Getting In the Game

In-game video game advertising has been in the act of becoming for a decade now, but eMarketer claims it is only worth about $408 million in spending this year. While planting ads into console video games is the sexy part of the business, in fact the majority of spending ($286 million) is going in and around games on the Web.  Expect that spending to grow only to $478 million by 2012. Ironically, gaming is among the most popular online activities, and yet traditionally it is harder to monetize. As with social networks, people are highly engaged in what they are doing when gaming online, and they pay little attention to ads that generally are not well targeted in the space.