手機遊戲蘊藏廣告商機 另一塊大蛋糕招人眼球大綱
Time is money. And if you are spending your time staring at a mobile phone, then that is where the money is. advertisers know that – eMarketer expects ad spending on mobiles to grow 92 per cent this year. But the mobile gaming world is struggling to win its fair share of those ad dollars.
時間就是金錢。如果你花時間盯着手機看，那就是潛在的盈利機會。廣告商知道這個道理——市場研究公司eMarketer預測今年手機廣告支出將增長92%。但移動遊戲行業似乎難以爭取到其中的合理份額。
Android users spend a third of their device time playing games, says Flurry, an analytics company owned by Yahoo. By comparison, Facebook gets 17 per cent of phone time. But advertising in mobile games – about $6bn a year – is less than Facebook’s mobile ad revenue. The business model is different – for now: mobile games make their money from in-app purchases, to the tune of $18bn this year, with sales growing 20 per cent annually.
雅虎(Yahoo)旗下的分析公司Flurry表示，Android用戶使用手機的三分之一時間花在玩遊戲上。相比之下，Facebook佔手機使用時間的17%。然而手機遊戲廣告（一年約60億美元）卻少於Facebook的手機廣告收入。兩者商業模式不同，至少目前如此：手機遊戲廣告商通過應用內消費來賺錢，今年銷售額爲180億美元左右，年度銷售增幅達20%。
But the growth in mobile ad spending is a lost opportunity for the gaming industry. One reason is that no one has quite figured out how to do mobile game ads well. Banner ads are tacky. And ads that are successful demand a lot of development work – such as the virtual Lexus in Real Racing 3 (by Electronic Arts). Some companies, such as Tencent, eschew ads altogether. But as it is, mobile games are less lucrative than their console counterparts. Average revenue per user in mobile games is only one-tenth of the Arpu for console games, according to Interpret.
然而手機廣告支出的增長對遊戲行業是一個錯失的機會。原因之一是，還沒有人完全明白該怎麼做好手機遊戲廣告。橫幅廣告很俗氣。而成功的廣告需要很多開發工作——例如在電子藝界(Electronic Arts)開發的遊戲“真實賽車3”中，那款虛擬雷克薩斯(Lexus)汽車。有些公司，例如騰訊(Tencent)，完全放棄了廣告。但就現狀而言，手機遊戲沒有遊戲機那麼有利可圖。根據市場研究公司Interpret的數據，每個手機遊戲用戶產生的平均收入，僅爲遊戲機用戶的十分之一。
True, some gaming groups do mobile better than others. At Electronic Arts, mobile accounts for a fifth of revenues after 30 per cent growth last year. At Activision Blizzard, by contrast, mobile provides just 6 per cent of sales (excluding distribution), and mobile revenues have fallen by half from the same period last year.
沒錯，有些遊戲公司做得比較出色。在電子藝界，手機遊戲收入去年增長30%之後，如今佔總收入的五分之一。相比之下，動視暴雪(Activision Blizzard)的手機只佔銷售的6%（不含分銷），而且手機收入同比下降了一半。
But there is a long way to go for the industry as a whole. The prize will be valuable for whoever cracks the code first: Android users spend 37 minutes a day playing mobile games on average, says Flurry. That figure rises to more than 45 minutes daily in the US and Germany. There’s more money here than in just buying extra lives.
但對整個行業來說，還有很長的路可走。誰先解決這個難題，誰就能贏得大獎。Flurry稱，Android用戶每天平均花37分鐘玩手機遊戲。在美國和德國，該數字超過每天45分鐘。拉廣告創收的機會大於鼓勵用戶購買更多“生命”。
