AdSense for games

Comscore reports that about 200 million people (25% of the Internet population) play games online, wether social or “serious” ones, and this number is growing quite nicely, faster than the growth of the internet population.

With a such a dynamic and growing sector, it will come with no surprise that Google is announcing AdSense for Games, enrolling publishers like Konami and Mochi Media. The product will reportedly allow to integrate text, video and image into the games. The model seems based on impressions and click-through.

This could be a nice source of revenues for social website that, in many cases, host social games. Not only, is a first step in the direction of trying to take over gaming advertising and explanation of what Google is going to do with Adscape Media, an in-game advertising company that bought last year for 27 million USD.

In-game advertising is still a marginal business these days. Estimation of its size are all over the places, but the numbers are still small, and probably around 400 / 500 million USD, but are expected to grow to anywhere between 1 and 1.8 billion USD by 2010, accounting for 3% of the total media spend.

Quite interesting, if AdSense for games will prove effective, it could open the doors for subsidized gaming, reducing the price tag for “serious” games and spreading gaming as a past-time even more. When compared to other form of entertainment, gaming is extremely cheap: a 50$ game can give you 100+ hours of fun, at 0.5$ per hour, while a 10$ movie can give you just a couple of hours, at 5$ per hour. Also, gaming as an industry surpassed movie just recently.

Watch out, I think there will be developments in this sector.