According to the folks at paidContent.org, Yahoo could soon sell off its Yahoo Games unit. In an effort to cut costs, Yahoo is looking to divest itself of certain non-core assets, and Yahoo Games could be joining a list that includes Yahoo Personals, Small Business and HotJobs. paidContent said that Yahoo has been approached by at least two different parties interested in acquiring Yahoo Games.
Yahoo Games already has partnerships with in-game ad firms Double Fusion and NeoEdge, and with about 19.2 million unique monthly visitors (just slightly lower than EA) Yahoo Games would offer a potential buyer "access to a staggering number of potential ad impressions and a variety of possible units: banners, pre-, post- and mid-roll video, as well as custom advergames." Yahoo Games has hundreds of titles to play thanks to deals with PopCap, Gogii Games and Big Fish Games.
paidContent speculates that News Corp. could be one of the interested parties. Yahoo Games could join the IGN network of gaming sites, or since MySpace is looking to revive its business with a gaming focus, News Corp. could integrate the site with MySpace. Retailers Best Buy and GameStop could also be in the mix, as could other portals such as MSN Games or AOL Games. The real question, however, is: What happens to the value of Yahoo Games once it's torn away from the huge Yahoo network?
1 Comments
July 27, 2009
The product only has value if Yahoo commits to continuing the flow of traffic from yahoo (either through URL redirection or by allowing the new other to continue using the games.yahoo.com subdomain). Otherwise it's just another games retail site offering the same product as every other without a firehose of users off a major portal.