[casual_games] Portal Sales

[Alex St. John]

For getting a feel for actual audiences on various portals I recommend the following free site;
   
  http://snapshot.compete.com/wildgames.com/%2Bwildtangent.com%2Bbigfishgames.com
   
  It seems to be the best free independant measurement I've seen.  My rule of thumb is easy to break down.  Conversion rates are actually between .08% and 1%, but some customers buy multiple games or are upsold to other value propositions like a CD so 1% and $20-$24 per transaction tends to produce the right result even it it's not precisely accurate.  
   
  Audience measurement is tricky in our business for two reasons.  Sites with free Flash games often appear to have larger audiences then sites that have download only games with no free flash trials.  This is because people spend more time playing on these sites instead of downloading and playing and many of the audience tracking systems like Alexa and Comscore give higher audience results for these sites then for sites that push the user quickly to a download.  (As WT does)  
   
  The advertising comment is also a rule of thumb.  In general there is an ad "saturation level" that an audiece will tolerate and that an advertiser will pay for, so in some sense it doesn't matter what mix of advertising is presented to a consumer, thier is a fixed range of advertising value that can be generated from an eyeball.  If your ads come from a network, the rev share from that network will generate about 35K-50K/mo per million unique users.  If you have your own sales force as WT does, the number is much higher and if you have specialized ad units it can be higher atill, but most casual games sites do not have very advanced advertising offerings.  
   
  Shockwave's ad revenues prior to their aquisition by Viacom were "rumored" to be in the range of 2m-4m/qtr across an audience of 5m-7m monthly uniques.  
   
   

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