Inside Social Games

Advertising, one of the oldest forms of internet monetization, has struggled lately. But that hasn’t stopped Arkadium from trying to find more effective ways to monetize games with ads. Starting a month ago, the company announced product changes to further enhance its solutions for the advergame and casual game markets.

First, it acquired Advergame.com. It also re-released GreatDayGames, a popular gaming portal. Through these new additions, Arkadium hopes to further enhance its gaming community platforms known as Arenas. According to Kenny Rosenblatt, CEO of Arkadium, the company wants to better attract and target the millions of casual players circulating the web by “showing them offers that are behaviorally targeted, relevant, and improve their game play experience.”

The first step to improving the aforementioned experience is an API for its loyalty system, which allows publishers to incentivize and drive traffic to revenue-base activities, such as rating games, writing reviews, and creating profiles. Second are social capabilities such as mailboxes, messaging, and friend activity notifications. Third, it enables avatar creation and touts improved leaderboards. Other minor features include the bookmaking of favorite games and friends. You can also update game pages containing reviews and sharing capabilities.

Currently, Arkadium services more than five million unique users, with more than 120 million page views each month. According to the company, each Arenas session averages around 20 minutes across online sites such as ABC, ESPN, CBS, and Sony. It has demographics ranging from teens to sports fans. If you couple that with these new features that will likely increase the number of impressions seen, Arkadium’s goal of greater advertising monetization is certainly on its way.