Inside Social Games

Casual games builder Arkadium is expanding its partnership with Lifetime Networks’ digital arm. Continuing Lifetime’s focus on women’s entertainment, the new partnership will feature new series of Lifetime-branded iPhone titles, and the integration of prizes and sweepstakes for myLifetime.com’s existing online games portal.

In August, we looked at Arkadium’s efforts to further monetize advertisements in games by enhancing its community gaming portals, dubbed “Arenas,” through improving user loyalty. This included publisher options to drive traffic to revenue-based activities such as rating systems for existing games, user reviews, and player profiles. Also added were social elements such as mailboxes, messaging, friend activity notifications, avatar creators, and leaderboards. Even before these additions, however, Arena sessions lasted an average of 20 minutes, as of August, across major online sites (ABC, ESPN, CBS, etc.) and saw over 120 million page views per month.

As a partner of Arkadium, Lifetime Digital’s myLifetime.com games platform experiences a good portion of these perks. Perks that have led to a 20 percent increase in visits since the games section’s launch earlier this year. With over 3.6 million women visiting the website each month (ComScore Media Metrix – May 2009), 20 percent is no small number. Suffice to say, Arkadium’s loyalty improvements look to be paying off.