For those of you who don’t know, Xfire is an IM and file-sharing client for gamers, as well as a community portal. You may have seen a recent article on CNN: Is Xfire the next MySpace? It inspired me to run a few questions past Frederic Descamps, Xfire’s Sr. Director of Marketing and Biz Dev. Enjoy!
Has Xfire performed any studies that quantify the effectiveness of advertising via the client? What sort of return on investment can an advertiser expect from a standard banner placement?
The banner ad located at the top of the Xfire client application is indeed one of the most popular locations for advertisers. One of the reasons is that Xfire users spend on average 90 hours a month using the Xfire client, as opposed to just a few minutes a month on average on any given leading gaming news site. Our client application ad is also static, non intrusive, and is the only ad displayed in the Xfire client application — giving it great impact.
Xfire is the only marketing platform in the world to offer targeted and behavioral advertising by demographic information, geographical location, actual games played, files downloaded, and more. Our targeted advertising allows for very precise and therefore efficient marketing, which in turn means higher ROI: if you want to run different ads respectively for WoW, CS: Source or RTS gamers, you can; if you want to run different ads whether people have downloaded a trailer or played the demo of a game, you can!
