As has been well publicized, in-game advertisements are big business and are continuing to soar. Some expect it to become a $1 billion dollar business by 2011. One very large component of that is the ability to serve ads online, dynamically.
Companies like Massive, IGA and Double Fusion have their own network and their own ways to deliver ads to clients. Their reach is impressive, but they don't yet cover the breadth of the Internet. One company that already does reach far and wide and could help in-game ads reach new heights is online business solutions provider Akamai.
We chatted with Kris Alexander, Product Director at Akamai, about what his quietly successful company ultimately means to the growing in-game advertising market.
Akamai is Hawaiian for Smart or Intelligent
If the name "Akamai" doesn't ring a bell immediately, don't feel bad. Like any industry, the Internet has several companies that are very successful filling vital, background rolls. Akamai does so successfully for not just gaming companies, but financial institutions, hotel operators, manufacturers, media conglomerates, the Department of Defense and more.
"We have a couple of different core businesses, dealing with the caching and delivering of small objects online," detailed Alexander. "To do that, we have our servers placed in thousands of networks around the world. This allows us to serve data quicker, since it means you don't have to traverse multiple networks to get something in cache. This often deals with small amounts of data, but the real evolution for us was being able to deliver full pages of HTML. We serve a number of businesses with dynamic site capabilities and finding the fastest path in real-time to deliver information is crucial. We've had customers in this space for a number of years, which we feel is a recognition of our ability to deliver large assets."
"Games are a large part of our business," he continued. "Nintendo, Sony Computer Entertainment, and Microsoft are all our customers. We can deliver massive game files to users globally and since we can identify fastest routes, it opens up numerous real-time applications. This includes games like real-time strategy, first-person shooters and MMOs."
What Akami Means to In-Game Ads
This experience with the transferring of data worldwide via a network makes Akamai particularly well placed to enter the in-game ads sphere. The future of the in-game advertising space will be the placement of dynamic ads via the Internet and Akamai's tech can not only transfer data quickly but also make the ads relevant to each user, based upon their behaviors online. It's similar to the "Holy Grail" talked about before.
"For a lot of our customers that we've partnered with, we enabled a lot of new business models that have evolved over the past couple years and will continue evolving into the future. We worked with Sony and Nintendo before their latest consoles launched," explained Alexander. "That's right, we're not limited to the PC realm; we are the delivery platform for both Sony and Nintendo. That means that we're helping to deliver patches online for the Wii and we're also used when someone buys a game or downloads a trailer via PlayStation Network. We also work with IGN and GameSpot and enable them to deliver objects on their site. We helped GameSpot stream video from the recent E3 press conferences. We're in a lot of places at the edge of the network, whether it's small images or pop-up content or full websites."
Alexander couldn't address specifically which game companies Akamai has worked with in the in-game ad realm, but he did talk about the importance of targeted ads. "There's nothing that we can talk about publicly yet. I can talk about our methods, though. Because we measure the passing of data on our network, we can determine where certain users are coming from. We look at the sort of assets we're going to send, and we're trying to make sure they're presented in a meaningful way that doesn't take them out of game experience. Better targeting the end user is something we have a lot of solutions to work for, which is important.