Just my thoughts and some research!

Sart your engines;

1. “Casual gaming” is loosely defined as anything easy to learn that doesn’t require a big time commitment, like Solitaire, Bejeweled or Diner Dash. Games like those have 200 million active players, and pull in $2.25 billion yearly
2. While Microsoft’s famed Solitaire franchise is the most played casual game ever, with more than 400 million people having spent time shuffling their own cards, Microsoft didn’t directly profit — the game is simply a long-running perk for owners of Windows computers. Free play is typically considered a cornerstone of the casual gaming market. Yet there are a handful of gaming portals that do profit, and account for most of those billions of dollars, including AOL Games, Club Penguin, MSN Games, China’s QQ, and Yahoo Games.
3. Although casual game players are evenly distributed through the population, women account for 74% of all paying players, just as young males dominate the hardcore gaming market. Both segments of the gaming industry would like to move into each other’s paying base.
4. Although some money comes in from advertising on gaming sites, there are other revenue models. PopCap, for instance, distributes Bejeweled for free on PCs, but sells the game on mobile phones. Other companies allow free play on the website but charge for downloads, limit the number of levels that can be played without paying, charge for multi-player versions or sell subscriptions.

Facts;

• The casual games industry rakes in $2.25 billion a year, according to the org’s latest research, with growth estimated at a whopping 20 percent.

• over 200 million people play casual games on the Internet each month. And it’s the only sector of gaming that reflects an appropriate gender balance: The ratio of men to women is nearly even, at 48.3 percent to 51.7 percent, respectively, yet 74 percent of people who pay to play casual games are women. In other words, casual gaming is an area of enormous potential for the gaming industry…

• Nine million accounts on World of Warcraft and six million accounts on Xbox Live are, after all, small potatoes compared to the 200 million suggested in sveral reports, but at least Blizzard and Microsoft (MSFT) can count on predictable revenue from every one of their subscribers. And don’t forget, too, that the most popular online hardcore game may still be Counter-Strike, which last year averaged 200,000 simultaneous players at any given moment on Valve’s game delivery service, Steam.

• It’s also good to keep in mind that the money generated from casual gaming doesn’t always go directly to a developer or publisher. Solitaire, which according to the report is the most popular casual game, is a free application that only indirectly profits Microsoft. Casual games are still making baby steps towards acquiring a captive audience and drawing a steady stream of income from it.

Men are just as likely as women to play casual video games...

... but are less likely to admit it, according to an industry report that shatters a widely held industry belief that such games appeal mainly to women.

But women are more likely to buy casual games -- a broad term referring to games that are easy to pick and play -- than men, who are more determined to find a free version or try to thwart anti-piracy protections on games.

Those were some of the findings in the first yearly market report by the Casual Games Association, an industry group aimed at promoting a fast-growing segment that accounts for about 10 percent of the $30 billion global video game market.

"Everyone always thought that casual games were something that only appeal to women," Jessica Tams, managing director of the association, said in an interview. "We have always been obsessed about making games for women."

Surveys of players showed that, while nearly three-fourths of people who bought casual games were women, the players of such games were split 50-50 between the sexes.

The reason men have not been reflected in the data so far is because most males are fans of realistic "hardcore" games and many do not admit they like to play simpler games involving shiny gems or lines of colored balls.

"It was really shocking for everybody. We knew these guys were playing these games," Tams said. "But the hardcore gamer who is playing 'Halo' with his buddies isn't going to brag that he just beat the next level of 'Zuma'."

Such information could be useful to game developers, who are pouring money into the casual games segment amid growing popularity of devices such as mobile telephones with sharp color screens and Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii console.

One emerging trend is the addition of casual games to social networking Web sites such as News Corp's MySpace and Facebook, Tams said.

"You have these two big draws, Facebook and MySpace, but the big problem they've been having is that they haven't been able to monetize their consumers yet and video games are a way for them to monetize their consumers," Tams said.

Survey: More online ads, free content;

A new study reveals that the majority of consumers would rather be bombarded with online ads than pay for content on the Web. Deloitte’s annual media consumption report also indicates that 66% of Internet users would click on more online ads if they were better targeted to them. The study used 2,081 U.S. Internet users ranging in age from 13-75.

“This is across the board, what mainstream America thinks about online advertising,” says Ed Moran, director of product innovation with Deloitte who conducted the survey.

In the online world where anything legal is rarely paid for, younger users are most receptive to ads. Nearly three quarters of Generation X (ages 25-41) and millennials (ages 13-24) polled said they would be willing to be exposed to online ads in exchange for free content. Among the millennials, who visit fewest sites per week of any generation, 72% said they’d click on more ads if they were more relevant, while 67% of Xers said they would.

Major Internet companies have been banking on this strong consumer attitude towards online ads. Everyone’s racing to grab a share of the projected $27.5 billion that will be spent on online ads in 2008, according to research firm eMarketer. Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), and Yahoo (YHOO), spent more than $11 billion in acquisitions to reshape Internet advertising this year in hopes of delivering more relevant ads.

Online ads range in effectiveness;

Ads delivered from search engines remain the most influential. The study reports 78% respondents found the most useful ads by performing keyword searches. (This may also explain why Google’s paid search business is expected to increase nearly 42% to $16.6 billion next year.)

Ads inserted into videos are among the most hyped by big media companies, but they appear to be the least effective among users. Less than a third want to watch commercials that appear before the start of a clip and only 17% said they will watch an ad that plays during a video. Hulu, a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. (NWS), is currently testing the ad model in shows like “Heroes” and “30 Rock”, which it streams on the web.

“We’re at the cusp where we’re seeing people consume media a la carte and on any device. It’s not just TV anymore. Companies are experimenting by moving their content to the web and tacking on the commercials. It’s a logical way of extending the model that works on one medium, but willthis work going forward?” Moran says. “Right now there’s no deliberate advertising model. This is a hard model to predict.”

Prisa sues Nielsen Online over visitor number dispute

Media giant Prisa, which owns Spanish paper El Pais, is suing research firm, Nielsen Online, over a dispute about the number of visitors to El Pais' website. Prisa accuses Nielsen of causing damage to the reputation of its flagship paper by publishing inaccurate visitor numbers for ElPais.com in 2007. In Aug, the research firm revised down visitor numbers to El Pais, which the Spanish media giant says was unjust. In the complaint, it says: "Serious negligence on the part of Nielsen in its measurement of audience figures for El Pais.com caused El Pais and Prisa to suffer serious damages due to lost advertisement this year." The media group claims it will lose USD1.4m in ad revenue as a result of the alleged mistake. Nielsen reportedly over-estimated El Pais.com's visitor numbers in Feb, because it had mistakenly included traffic on the site's RSS page, which is not supposed to be included in the overall traffic figure. As a result of the revision, in Aug, it appeared as though the number of visitors to the newspaper's site had declined nearly 20% since Feb.