally related to gaming.

In my mind it’s as much about the gamers as about the games, I think focusing on improving the gaming experiance as much as the games space is the most important goal (at least for GLM anyhow).

Lets hope 2007 is the year of the gamer and of games, one does not exist without the other no? (and this is where 2.0 fits in quite nicely)