Note from Anastasia: This is a guest post from Alexis Madrigal, a Ypulse reader who is interested in contributing about gaming on a regular basis. I have had lots of well meaning folks from all over the world volunteer to post regularly in the past, but life usually gets in the way and they fade back into the ether. Chet Gulland has persevered and earned his title of Ypulse contributing editor. Based on this first post from Alexis, I hope he sticks around, too!

More about Alexis:
Alexis is a product of Ridgefield, WA (pop. 3000) and Harvard's English department. Trained as an analyst, he is interested in consumers with limitations -- children, the poor, rural residents, housewives, senior citizens, non-English speakers -- and their uses of interactive entertainment. They will decide which early-adopter fads turn into last media market changes.

And now...The Secret Behind Club Penguin's Success

Tween trends can seem to come out of nowhere. One minute, a company in small-town Canada (Kelowna, BC, pop.150,000), releases a product called Club Penguin. The next minute, their product sells to Disney for hundreds of millions of dollars. One minute, some garage nerds in England release a free massively multi-player online game called Runescape. A couple minutes later, they have 1 million paid subscribers and are generating 1 billion ad impressions a month.

In today's Internet world, where content is perceived as king, it's easy to chalk that success up to the power of the product itself. While quality and good technology are obviously factors, an old fashioned secret has been the key to both products' success: distribution. Runescape and Club Penguin both used the largely teen gaming portal, Miniclip, and it's 34 million users, to build their huge audiences.

Without Miniclip, it is likely that there is no Club Penguin phenomenon. The product launched in October 2005 and was able to eke out a base of about 25,000 users. A few months later, the game was posted on Miniclip and experienced explosive growth. By September, the product had over 2.6 million users. Runescape's user base saw a similar, if slightly less dramatic, increase from a niche game to a multi-million user success.

With a core demographic of 10-24 year olds, Miniclip has built a portal with the power to instantly launch a youth brand. What network TV was for The Transformers, so Miniclip has been for Club Penguin. Great products can travel virally, but the task is a lot easier if the starting point is 30 million exposures. That's what scale and distribution can do. After all, retail distribution -- the most proven way to educate consumers -- has driven Webkinz and the Barbie virtual world (reg. required). Online, Facebook's platform has set the world abuzz not because of technology, but rather the possibility of targeted distribution to a huge user base, albeit one that is only about 60% of Miniclip's.

Miniclip might be the best place to spot the next t(w)een gaming trend. Billed as the largest privately held entertainment portal in the world, Miniclip is also one of the most attractive takeover targets left in all of Internet media.

Posted by anastasia