Gamesville
 |
|
| Subsidiary of Lycos | |
| Industry | Online Games Developer/Portal |
| Founded | 1995 |
| Headquarters | Waltham, MA, United States |
| Products | Various, visit website for full product listing. |
| Revenue | N/A |
| N/A | |
| N/A | |
|
Number of employees
|
N/A |
| Website | http://www.gamesville.com |
Gamesville is a casual gaming portal founded in 1995 in Boston, Massachusetts by Steven Kane, Stuart Roseman and John Furse. Gamesville was acquired in 1999 by Web portal Lycos for $232 million in stock. Gamesville’s tagline is "Wasting your time since 1996".
Founded on a minimal capital base, Gamesville operated not just as a games provider but as a targeted marketing operation, offering free games and prizes to members as a way to attract large numbers of users while tailoring their proprietary games to meet the demands of advertisers. To play, members must provide demographic information; in turn, members would receive targeted ads based on the demographics provided. Gamesville pioneered the use of interstitial advertising as a method of monetizing game players.
Gamesville's first game, The Bingo Zone, enabled hundreds of people to compete against one another in real time, for free, and win up to $20 by getting a bingo. Initially, Kane was skeptical of launching a free online bingo game because bingo is traditionally associated with the elderly rather than the prized demographics most advertisers seek. However, on the day Gamesville.com launched in April 1996, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about Gen Xers playing bingo in bars, and Kane is quoted as saying, "It was as if God had whispered to us."
Over the years, additional free games with cash prizes were added, including card, trivia, puzzle, and several bingo variants. This approach attracted many visitors: In August 1999, Gamesville.com was the "stickiest" site on the Internet with eBay in second place.
In November 1999, internet portal Lycos announced that it would spend $270 million in stock to acquire Gamesville.com, which at that time had approximately 2.2 million registered users.
Gamesville leveraged its relationship with Lycos to obtain the rights to produce the first (and to date, the only) online version of the popular television game show The Price Is Right in 2002 although the license was dropped after one year.
In 2002, Monster.com profiled Gamesville's Rewards Manager, Josh Yeager, citing him as holding one of the Top 10 Coolest Jobs on the Internet. Yeager estimated that he sent out between 1,000 and 2,500 prize checks weekly, indicating that "some days I feel like the Bob Barker of the Internet, other days like Santa Claus himself." There is in fact more truth to this statement than at first glance, as Gamesville, for a brief time in 2002, had hosted the exclusive Internet game rights to The Price Is Right.
...
Wikipedia