Advertising

Got game

Jun 7th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Inserting advertisements into video games holds much promise

Welcome to the future

THEY are known to television executives as the “Lost Boys”—the generation of video-gaming young men who are watching less television and, thanks to ad-skipping technologies such as TiVo, even fewer advertisements. The obvious response is to start putting advertisements into games instead, by incorporating billboards into the game environment, for example. But incorporating static advertisements into games is unsatisfactory. Now that most PCs and a growing number of games consoles are connected to the internet, however, it is possible to update advertisements when required. As a result, static in-game advertisements are now giving way to dynamic adverts, which accounted for $26m of the $76m spent on in-game advertising last year, and will account for 55% of the $182m spent this year, says the Yankee Group, a consultancy.

Vertical search-engines

Know your subject

Jul 12th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Topic-specific search-engines hope to challenge Google, at least in some areas

ARE you a generalist or a specialist? The question can be asked of people, but it is increasingly being asked about internet search-engines, as specialist or “vertical” sites take on generalists such as Yahoo! and Google. Some are already prospering: GlobalSpec.com, for example, a profitable search-engine for engineers, has 3.5m registered users and signs up another 20,000 each week. “They own that market,” says Charlene Li of Forrester, a consultancy.

This is due in large part to GlobalSpec's definable customer base. Its knowledge about the needs of its users sets it apart from the generalist search-engines, says Angela Hribar of GlobalSpec. Vertical sites, which serve up search results from a carefully selected group of topic-specific websites, can also target advertising at particular audiences more precisely...