Digital Media

Nickelodeon's AddictingGames, one of the largest gaming sites for teens in the United States, is turning itself into a social hangout for generation Y and their younger brothers and sisters.

This week, the company will announce several steps to turn its Flash-based games site into more of a community for teen players. By the end of October, AddictingGames visitors will be able to create a member profile, featuring things like photos, member name, games played, high scores, and a buddy list. At that time, members will also be able to see a high-score list among friends who play the same games, rather than all-time high scores, and they'll have the ability to challenge friends or join them immediately in a game when they log on.

Users will also have an IM application to chat with friends, according to Dave Williams, senior vice president of the Games Group at Nickelodeon's Kids and Family that formed in June. (For instant messaging, AddictingGames plans to use social network Meebo's Community IM service, due in the fall.) But despite these features, Williams was careful to say that it won't be another social network.

"Our big focus now is community," Williams said in an interview with CNET News this week. "Games were always meant to be social."

AddictingGames, which attracted its largest audience of about 10.7 million U.S. monthly visitors in June, according to ComScore Media Metrix, is stepping up its social game at a time when casual gaming, socializing and user-created content are converging online and on the mobile phone, particularly for kids and teens. An estimated 86 percent of teens on the Internet regularly play games, and most of them belong to a social network and own a mobile phone.

While the company has stiff competition from the likes of game providers Miniclip, Yahoo and Kongregate, even more challenging for AddictingGames might be to keep the attention of capricious teens--especially its main constituency of teenage boys. Last year, Nickelodeon said that it would invest as much as $100 million in online and casual games, and part of that money is being funneled into making its game sites more "sticky" with profiles and chat.

To be fair, another site that Williams heads up in the Games Group, Shockwave.com, has been trying out many of these social features already.

Shockwave, a casual game site geared more for older audiences like mom gamers, has had member profiles since late last year. Since that time, the profiles have boosted the time spent on the site by 30 percent, to roughly 47 minutes a month, according to Williams. (Players spend an average of 30 minutes monthly on AddictingGames, according to ComScore.) In that vein, Shockwave has also recently began letting members create a so-called virtual talking avatar for a profile page. Members can designate for the avatar a gender, voice type and accent, as well as give it scripted text so it speaks for them on the profile page.

Part of the strategy to keep teens attention is to constantly introduce new games, some of them "flirty," according to Williams. AddictingGames has about 3,000 games on its site, adding between 12 and 20 new ones every week. "New game Friday" features a bulk roll out of nine new games at once, many from its user community.

AddictingGames, which became a part of Nickelodeon and MTVN when their parent Viacom bought Atom Entertainment for $200 million in August 2006, is also leaning toward more social games. Those are games that ask for player's creativity and collaboration.

As little as a year ago, online games were geared much more to a solo experience, ala Solitaire. But now casual games are encouraging more interaction among players. Pencil Racer, for example, is a game that asks players to draw their own track, upload it to the site, and pick from a range of vehicles, like a monkey on a bike, with which to race. The game was launched only a few months ago, and people have already created more than 1 million different race tracks.

"We have lots of kids cutting their teeth making new games," said Williams. A 15-year-old boy from Sweden, for example, built a popular shooter game called Clear Vision.

Because Addicting Games caters to a younger audience, Williams said that it will be sure to promote teen safety when it introduces profiles and other social features later this year. For example, kids under the age of 13 will not be able to sign up for an account, and members over the age of 18 will not be able to "friend" those under 18 years old.

As for how it makes money, the site sells advertisements and sponsorships for its more popular games, and it has been profitable for years, according to Williams. AddictingGames, for example, recently created a version of Pencil Racer that allowed players to race a T-Mobile phone.

Not to ignore the trends in mobile gaming, Williams said that his division is looking closely at games for the iPhone. But he said that there was nothing to announce at this time. The company already sells a pack of Flash-for-mobile games called "addicting quickies" for Verizon phones.

SAN FRANCISCO--Marketers convened here this week to figure out how best to reach teens on the Internet. The answer: It's all about the mobile phone.

Advertisers are clamoring to reach teens in digital environments because that's where they're spending much of their time--either online, with cell phones or playing video games. What's more, teens wield an estimated $200 billion annually in discretionary spending.

Fuse, a marketing agency based in Vermont, talked in recent weeks to senior technology executives from companies such as Sony, MTV Networks, Yahoo, and Nokia to find out what the future of technology will look like for the teen market.

Among the predictions: Mobile phones in the United States will surpass the popularity of desktops for teens. Only an estimated 20 percent of teens currently own a smartphone such as the iPhone, but mobile phone and content companies are counting on the idea that smartphone adoption will spread fast among teens in middle America and other areas.

"The iPhone is just the beginning of the all-in-one device. Uses of mobile devices will expand to include all kinds of bar code applications and prepaid debit card payment methods," said Bill Carter, a partner at Fuse, who presented the findings here at the YPulse 2008 National Mashup, a two-day conference on teens and technology.

That's likely why geographic ad targeting to teens via the phone is expected to explode in the coming years. Right now, mobile phone providers analyze an estimated 4 billion Internet Protocol addresses to provide street-level targeting to consumers. Companies like U.K.-based Blyk, for example, are reaching teens through the phone with ads and information on nearby nightspots. Teens sign up for the service.

"When you combine this new technology with teens giving their permission to market to them, the growth could be exponential," Carter said.

But, he said, mobile phone providers likely won't succeed as the entertainment leaders for the phone, despite their efforts to sell ringtones, games, and music. Other companies like Apple, Google, and Yahoo will be more effective at "side-loading" the cell phone with services.

Case in point: Most teens download music to their iPod that's been ripped from a friend's collection as opposed to bought from the iTunes music store. "There's a natural gravitation to get content on a device that's different than the one the manufacturer intended," he said.

As a corollary, he said that most teens will eventually buy subscription-based music services, much like the cable TV model. He predicted that Apple's iTunes will offer an unlimited monthly download service for music. Mobile phone companies, too, will launch music subscriptions on the smartphone.

Another prognostication: Other technology platforms will save, not kill TV networks, Carter said. The analog-to-digital conversion will make it possible for teens to watch live TV on portable devices. The technology will help the television networks target programming to specific audiences, and that will buoy the cost of advertising, he said.

"The device is inconsequential compared to the content," he said.

SAN FRANCISCO--Tweens and teens are pushing parents to adopt text messaging so they don't have to talk "live" over the cell phone, according to mobile phone executives.

A typical teenager carrying a cell phone might let mom's call roll over to voicemail and then immediately text her back, "What going on?," according to Stephen Saiz, manager of consumer insight and strategy of the Walt Disney Internet Group's North American mobile division.

"Teens are pushing their parents to go on mobile because they don't really want to communicate with them directly," Saiz said here on a panel of mobile executives at the YPulse 2008 National Mashup, a two-day conference on teens and technology.

He said later in an interview that his Disney division researches teens' and parents' behavior on the cell phone and with its mobile applications. The majority of older audiences using Disney mobile applications skew to mothers who are goaded there by their kids, he said. And most tweens and teens prefer to text message and instant chat with parents and friends rather than talk directly so that they can continue doing other things like play video games with friends, he said.

More broadly, nearly one out of every two U.S. tweens (or kids between 10 and 13 years old) and 83 percent of teens own a cell phone, according to new research from Chicago-based C&R Research. And with that many kids using mobile devices, the text messages are flying.

The average teen, according to C&R, generates between 50 and 70 text messages a day, or as many as 18,000 a year.

Despite the flurry of activity, it's not all about mobile communication for teens anymore. More U.S. teens are looking for social networking and entertainment via the cell phone. Saiz, for example, said that young people are looking for full-length video on the mobile phone, despite the perception that kids just want to "info-snack," or consume small bits of information. "Young people are looking for long-form content," he said.