|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
CASE STUDY
AARP
|
|
|
|
|
AARP Seizes Online Games as an Opportunity to Drive Site Traffic and Membership
Loyalty
With over 39 million members, AARP is the leading nonprofit, nonpartisan membership
organization for people age 50 and over in the United States. The organization’s
Web site, http://www.aarp.org, which is
visited by over 32 million individuals each month, offers extensive information,
resources and community features.
Last year executives within the organization began to notice an interesting trend
in online games. While many believed that the majority of online gamers were teenage
boys glued to a monitor playing video games, statistics began proving that the average
age of the online gamer skewed much older. In fact, according to the Casual Games
Association, women age 35 years and older are the largest demographic of casual
online gamers, making up close to 75% of the market.
Recognizing the relevance of this trend for its organization, AARP turned to Arkadium
(http://www.arkadium.com ) to help conceptualize
and launch a game community (http://games.aarp.org)
for AARP.org site visitors and online members.
Games.AARP.org Becomes the Most Highly
Trafficked Area on the Site
The games were launched in February 2008 as part of an overall redesign of the site,
and since then traffic has soared. After the launch, traffic shot up to an average
of 4.5 million page views, an increase of 294 percent. And more telling of the success
is that games as a percentage of overall traffic climbed to about 52 percent of
overall traffic to the site.
“The online game center not only includes arcade, card, strategy, word and sports
games, but also promotes community interaction with leaderboard functionality,”
said Kenny Rosenblatt, CEO of Arkadium. “We’ve provided everything from Sudoku and
Solitaire to Mahjonng and Backgammon; games that we knew would appeal to a wide
range of people and add to the extensive community features that the site already
offers.”
The most popular games on the site are Mahjongg, Pyramid Solitaire, Eggz and Free
Cell Solitaire. All of the casual games on AARP.org are easy to understand and play,
and help to drive increased interaction times. The average play time on many of
the games that Arkadium included in the AARP.org games Arena is 15 minutes or more.
Mahjong alone has an average interaction time of 29 minutes, while Solitaire commands
over 20 average minutes of play time.
With all the success, recently AARP.org has also moved to turning their online games
and game center into advertising opportunities for brand marketers. Through sponsored
advergames and re-branded games, AARP.org is able to customize and repackage popular
inventory that is making an impact in terms of reaching this key market where they
spend the most time.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
920 Broadway, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10010 |
 |
T 212.337.3701
F 212.337.3741 |
|
|
|
