Advertising World of Warcraft and Eve Online

One of the complaints I continuously heard while playing EverQuest 2 was that the SOE marketing department didn't advertise the game.  I haven't seen the reaction yet to Blizzard's advertising for Cataclysm on Fox's football broadcasts yesterday, but I will bet some of the veterans are not happy.






Of course, as Blizzard-Activision (as the company should be named) depends on World of Warcraft for so much of its profits, television advertising for the MMO giant makes sense.  And with the revenue WoW brings in, advertising on television is possible.

But lower cost options are available to game companies, as anyone who has seen the ads for F2P games on gaming sites knows all too well.  CCP has gone one step beyond that in looking for new players.  The Icelandic company is using Google Ads and its Adsense feature to advertise throughout the blogosphere.  And when I mean blogosphere, I don't mean just game sites.

One of the biggest websites in the political blogosphere is Instapundit, a site run by Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds.  When I visited the site this afternoon, I was greeted with this sight...

Those gifs look familiar

Followed by this...

Well, Glenn DOES like capitalism

I do believe that using Google Ads could have some drawbacks, although I think this juxtaposition I spotted a little later worked out well...

Not true, carebears are welcome in New Eden

But to see if the ads showed up on both sides of the political fence, I visited The Daily Kos, one of the largest liberal U.S. political blogs, and yes, Eve Online made an appearance there also.

Does Markos know he's promoting laissez-faire capitalism?

I'm actually glad that CCP has decided to advertise this way, because that means I see a lot fewer adds that would annoy me.  Now if SOE would just take the hint.