Online game sites top Nielsen sticky list: Women lead the pack
"Users of online game sites spent more time in May in that category than others spent on sport or news sites during the month. Over 46.0 million people, or one in three online Americans, visited an online game site in May.
A demographic breakdown of those who visited online game websites in May showed women ages 35-49 as the single highest user group, edging out men ages 35-49, who made up 14.4 percent of users. The overall gender split was almost even, with males making up 50.8 percent and females 49.2 percent of online game site visitors in the month of May. "
[via GameDaily Biz Newsletter]
Now let's back up the Neilsen data with a couple other articles that came out last week:
Wired's David Kushner wrote a piece on the growing "casual gamer market" as the industry likes to call them. That is nice talk for women who play hearts online. But as Erick Hachenburg, senior vice president of global publishing for EA, was quoted in the article, "What's casual about someone spending eight hours a day playing Word Whomp?" EA/Pogo, Yahoo!, MSN Zone -- all these kids are grappling to be the king of the hill, and capture this enormous, dedicated gaming audience. Pogo alone has 8.6 million subscribers who play monthly, and according to Kushner's research, there are 82.5 million players in the casual gaming sector.
OK, now we are going to skip over to AdAge:
Not only is this group indulging more hours gaming than the young male players advertisers typically go gaga over, 43% of the average gamers are women, according to an Entertainment Software Association study.
"The reality is that gaming has always been a very female activity," said Julie Shumaker, director-of ad sales at Pogo.com, the giant gaming site operated by video-game maker Electronic Arts. Pogo.com has 15 million unique users every month. Since 1999, over 60% of them are women.
It is nice to see such a the gaming population presented in the media recently as the complete picture it is. While it is still a smaller part of the revenue pie than console gaming, at least the "casual" market is finally getting advertisers all hot and bothered. We all need some action.
