I've seen a lot of people running arcade sites (although of course that means the market is saturated). I'm wondering...are they really that profitable? And do most run off just advertising? If it is a good thing to look into, are there places where I can just buy a script with a bunch of games?
yes, if you market your site the right way it can be very profitable. usually peolpe get a YPN account OR Adsence account.
Define "marketing your site right." Has anybody here ever tried an arcade site with myspace? (Not the whore trains, genuine profiles like the guy from 15kchallenge.com/blog/)
I think the idea is that people kinda enjoys running them (that or they are somewhat knowledgable about the topic since they spend their time playing the games anyway). I run video-websites and they're not very profitable. If you want quick money you better look somewhere else.
My friend has a somewhat-new arcade site (see signature), but he doesn't pay for advertising. Word-of-mouth has gotten some visitors to the site, but most of the returning ones are kids from school.
I know that Chris's www.excessively.net game site does well, but Chris is exceptional in this type of SEO. He has very good rankings in Google now.
true marketing an arcade site takes time to boom, except if you hit the jackpot. I've been working for 3month for my game site, and still traffic is minimal, probably due to the google sandbox. So mostly traffic are coming from paid/links exchanges
You're not going to make much money with Adsense on an arcade site. High paying ad networks don't accept those types of sites anymore.