Marketers interested in targeting teen girls and leading-edge baby boomers may want to look at online gaming sites.
The total female online gaming site audience was up 27% in August 2008 over August 2007, to nearly 43 million visitors. Growth was even faster among female gamers ages 12 to 24 and 55 to 64, according to comScore Media Metrix.
"With the increased interest in online gaming among the highly lucrative teenage girl and older female demographic segments, marketers who have been hesitant to transfer some of their ad spend to the gaming space may now be taking a second look," said Edward Hunter, director of gaming at comScore, in a statement.
Gaming has become nearly universal among all teens.
comScore said that fashion and dress-up sites and virtual worlds such as Neopets and Gaia Online helped the category grow in popularity among younger girls. More older women visited gaming sites because of partnerships between women's content portals and casual game sites, such as iVillage's partnership with Pogo.com games.
In a more wide-ranging study covering all types of games (not just online), the Pew Internet & American Life Project surveyed girls ages 12 to 17 about their favorite gaming genres. In that study, fielded from November 2007 to February 2008, respondents said they played a broad variety of game types, including puzzle, racing and rhythm games (think Guitar Hero).
In contrast to the comScore study, Pew found that virtual worlds were actually the least-played category when all platforms were considered. This does not indicate one of the two studies is wrong, but rather that virtual world sites (again, such as Neopets) enjoy particular popularity among online gamers, who mainly use PCs.
When consoles, handhelds and mobile games—none of which are used to play most virtual world games—were included, virtual worlds were not as popular with teens of either gender.
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