Bolt Got Game

Bolt Media, the youth community and social networking site, yesterday significantly expanded its reach with the acquisition of video game Web publisher Game Revolution for a seven-figure sum.

The Game Revolution deal gives Bolt one of the highest concentrations of 14- to-24-year-old consumers on the Web, said Bolt's Chief Financial Officer Lou Kerner. The company has 9.2 million registered users between the ages of 13 and 25, who spend an average of three hours per month at the site. Bolt is 60 percent female and 40 percent male. Game Revolution adds 1.3 million unique visitors to Bolt Media's audience base.

"We like to describe ourselves as the world's largest basement," Kerner said, where kids "do nothing but talking about everything."

Game Revolution will continue under its own brand name, and at the same URL, but will integrate staff-- including its advertising sales force--with Bolt.

Bolt also is expected to announce today it has hired behavioral targeting firm Revenue Science to parse its audience into segments advertisers can target anywhere on Bolt Media's properties.

Revenue Science will combine registration, search queries, page views, visitation frequency, and time-of-day behavioral data to create and package audience segments for Bolt Media to sell to its advertisers. Current Bolt advertisers include Fortune 1000 companies such as Nike, Warner Bros., Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Visa, Verizon Wireless, Nintendo, and Disney.

Kerner said that both the Game Revolution acquisition and the decision to hire Revenue Science are wins for Bolt's advertisers. "Because we're a community site, kids spend a tremendous amount of time on Bolt.com," he said, adding that behavioral targeting is an effective way to reach the "ever-splintering" youth market.

Behavioral targeting gives advertisers the opportunity to purchase the chance to get in front of their target audience, rather than compete for a limited number of high-traffic pages, said Nick Johnson, Revenue Science's senior vice president of business development and general manager of account strategy. "The net benefit is efficiency," Johnson said.

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