Who's the BIGGEST Portal

[Tom Gilleland]

A couple of months ago (11.26.05) I did a Alexa Traffic Ranking on a bunch of the big Portals. This list is the Top 27. Starting at portal #28 the traffic went exponentially downward, it was near 2,000,000. Following is the list sorted by rank. So when I submit my upcoming hit game I will mostly be working to get it on portals in this order. Note that some of these portal traffic numbers are skewed because they include all traffic to the site. So the high Apple number is more likely people getting thier itunes. And the numbers are probably off a bit for other similar Alexa quirky reasons, but at least it's something to start with. Hey, maybe James Smith can add a new Portal Traffic Ratings section to his cool Top Ten games list. (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/) I wonder if you can scrap the Alexa data for something like this??? Anyway here the list.

games.yahoo 1
games.msn / zone.msn 2
aol 19
apple 52
download 99
pogo 204
shockwave 516
realarcade 915
popcap 1,264
bigfishgames 1,367
zylom 1,587
gamehouse (realarcade) 1,677
grab 2,099
arcadetown 2,705
reflexive.net 11,751
alawar 12,498
trygames 14,687
download-free-games 14,888
gamefiesta 16,630
playfirst 28,439
garagegames 32,638
oberongames 64,948
mumbojumbo 122,970
funsta.co.uk 257,395

Tom :)

[Vorax]

That's interesting, but Alexa is horribly innacurate. For example. games.yahoo.com is completely screwed because alexa will only go by the domain yahoo.com. Instead of seeing the traffic games.yahoo.com gets, you get what yahoo.com (tons of sub-domains) gets...same for MSN, etc. If not a single person ever visited games.yahoo.com, it would still have an Alexa rating of 1

Also Alexa is based on the misguided notion that people using the Alexa toolbar is a fair sampling of the internet. Experienced people using the net avoid toolbars, novices are told to never install them. Most people only trust google's or yahoo's. Secondly, Alexa is easily skewed because people that know the system can install the toolbar and visit the sites they want to to boost their ratings.

Unfortunetly, no one has found an accurate way to guage net traffic.

[Bmc]

I don't quite remember all but

Pogo, Yahoo, MSN, Real and Big Fish were the 5 biggest last time I heard anything about the subject.

Real and Big Fish are #4 and #5, the rest I can't remember

[Tom Gilleland]

Yea, you should take the first five with a grain of salt because of other site activity. But if you treat the rest a just a statistical sample, then theoretically the list should be pretty accurate.

It's better to go with some data then just pulling it out of a hat. :D

Tom

[Phil Steinmeyer]

While I admire the effort here, it's quite flawed and not all that useful. And not so much because Alexa may be unreliable - that's sorta moot. The main problem is that of the portals that folks widely agree are the big ones (yahoo, msn, shockwave, realarcade), none of them can be well measured by Alexa (the first 3 because of all the non-game related traffic to those domains, the last one because much of it's traffic is through a custom browser thingie that Alexa almost certainly doesn't measure.

That leaves these domains that are game-only, and capture most of the traffic to that portal:

There are further problems with this list - some of these sites do a lot of traffic in webgames (i.e. pogo), that doesn't really convert well to download sales. Zylom caters mainly to West European users, where I suspect Alexa toolbar install rates are very different from the US. So the only ones that I've got a moderate degree of confidence in are:

popcap 1,264
bigfishgames 1,367
gamehouse (realarcade) 1,677
grab 2,099
arcadetown 2,705
reflexive.net 11,751
alawar 12,498
trygames 14,687
download-free-games 14,888
gamefiesta 16,630
playfirst 28,439

(Edit - just to note - I don't think the above are the biggest portals, just that the intra-list comparisons among the above , based on the Alexa rank, have SOME degree of validity. Almost certainly, RealArcade, MSN, Yahoo and perhaps Shockwave, AOL, and Pogo are larger than any of the above.)

[Tom Gilleland]

Tough crowd, you guys must all be binary-thinking programmers or something. :) It would be great if someone shared actual sales data (as a percentage) on all these portals, then we would have a more accurate measure. Of course this might be skewed by the type of game and the normal audience of that portal.

I know there are problems with this list, but since there is basically no public measurements of portal sizes, I thought I would start somewhere. I just don't exactly trust the marketing stuff that says, "we're the 4th largest portal, blah, blah."

Tom

[Indiepath]

Maybe I'm wrong but I was under the impression that a UK Portal was the largest in the world.


27 Million unique users per month!
source, Comscore Media Metrix, December, 2005
Miniclip.com is the world's largest website dedicated to playing online games. Miniclip produces great online games that can be played anywhere, anytime. Miniclip.com's community of 27 million game players are offered the full range of single player to hard-core massive multiplayers games. Miniclip.com games are extremely popular because they are fun, free, easy to use and involve the Internet's largest community of online game players.

Perhaps I am mistaken but I reckon these boys sit on the top spot.

[Vorax]

Hmm... Alexa gives miniclip a 208 which places them 7th. If 27million unique visitors per month is accurate, I would say that proves Alexa is pretty much smoking crack :)

[Nexic]

Alexa isn't at all accurate, my site was 350,000 a few months ago, it's now 2,000,000. During that period my site traffic has increased by a large margin.

[Tom Gilleland]

I thought I read somewhere there was just recently an influx of a couple of million sites from Asia being posted or something along that line. The point is that it is changing so fast I would expect some wierdness in traffic monitoring.

Alexa certainly has problems, but it is really the only tool we have to use.

Tom

[cyrus_zuo]

Speaking of issues with the data...you'll find each of the Reflexive domains listed seperately...aggregate data would be useful...

Reflexive.com - 14,226
Reflexive.net - 11,751

[Anthony Flack]

Alexa certainly has problems, but it is really the only tool we have to use.

Well then, it seems we don't have any tools worth using.

[Andy]

In the moment they show our traffic rank as 220,523. And this wouldn't be so terrible. But they state that it has dropped down on 262,059 in last three months. So get this guys! 3 months ago our rank was even better than 1st we were -41536. Uh? :D

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.wildsnake.com

[arcadetown]

Alexa > 50k rank gets decently reliable given larger sample size. Our sales kickin butt here. Lower ranked highly targeted sites like DFG for example, can also do very respectible sales. Anyone questioning Alexa 200 rank for Miniclip could be smoking crack themselves, MC gets a shitload.

[DFG]

Where in the world did Zylom come from?

Throw iWin.com in there as a top ranked portal. (5,505 Alexa)

btw, nobody is ever going to give you sales data - that is closely guarded proprietary info. The best you can do is get your games on all those sites and then compare. Even then, you won't get a completely accurate read because of different demographics using the sites but that is the best you can hope for.

Ditto what Brian said - Alexa Rank and traffic don't directly correspond to sales.

P.S. There are some sites on that list manipulating Alexa Rank

[Andy]

Well. Basically the simplest trick you can use for Alexa ranks is to place a couple of online games on your website. This is where you will get your rank grow pretty quickly with the same limitted number of online gamers returning to your website again and again.

So, yes. Sales could give more valuable info here. But as was mentioned above no one would give you fair numbers here - everybody would cheat you anyway. :)

[Grey Alien]

This list is fairly useful nonetheless, thanks for posting it!

[arcadetown]

A few more could see on the list... Cartoon Network, Nick.com, Miniclip, Flyordie, TerraGames.

[Tom Gilleland]

I should have expanded the title of the thread:

"Who's the BIGGEST Portal for getting my upcoming game posted on."

That's why I didn't include some of these portals like iWin, miniclip, nick, etc. A download sales by portal list would be the best, if someone can figure out how to get/publish this info. In retail distribution this information is much easier to get. Of course retail has a completely different set of complications. ;)

Tom

[Andy]

In the moment they show our traffic rank as 220,523. And this wouldn't be so terrible. But they state that it has dropped down on 262,059 in last three months. So get this guys! 3 months ago our rank was even better than 1st we were -41536. Uh? :D

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.wildsnake.com

Well. And today they kinda fixed this. As result they made our rank 140K points down. In a single week. :)

[gamefiesta]

If I was to put a short list of the top 10 by volume (not performance) I would say
1) RealArcade (Gamehouse)
2) Yahoo Games
3) Oberon Network :Pogo, AOL (non exclusive), MSN, Xbox Life, and so on
4) Zylom
5) Shockwave
6) BigFish Games
7) Boonty Games
8) TryMedia (Because of AOL)
9) Reflexive Network
10) Gamefiesta, Arcadetown, Iwin, Wild Tangent

I threw the last nuch in at the bottem since most deliver around th esame volume. This is only my opinion but has about 2 years of trailing experience.

Hope this helps those newer developers out there. Remeber like retail any game your working on will need to compete against the top 3 game that you see today because your game is usually about 2 months from going live.

[Phil Steinmeyer]

GameFiesta - of your list, the only thing that is really surprising to me is Boonty at #6. I had heard of them, but just barely. Going to their site, they appear to be a network, like Trygames, Reflexive, etc. I see no portal of their own. Are they big in Europe or something or have they just been under my radar? Are they aimed at small sites (as, say the Reflexive network seems to be), or big sites (as the Oberon network seems to be)?

[arcadetown]

Also depends on the your game type. If it's an action, strategy, or online playable the list would be juggled and put ArcadeTown in top 5. Some partners we're even their #1 or 2 outlet. Other games yes ArcadeTown's probably top 10 - 20, and working on it ;-)

Note, Gamefiesta/George perhaps basing list on their ToyBoxGames brand that included good sellers like Roller Rush that got wide distribution so probably good list. Close to list I expected to see (minus other outlets that people love to forget for some reason).

A savvy developer can get access to many if not all of those portals themselves. ArcadeTown, BFG, Trymedia, Reflexive most anyone with decent title can get on direct. Real can do but they're pretty picky. Some others make Real look easy typically only taking games through publishers. If you're not persistent then a publisher with wide access is probably smart, but you're game still must be really good with huge potential. If not going direct is probably better as most of a publisher's value is access to sites like Yahoo.

[gamefiesta]

As Phil Pointed out the industry is already eating itself and since we are so small it will be a quick lunch.
Phil also pointed out Real expects this industry to be worth 2B where I see it being a 10th that big now, certainly growth is there in multiples but not at the rate their talking. For that to happen we will need to radically impose a different business model industry wide that charges per download like the wireless space does. Imagine if you could make $1-5/DL rather than on a % of % of users!!!

We have some growing up to do and think that you will see many more changes in the coming year. Look for BFG to make some big jumps, Real to continue to explore international expansion, I think we are also on the cusp of seeing a Massive Multiplayer Casual game that could change our industry thinking as well as the multiples that go with our revenue per unit or revenue per customer. I would also expect to see new players with Capital and big partners step in and take a strong position quickly.

My biggest fear is the product saturation like we saw in PC retail over the last 10 years and the fall of that business. We get 3-4 products a year from Iwin/Playfirst/Popcap/Gamehouse then you start seeing 4-5 products/month from Russian and international companies at the same or similar caliber. Customers will have more free trials than they want or feel they don't need to purchase.

No question 2006 will be a strong growth year for Casual games and I think the Zylom purchase is the first sign of that.

[DFG]

Customers will have more free trials than they want or feel they don't need to purchase.

That is where the clone business model completely breaks down. If the content is not sufficient to create enough interest to warrant a purchase of the full version, might as well play trials for the rest of your life. Developers are going to have to work harder to create higher quality, more distinctive content that sufficiently entices users to pay for the full version.

Last time I bought a set of casual games, I played through them very, very quickly. The length and challenge were not there to really warrant a $20 price tag - especially since I could have purchased a core PC title that would have given me much more play for the value.

[svero]

That is where the clone business model completely breaks down. If the content is not sufficient to create enough interest to warrant a purchase of the full version, might as well play trials for the rest of your life.

I really can't buy into this, at least naively as a game consumer. (maybe im atypical?) My biggest problem is finding games that I want to play. It seems I might wait 2 yrs to get my hands on a game I really like. The games I'm willing to pay for are few and far between. With most trials I'll play for <5 mins before deciding its not for me. It's finding a game that I want to play longer than that, that's rare. So the idea that I would amuse myself by playing free trial after free trial just doesnt sound right to me.

[DFG]

So the idea that I would amuse myself by playing free trial after free trial just doesnt sound right to me.

I get feedback from customers all the time that tell me that is exactly what they do.

[soniCron]

I get feedback from customers all the time that tell me that is exactly what they do. I've known a lot of people that do this, and I don't understand it one bit. It makes me rather unhappy.

[svero]

I get feedback from customers all the time that tell me that is exactly what they do.

Well.. maybe Im not the average joe in that sense. I find it strange that someone would want to spend an hr playing somethign but not be enjoying it enough to want to continue playing it.

[Anlino]

I know i do:)

[Chris Evans]

Well.. maybe Im not the average joe in that sense. I find it strange that someone would want to spend an hr playing somethign but not be enjoying it enough to want to continue playing it.

Because it costs $20. :)

It means going to your wallet/purse to find a debit/credit card and justifying the expense to yourself or spouse. Other people just like to avoid purchasing things online if they can.

So if you have Game A, Game B, and Game C all with near identical play mechanics, I can see why some players are content with just hopping from trial demo to trial demo. Also not everybody uses up their trial time within the first 60 minutes of downloading. Some people play 5 minutes here, ten minutes there, and so on.

To make matters worse, even though a game may be on different portals, the game still stores the data in the same place. So in some cases, you can download the game from Real and get to level 12; when your trial expires you can then download the same game on Big Fish and continue from level 12 but with a fresh 60 minutes.

There's definitely some flaws in the current portal system. However, they're still doing so much business that I wonder if these issues are negligible. I don't think anyone is really going to panic until revenue and growth slow down. But I agree this could come sooner than expected if certain genres get over-saturated too quickly. Imagine all the big ten portals rushing to make an in-house clone of the current big hit. If the releases aren't staggered, then the market could definitely get over-saturated. We've already seen cases where similar games that were released right next to each other didn't do so hot or didn't reach their potential.

[DFG]

Judging by conversion rates, I would bet 99.2% of all people downloading play nothing but trials :)

[James C. Smith]

But the question is, would any of those people actually pay for the game if there were no other free trials available? You are assuming that they don’t buy the games because there are other game demos as free alternatives. But if we took away all those free game demos (or greatly reduced the quantity and duration), wouldn’t a lot of these people just find something else to do for free like surf the net or watch TV?

Those 99.2% of the people are not necessarily your target audience. Sure, they like to play games. But apparently they like free stuff. If you want to make money of off them I suggestion you find a way to do it without involving them opening their wallets. Taking their free stuff away is not going to make most of them star paying to play.

[Phil Steinmeyer]

I do think that some relatively simple industry-wide measures would increase C.R.s.

1) If user downloads demo from multiple sites, don't give him 60 minutes per site. For the 2nd download, pop a dialog saying that he's already used his free time, but as a special bonus, we're giving him 5 (or 10) extra minutes.

2) Integrated in-game upsell/unlockables. Right now, because of varying DRM systems, games can't count on knowing whether they're unlocked or not. If they did know this, they could lock out certain features, and have in-game upsell screens and the like.

[arcadetown]

Due to how the wrappers work #2 can be done but #1 can't really since the wrapper typically controls time limits. I HIGHLY suggest every developer include the wrapper api setup for the portal they distribute their games on so it can do in game level limits, in game nagging, and so forth. Thus if a game is limited to say 5 levels in the free demo going from portal A to portal B doesn't give the player anything more than X minutes of playing those first 5 levels.

Turn that 99.2% to 98.8% and bam you've got 50% more sales. Here's some sample c/c++ Armadillo api code to detect if full version is activated or not. It's so dirt simple...

http://www.arcadetown.com/vendors/cppgamecode.asp

[alikus]

A couple of months ago (11.26.05) I did a Alexa Traffic Ranking on a bunch of the big Portals. This list is the Top 27.
reflexive.net 11,751
alawar 12,498
trygames 14,687
download-free-games 14,888
gamefiesta 16,630
playfirst 28,439
garagegames 32,638
oberongames 64,948
mumbojumbo 122,970
funsta.co.uk 257,395

Tom :)

Tom, you definitely missed absolutist.com with 11,000 here

[berserker]

Tom, you definitely missed absolutist.com with 11,000 here

Are you trying to say that you are picking up third party titles?

[Fabio]

Do you really trust Alexa? I don't.. and I know why.

[Tom Gilleland]

Do you really trust Alexa? I don't.. and I know why.

Accuracy should increase as the statistical sample size is increased. So the big sites at the top should be fairly accurate. The small sites down there over a million should not be very accurate. And when it comes to the specific numbers don't think binary, think Fuzzy Math.

It is certainly more accurate than the other publicly available size measure - each portals marketing guy saying "we're the 3rd biggest portal..." These guys use faith based math (www.faithbasedmath.com) ;)

Tom

[Phil Steinmeyer]

The problem is that for most of the very biggest sites (Yahoo, MSN, Real), Alexa doesn't give a true read of the casual games traffic (because it's comingled with all their other traffic, or, for Real, handled through a custom browser).

So Alexa has some value for relative ranks of the mid-sized sites with single-purpose domains, but not for the very biggest sites. And the order and relative size of the top 5 or so portals is far more important to know than whether DFG is bigger than ArcadeTown or whatever (except perhaps for the owners of those mid-sized sites).

[Tom Gilleland]

Here is the final list that is a combination of all the feedback in this post. It is heavily weighted with the excellent info from Gamefiesta as well as great comments from Phil, ArcadeTown and everyone else. This should fix much of the problems with the Alexia data. Numbers 22 & 23 are hard to estimate since they both have tons of traffic, but not to game downloads. Remember that this is ballpark list and is guaranteed to change constantly as we've seen with the recent acquisitions.

1. RealArcade 915 (gamehouse 1,677, Zylom 1,587)
2. Yahoo Games 1
3. Oberon Network (oberongames 64,948, Pogo 204, AOL 19, MSN/games.msn/zone.msn 2)
4. Shockwave 516
5. BigFish Games 1,367
6. Boonty Games
7. TryMedia (AOL 19)
8. Reflexive Network (reflexive.net 11,751, reflexive.com 14,226)
9. Popcap 1,264
10. Grab 2,099
11. Arcadetown 2,705
12. Flyordie 5,031
13. Alawar 12,498
14. Trygames 14,687
15. Download-free-games 14,888
16. Gamefiesta 16,630
17. Terragame 19,692
18. Playfirst 28,439
19. Garagegames 32,638
20. Mumbojumbo 122,970
21. Funsta.co.uk 257,395
22. Apple 52
23. Download 99
24. BeachWare 1,526,909 (have to start somewhere ;) )

Tom

[Fabio]

Hi Tom.
Accuracy should increase as the statistical sample size is increased. So the big sites at the top should be fairly accurate. The small sites down there over a million should not be very accurate. And when it comes to the specific numbers don't think binary, think Fuzzy Math.
No, I meant that some sites (I heard even wannabebig portals, but I can't offer proof for that) cheat.. and send lotsa "clicks" using custom written apps to fool the Alexa system. So they bloat their own rank.. and can say to be big when they really really aren't. :)

Ah, those managers..