The Value Of Data
April 8th, 2009GameLife brings news of a new Nielsen study suggesting that female gamers represent the largest demographic in the industry. They also note that the reason for this is that the definition of gaming is so broad that it includes even the casual games built into your computer. Obviously, this is silly, but the part that confuses me is that this is Nielsen, a marketing data company.\
Research that isn’t actionable isn’t worth paying for. And this type of information - which is so undifferentiated as to be meaningless - is exactly that. Yet Nielsen, a company in the business of selling people information, doesn’t seem to understand this fairly obvious point. I assume that they’re mainly interested in trying to make headlines, but I don’t really get their angle.
Posted in Geoff, Idiocy |
April 9th, 2009 at 6:53 am
I tend to agree with you, but perhaps it would be possible to monetize that sector by making games that appeal to the Solitaire crowd.
Here’s a link to the Game|Life story: http://blog.wired.com/games/2009/04/female-demograp.html
April 9th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
I agree you can monetize it, but you can’t target effectively if you don’t segment effectively. And these generalizations are so broad as to be ineffective in delineating the market in the first place.