• by Shankar Gupta , August 17, 2006

Hoping to bolster its gaming offerings, AOL has acquired video game news and review site GameDaily.com, the companies said Wednesday.

Ralph Rivera, vice president and general manager of AOL Games, said AOL hopes the deal will help it draw more online gamers to the site while also luring game-related advertisers.

"We were looking to scale up, given how significantly the video game space has grown in the past few years," Rivera said. "We're looking to get bigger in that space, attract a deeper audience in that space--and quite frankly, become even more attractive to advertisers in that space."

AOL isn't alone in trying to boost its gaming capabilities. As gaming has grown in popularity, other large companies have recently made plays for online gamers. WPP Group said it had invested $3 million in ad-supported video game network WildTangent. Also, Viacom's MTV Networks recently purchased Atom Entertainment, which operates gaming sites Shockwave.com and AddictingGames.com as well as short-form video sites, for $200 million.

Also, Verizon launched a free online service that allows users to participate in and organize games that can be played over a local area network.

With 1.7 million unique users last month, GameDaily.com is one of the second-tier players in the video gaming information site space--far below top players like IGN Entertainment, which captured 8.2 million users, and Gamespot, with 6.7 million, according to comScore Media Metrix.

But Rivera said that AOL expects to grow the site's traffic by distributing the content throughout the AOL gaming vertical--which he said captures 2 million monthly unique visitors.

Rivera said that GameDaily is not necessarily looking to compete for the top spots with IGN and GameSpot, but rather to focus on the most popular franchises and titles. "What GameDaily does today and what we've done is really focus on the space that resonates with the mainstream, and so it's really focused on the franchises--on the things that are most popular, most anticipated," he said.

Ad space on GameDaily will be sold by AOL's media networks sales team, and the ad units on the GameDaily.com site will not change when it is migrated over to the AOL network. Rivera said that the ad space on the page will be packaged with other ad inventory on AOL entertainment properties, which he hopes will make the space more attractive. "I think it'll continue to be very strong with the endemic game business, but I also think that it'll benefit by being in packages with music and movies and sports that might appeal to a broader base of brand advertisers," he said.