AdSense for Games: Could RIAs be next?

Google today announced a public beta for AdSense for Games. What’s unique about it is that it’s primarily targeted at Flash games with partners like Mochi Media, Konami, Heavy Games and others. This is significant for a number of reasons. First, because the online casual game market is growing quickly. According to Google’s blog post 25% of internet users play games every week. But perhaps more importantly this is really the first time that AdSense has been incorporated into Flash. Google has built in hooks that allow content creators to show contextual advertising at the beginning, the end, or in between levels.

Using AdSense inside of RIAs has been all but impossible until now. Scribd had a hack that allowed them to show AdSense inside of their Flash-based iPaper but beyond that there haven’t been a lot of good examples of using AdSense inside of RIAs. In fact advertising inside of rich Internet applications is something that continues to be difficult to do based on the current web model. Matthew Johnson from blist has some good thoughts on this.

My hope is that AdSense for Games can be a driver for helping bring together Google’s advertising platform into the new real-time RIA experiences on the web. It continues to amaze me that a platform like Flash which is so much a part of advertising on the web has yet to really find away to incorporate that advertising in its applications.