Josh Chambers

Interesting Opportunities for Publishers

I wonder if this will actually take off…it does seem like an excellent blend between a print magazine and digital.

Gaming Is Growing – The Pyschology Of Gaming

This is a recent post from my work blog. I enjoyed writing it, and I decided to re-post most of it here.

Gaming isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s growing and it’s growing fast. And it’s not just black-t-shirt-and-square-rimmed-glasses-wearing-with-dirty-facial-hair-stuck-in-their-mom’s-basement-playing-WOW nerds. Gaming is invading reality, and everyone is playing:

As of today, Farmville has 83,105,118 active monthly users and Mafia Wars has 25,080,678. Seriously?
Farmville has more players than Twitter has accounts
Two and a half years ago, Disney purchased Club Penguin for $350M – a game which at the time boasted 12 million accounts, 700,000 paid subscribers, and $40M in annual revenue. I’m sure the numbers are exponentially larger now
As of February 20th, PlayStation has 20M users worldwide and Xbox Live has generated $1 billion dollars since its 2002 launch
MyTown recently hit one million users after only two months in existence. And let’s not forget about Gowalla and Foursquare, and Causeworld
Gameloft brought in $170M in iPhone App Store revenue – and that’s just one company

Not only is gaming not going anywhere; you can expect to see elements of gaming incorporated into just about everything – or so says Jesse Schell, owner of Schell Games and Professor of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. In his talk, “Is Your Life Just One Big RPG – Design Outside The Box” at the 2010 DICE Summit, Jesse hypothesizes that beyond the fun element of gaming, it’s actually the psychology behind gaming that makes it so appealing.

Here’s Jesse’s talk broken into three parts, and it is absolutely incredible. It is worth the 25 minutes, I promise (thanks to Nicholas for this find):

LastHistory » Visualizing Last.fm Listening Histories and Personal Streams

via frederikseiffert.de

Awesome blend of music, visual art, and usefulness. Thanks @talbs for the link!

Posted via web from Josh Chambers’s Posterous

The Educated are Harder to Advertise To

The more college educated a state is, the harder it becomes to advertise to, according to online ad network Chitika’s latest study. The Massachusetts-based company compared the ad click rates of individual states to those states’ rates of college education (from the US Census Bureau’s data), and found a strong inverse relationship.

The two states with the lowest ad click rate, Massachusetts and Washington, showed a much higher rate of college education than the national average. West Virginia, which boasted the highest click rate, also had the lowest percentage of college graduates over the age of 25 in its population. In between, the relationship between low click rate and high college education rate stayed relatively strong.