• Ross Fadner, May 22, 2006, 11:30 AM
  • ESA: Average Gamer Is 33 CNET's Alpha Blog At the tail end of E3 last week, the Entertainment Software Association released its latest fact sheet for video game usage. Every year, the ESA releases a detailed demographic and trend report for the video game industry, and every year, the average video gamer's age seems to go up. This year, the ESA claims the average age of gamers (both online and console) is 33, and that 38 percent gamers are female (a number that hasn't changed for ESA in the last few years). Is the average gamer really 33? What gives? Wasn't it 28 not too long ago? Does this mean that younger generations aren't interested? What if video games will stay pegged to Gen Xers and those Gen Ys that grew up with the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis? ESA's data comes from a survey of 1,700 "nationally representative households." Read the whole story...
  • Interactive Biz Says Help Wanted, Big Time Business Week The online advertising job market is hot again. It takes a while for the job market to pick up following a big bust like the dot-com recession, but Business Week points out that Web companies are now hiring ad-related positions at a rapid pace. The online ad business was up 30 percent last year, according to the IAC, and now "job candidates are feasting on a seller's market." Avenue A/Razorfish, the Web's top ad agency with a staff of 1,500, needs to fill 200 positions after already filling 200 so far this year. Digitas, of Boston, needs to add 74 positions to its staff of 1,700. It recently offered former workers $2,000 for referring friends toward its job openings.  In fact, some analysts say that the biggest impediment to Web industry growth is filling such positions fast enough. Pay is up somewhere between 10 and 20 percent more for the number-crunching ad effectiveness jobs, as Web ads involve far more technology input than traditional media jobs. Read the whole story...
  • Start-Up Licenses Content to Consumers Associated Press A Silicon Valley start-up plans to launch an online commerce system that aims to give consumers more power over digital media downloads. What does that mean? The company, Navio Systems, sells software to content providers that lets them sell the rights to pieces of content to consumers rather than downloads or individual files themselves. The product also lets companies use a variety of different online distribution methods--from blogs to fan sites--and gives consumers access to the content from PCs, phones or nearly any other Web-enabled media device. As it is, consumers have less rights and lots of restrictions when it comes to (legally) buying content on the Web today. For example, lost copies of downloaded music or games usually mean consumers have to buy it again. With Navio, consumers could download files again and again free of charge because the consumer effectively licensed when he or she bought it. This is very pro-consumer and very cool and all, but Navio's biggest challenge is going to be signing up content owners to use its platform; so far, its customers are Walt Disney's Internet Group, Atom Entertainment Corp. and Fox Sports Mobile. Navio did say its technology would one day allow any Navio-powered online music file to play on the iPod, which to date only plays purchased downloads from Apple's iTunes Music Store. Read the whole story...
  • What Do You Know About Google? Los Angeles Times (free registration required) The whole world loves Google, with its cute brand and free and useful services. Advertisers (generally) love the returns, shareholders and analysts love its performance on Wall Street (+53 percent in the last year) and the media loves all of these things, which is why we have hundreds of stories about the search giant everyday. But what nobody knows, and everyone seems to forget that they don't know, is how exactly the world's most popular company works. To investors and analysts, Google only discloses the basics: profit, expenses and balance sheet. "Google's whole purpose is to make information easier to access--unless, of course, you want to know information about Google," says one analyst. Perhaps that's why Wall Street has been so very wrong about Google's earnings the last two quarters: analysts drastically overestimated its Q4 '05 results and severely underestimated its Q1 '06 numbers. Google execs tell the Los Angeles Times the company may be turning over a new leaf by moving towards greater transparency, but there's internal squabbling about how to do that. Remember, transparency also means giving competitors a look at the secret sauce, the most important thing in the closely guarded world of search. To be sure, advertisers and publishers that depend on the Web giant for traffic would love to know more about the mysterious company, whose internal motto seems to be "the less information, the better." Read the whole story...
  • Virtual Chat Rooms: MySpace 2.0? Reuters.com Online virtual worlds are small places made up of concentrated, captive groups of people; many of them tend to spend most of their free time there. That's enough for certain advertisers to take a keen interest in being seen there, as Reuters.com reports. Interscope, a record label, noticed a cheap but effective marketing opportunity in the form of a nightclub appearing in the virtual community Doppelganger. It recently opened the Pussycat Dolls Lounge, named after one of its principal acts. Doppelganger's users bring their digital personalities, called avatars, to the nightclub as a place "to go out" at night as they would in the real world. There's even a DJ, and he takes requests. Interscope, of course, uses the nightclub to plaster images of its other acts, like Beck, Gwen Stefani and Keane, along the walls. Actual members of the Pussycat Dolls have been known to log on with their own avatars to chat with fans in the VIP room. MySpace is obviously the online community benchmark, but Doppelganger, and virtual "chat rooms" like the Pussycat Dolls Lounge, likely represent the next generation of social networking. Interscope execs point out that they would love to one day sell products at these online community centers, and they say that they plan to. The lounge already features a storefront, and users will one day be able to buy artist T-shirts to outfit their avatars. Doppelganger says it plans to sell property to other brands who wish to use its real estate for promotions in the future. Read the whole story...
  • Why We Need Web Video Ratings ClickZ Is it time for Web video ratings? Currently, advertisers buying video are doing so against numbers publishers report, which might or might not be audited by a third party. It's interesting to think that the same companies that buy and use the complicated "scientific" procedure for buying television are now buying online video, but the process for buying the latter isn't nearly as refined, writes Ian Schafer of ClickZ. How do you compare performance and impact when the processes are so different? Without neutral, third-party reporting you don't, really. While comScore offers a product, Schafer says it isn't widely used. Online video needs ratings because advertisers have to be able to make like-comparisons with other media. Demographics would greatly help the coordination of media plans and audited streams would give advertisers a common currency to gauge the value of video inventory across the Web. So what gives? Why aren't more publishers and ad networks using comScore's system? Where's Nielsen? And what's the model, panel-based or real-time? Schafer says the answer will likely be a hybrid, but an answer is definitely needed to help spur growth. Read the whole story...