Remember all those times they told us “hard work pays out”, “the early bird gets the worm”, and “there are no free lunches”? Well, looks like it’s not always accurate.

According to recent findings by comScore, casual gaming is enjoying both a surge in traffic, as well as high acceptance of the “advertising in exchange for games” formula among gamers. Traffic Spikes for Ad-Supported Games. The bottom line is a 27% increase in unique visitors and a 42% increase in total playing time vs. year ago. Compare that to a growth of only 4% in Internet traffic over the same period. There are various reasons for the hefty rise in casual gaming. It’s a combination of reasons ranging from better game offering and increased accessibility and availability, all the way to the fact that the world economy currently appears to be mimicking the final minutes of the Titanic’s voyage.

Whatever the reasons, the facts are very clear – it pays to play (or more correctly – it pays to let other people play….). Casual gaming is officially the scorching hot segment on the web today, and growth is expected to continue at an accelerated pace.

Basically, this means that TicTacTi’s widgets, fully loaded with games and advertising and ready to make serious fun for your traffic and serious money for you, are a great idea. With virtually no work from you at all (unless you qualify implementing a line of code as work…), you can start racking in some serious cash. Once implemented, the only work you’ll need to do is view your account once and a while and check out the statistics to see how much money you’ve made.

If you haven’t done so already, come join our beta program and start implementing widgets and making money today.

Although according to our wives this hardly ever happens, looks like we were right for a change! When we set out to pioneer the IGA (In Game Advertising) front, we claimed that users spending time on games will accept well integrated IGA much better than other forms of advertising. Well, the preliminary results from our closed beta have been analyzed, and we’re indeed seeing a huge increase in CTR, which of course translates into a direct increase in eCMP and revenues. Our beta users are showing significant increase in response vs. others forms of advertising, and are already on the path to increased revenues. Ka-ching!

It’s pretty clear that ads embedded in a game in a non-intrusive way, which have the same look and fell of the game currently being played, are superior and much better accepted compared to other forms of advertising such as simple banner ads, pre and post game advertising, etc. It appears that games are the ultimate sticky content, often even more than videos. Users are immersed in them during play, with very high levels of focus and concentration on the game screen or window, and therefore much more susceptible to advertising – but only to the proper form of advertising. It’s like our wives always tell us – if you do something, make sure you do it right (or were those our moms that told us that...?).

As more data and statistics are generated through our data, we’ll share more accurate figures with you. Meanwhile we’ll go and enjoy our glorious moment of being right since, as we mentioned, according to our better halves this hardly ever happens. But as they say – even a broken clock is accurate twice a day, so this is one of those two times...!

And for those of you interested in joining our beta, make sure you hurry. Response has been high and we can only serve a limited number of publishers during the beta, so there’s only room for a few more publishers. So sign up today to make sure you are part of the success story, and more importantly that you’re part of the increased revenue generating machine called IGA.