L.A. Times Adds More Games to Website, Hoping to Boost Revenue

In a bid to boost its digital revenue, the Los Angeles Times has struck a deal with Arkadium, a major online game developer, to add more than two dozen games to that section of its website.

This will add diversions like Mahjongg Dimensions, complete with Twitter and Facebook integrated, to a vertical of the site that already includes activities such as Crossword puzzles and Sudoku.

The audience of the Times’ site has grown substantially this year, reaching more than 17 million unique visitors a month. However, for many newspapers, the problem at the moment is that even increases in online traffic have not let to increases in advertising revenue.

Also Read: L.A. Times Rocked by More Turmoil: Top Editor Quits With Cuts Looming (Updated)

Whether games are an effective method of changing that remains unclear, but this deal is a small step in trying to widen the digital revenue stream.

“Given the ever-rising popularity of casual games, adding Arkadium’s titles allows us to further engage latimes.com’s users and entice previously untapped gaming enthusiasts to visit our site throughout the day,” Jennifer Collins, the Times’ Vice President for Digital Revenue Products, said in a statement. “We are also creating a previously unavailable opportunity for our advertisers to reach Southern California’s casual gaming audience and in the process establish another digital monetization platform.”

Collins statement makes the two motives quite clear -- that these games bring more users each day, and that those customers stick around and get sucked in by advertisements.

The Times hired Collins in late November as part of an overhaul of its digital revenue team. Both she and Andrea Nunn were hired while three other employees were promoted to either fill new spots or replace individuals who left.

At the time, John O’Loughlin, the Times’ chief revenue officer and executive vice president for advertising sales indicated that the Times was looking for new methods to court advertisers on mobile, social and other platforms.

From today's New York Times comes this story of how newspaper web sites are having trouble attracting larger brand advertisers consistently.The reason boils down to two problems we have spoken about on this blog many times - newspaper sites are too expensive and the ability to target is poor.

Full story here.

Part of the story:

It was a good day for newspaper Web sites when Mercedes-Benz USA introduced its updated E-Class cars this summer. Mercedes bought out the ad space on the home pages of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and had those sites create special 3-D ads for them, at an estimated cost of $100,000 a site.

The days after were not as good. While Mercedes was happy with the newspaper sites’ performance, it shifted money to cheaper, more tightly aimed ads bought through networks, which bundle ad space from many Web sites.

When Mercedes advertises its more basic models next year, it will largely avoid newspaper Web sites and rely on networks. That lets Mercedes “be very targeted and efficient with our dollars,” said Beth Lange, digital media specialist for Mercedes-Benz USA.

But that also explains why newspaper sites are not holding on to ad dollars, even while overall Internet advertising is creeping back. Newspaper sites are the patent-leather stilettos of the online world: they get used for special occasions, but other shoes get much more daily wear. The beneficiaries of this behavior are networks and exchanges like Advertising.com from AOL and DoubleClick Ad Exchange from Google, which dominate the buying and selling of extra space.