Digital Interactif

French Youths Online - Forrester Study

I came across an interesting Forrester report on the French blog, Sortez du Cadre!. 

Forrester polled 1000 French youths, aged 12-24, and found that:

• 89% send email
• 72% read blogs
• 69% use search engines
• 57% utilize major web portals (ie. Yahoo!, MSN...)
• 55% research products online
• 51% comment of blogs
• 43% use chat rooms
• 40% use reference sites (ie. wikipedia)
• 37% look for news online
• 37% Maintain an online blog
• 29% look for sports results
• 29% download freeware
• 27% take part in discussions in forums and chats
• 26% prepare itineraries online (ie. directions, maps...)
• 24% use comparison sites (ie. Kelkoo)
• 24% use social networks
• 22% research/apply to jobs online
• 22% look at consumer reviews online (ie. Amazon, Ciao, DooYoo)

 

Mobile Gaming Industry - MIT Interactive Entertainment SIG

This past Monday, I attended the inaugural MIT Interactive Entertainment Special Interest Group (SIG) event.  The speakers on the panel included Mathew Bellows (GM of Floodgate Entertainment), Jeff Burden (VP Digital Media & Games for Hasbro), and Beth Marcus (Founder of Zeetoo.net). 

The panelists painted a bleak picture for the $1 billion mobile gaming industry.  There are currently two major obstacles facing mobile game producers, Carriers and Hardware:

• Carriers
  • There was agreement on the panel that the single largest obstacle facing game makers is the phone carriers themselves.  The "$6 per game" business model has been undercut by the payments demanded by the major carriers.  According to Jeff Burden, roughly 35-50% of a game's revenue is taken by the carriers upfront.
  • Carriers reserve the right to terminate data packets if they deem them burdensome to the network.  Therefore, even if a game is successful, a carrier may pull the rug out from under it because the game is causing too much traffic on a mobile network.   
• Hardware
  • The market for handsets is too fragmented.  Differences in screen size between handsets make standardization of game resolution impossible. 
  • Memory on most cell phones is not large enough to support high quality games.

The margins for mobile gaming companies are small due to the market's small size and the obstacles thrown up by the carriers.  Matthew Bellows observed that there are not many marketing costs associated with getting a mobile game to market, except taking Execs out to dinner!  Matt insinuated that there was no effective way to market to consumers.  But this point of view avoids the potential of in-store bluetooth downloads and other means of getting consumers to download and interact with video games directly in retail environments. 

Mobile gaming companies have a slight advantage over game makers for traditional gaming platforms because of the relatively low cost of creating a mobile game.  The cost of producing a major PC title typically runs from $4 - $12 million.  The cost of Mobile games on the other hand runs from $150k - $750 per title.  The low end mobile games are 2D, single/multi player whereas the high end games are 3D, multiplater, and bluetooth compatible.  This results in mobile game makers throwing a bunch of games at a "wall" and hoping that they'll stick.   

Mobile gaming has yet to see a game with a viral component.  The first real "big" mobile game will probably arise from a synergy of a mobile social network(Mocospace) and a mobile game.  Additionally, there has yet to be a game with any tie-in on the Internet.  The old model of designing PS2 games for a mobile handset is a dead-end and there is a great amount of potential innovation to be seen within this industry. 

One way to move the mobile gaming industry forward is to look outside of the physical handset for motivation.  Local interactive media company Locamoda has developed technology that allows users to interact with LCD screens hooked up to the Internet via local access numbers.  Using Locamoda's technology and a mobile phone, consumers can control the content on LCD screens, whether it be at a mall or a bar.  This technology could radically alter how the industry develops and looks at mobile games because it would allow game users to bypass the carriers and play games via local access numbers against people in the same room instead of having to use bluetooth or data plans.  This work-around would also allow game makers to do what they are good at: producing high quality games!  Since the games themselves would now be embed applications hosted outside of the handset itself, the level of interactivity and social aspect could be increased drastically . Additionally, projecting mobile games onto an external high quality screen would overcome the fact that it's just not fun to play a game on a tiny mobile screen.

The next MIT Interactive Entertainment SIG event, Financial Game - VC Funding in the Gaming Industry, will be taking place on December 5th.   

5 Ways to Monetize Your Web Content

I went to a few of the Podcamp Boston 2007 sessions on Saturday afternoon and I was surprised to see how much of the crowd was not into Podcasting.  When asked for a show of hands, it seemed the majority of folks there were active bloggers but did not actually post original audio or video on their blogs.  Though the economics of blogging is not one-to-one with podcasting, the conference offered up some insights into monetizing online content. 

Paul Kontonis, CEO/Founder of For Your Imagination, gave an interesting presentation entitled Monetizing Your Web Series/Podcast.  For Your Imagination (FYI) is a video production company that creates original and professional quality content.  Since it's founding in November 2006, FYI has spent $700,000 and earned $400,000 from its various means of monetization.  Though FYI is currently losing money, the IPTV market is looking at considerable growth over the next several years as consumers have begun to adapt to the idea of watching TV shows online. 

Paul's presentation addressed the ways in which his company has attempted to monetize its video content/audience and I have summarized the findings below:

1. Advertising
   • Banner Ads
     • Average CTR (Click-thru-Rate) for a flash banner ad located at the top of a webpage is only .25-.3%  Very much due to the Banner Blindness affect.
     • Interestingly, Feedburner ads on an RSS feed have an average of 3-4% CTR and therefore, banner ads could be leveraged better if placed primarily within feeds. 
     • Banner ads yield an average of $1 - $2 eCRM (Ad revenue generated by 1000 actual click-thrus on an ad) for a general web audience.  Niche markets can fetch higher eCRM (ex. $23 for the Business School audience: 26-33 year old, college educated, finance background).
   • Video Ads
     • Stand alone video ads yield an average eCRM of $2 - $3   
2. Sponsorship
   • To make money on sponsorship, a web property must either have a massive audience(200,000+ unique visitors/month) or a good size niche audience (50,000+ for potential Business School candidates).   
   • Product/Company sponsorship typically pays $40 - $120 eCRM. 
3. Merchandise
   • .1% of For Your Information visitors actually buy the site's branded merchandise.  For instance, Patrice O'neals Web Show has sold 70 pairs of branded panties! The average customer purchases $4 worth of merchandise off the site.
   • Resources for creating Branded merchandise: Cafepress, zazzle, and CreateSpace.
     • Ideas for Products: DVD's, Tshirts, Posters, Buttons, Thongs, Buttons, Coffee, Mugs, ect...
   • Set up an Amazon affiliate program.  Visitors will be more likely to buy your merchandise if they associate your brand with a reputable online merchant.
4. Licensing
   • Since FYI is a video production company, the figures they provided do not correlate to blogging.
   • $2k - $5k per episode should a web show be picked up by Showtime, HBO, or another major cable channel. 
5. Franchising
   • Deals for a cable channel buying the right to your video content can range from $250k - $5 million.

For more information on the Monetizing Your Web Series/Podcast presentation, check out Lori Magno's write up.   

Free Internet Traffic Statistics

If you haven't taken an interest in web analytics yet, there are two websites that may provide a spark for you:  Compete and Alexa. 

Compete
Compete provides a free service that allows you to compare the traffic numbers of different websites.  Essentially the service tracks the behavior of 2,000,000 Internet unique users, runs their behavior through an algorithm, and offers up it's estimate of a site's traffic.   It works pretty similarly to Nielson ratings.  (So, uh, if you are one of the people Compete is tracking...please come back.  Often.) 

A cool feature of Compete is that it allows you to get an idea of a typical user's behavior on various sites.   For instance, thanks to Compete,  you can gather stats on Facebook such as: Ave. Time on Site(14:08 minutes), Ave Pages viewed per Visit(44..3 pages), unique visitors per month(26.2 million people). 

Alexa
Alexa also provides traffic data on websites but it focuses more on a site's traffic rank than user interaction.  It is always good to compare Alexa stats against Compete, and vice versa, to give yourself a range for stats because neither site is perfect.  For instance, whereas Compete states that users visit 44.3 pages on Facebook, Alexa says that users visit only 31 pages per visit.  This 13 page difference is quite significant and therefore you should utilize both sites if ever using the services for a competitive analysis. 

The best feature of Alexa, in my opinion, is the "Sites Linking In" section.  This will show all registered sites that are linking back to the site.  Essentially, the more websites that link to your site, the better your site will do in search engine rankings and quality rankings. 

These two websites are great but there are still a lot of services/features that have yet to be developed, such as a company that provides free insights into RSS feed readership for various blogs/websites.  That would rock.