as more developers turn to Flash for its vector-based, interactive capabilities for complex game creation, and its cross-platform near loss less technology for video compression.
Perhaps more than any other type of site, entertainment sites enjoy a particularly valuable quality: user retention per visit. In 2006, each YouTube visitor, for example, averaged nearly fifteen 1/2 minutes per visit, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.8 Because videos and online games provide a potentially longer user experience (once started, users tend to watch a video or play a game to completion), entertainment sites are able to keep visitors locked in, feeding them more advertising and offers to purchase products. (Using fifteen 1/2 minutes as an average retention time, a Web site that rotates a new display ad once every 30 seconds would feed 31 different ads to each visitor—an exceptionally high rate.)
Keeping content fresh is one of the highest priorities for entertainment sites, as most videos and games lose their ability to entertain after the first few times they have been watched or played. While user retention per visit might be higher than it is for many other types of sites, keeping users coming back to entertainment sites is more of a challenge. Much like an e-commerce site, which pitches its best products on its Home page, entertainment sites constantly need to seek out better ways to entertain and must frequently refresh their sites with new and exciting products.
The high user retention rates and increasing volume of traffic to entertainment sites make them a potentially explosive platform on which marketers can gain visibility among a large audience of potential customers. While standard display and video commercial advertising on these sites has perhaps been the most popular means of leveraging entertainment sites, some marketers take more creative approaches. On video sharing sites like YouTube, for example, some brands have posted their own videos, in the hopes of capturing attention.