Google announces Adsense for Games

Will target online games to begin with

8 October 2008 16:43 GMT / By Verity Burns

Google has announced its intentions to enter the in-game advertising sector, with a post on its Adsense blog suggesting it will be targeting web-based games to begin with.

It read: "Do you develop or publish web-based games? If so, you're contributing to a growing trend - according to comScore, over 25% of Internet users play online games every week, which is over 200 million users worldwide. As a beta user of AdSense for Games, you can display video ads, image ads, or text ads within your online games to earn revenue".

The pitch continued: "You'll be able to show these ads in placements you define, such as interstitial frames before a game, after a level change, or when a game is over. Members of our AdWords team will sell your in-game ad placements directly to top brand advertisers, and you'll also see contextually targeted text and image ads based on content and demographic information. In addition, you'll be able to control the ads you see on your pages using our filtering options".

The beta for Adsense for Games has now been opened and is available to those publishers with over 80% of their traffic from the UK or US.

It will be run in partnership with Mochi Media and its MochiAds network, with Google providing advertisers to fill its available advertising slots.

The news comes not long after Google announced it would start selling games and other products via links from relevant videos to online stores such as Amazon and iTunes.