Consumers Seek Cheap Thrills


The Wall Street Journal:

Even in a recession, people will still want to be entertained.

The Great Depression saw resilience and even growth in movie ticket sales as one of the cheapest ways for people to entertain themselves.

As this economy tightens through 2009, we’ll find growing numbers of “time rich-cash poor” consumers seeking today’s lowest cost methods to entertain themselves.

In general, this will benefit two categories of consumer Internet companies.

First, social media and social networks. These are free and endlessly entertaining. As mainstream media companies cut costs, the relative value and quality of user generated content increases.

MySpace, YouTube and Facebook all rank in the top 10 Web sites by aggregate time spent according to comScore. The most popular applications on Facebook and MySpace are all games, entertainment and lightweight communication, and these can provide endless hours of entertainment for users.

Second, games. Games are one of the most cost effective means of entertainment available. While a $10 movie ticket can provide 90 minutes of entertainment, a $60 computer game can easily provide 50-100 hours of entertainment.

Free-to-play web based games make this math even more compelling, whether they be casual game portals like Pogo, virtual worlds like Gaia or massively multiplayer games like Runescape. The Web site with the highest amount of time spent per visitor in October was Pogo.com with 444 minutes/visitor. Number two was Yahoo, with just 291 minutes/visitor in the same period.

Games in general, and free games in particular, can provide a lot of cheap thrills.

Photo by pogo.com.

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