I own a few gaming sites. They are great. However, it's not the highest paying niche out there. On the flip side you can use Amazon Affiliate to generate sales on presales of new games or just regular sales.
One guy i know opened gaming forum but that forum was more related to gaming cheats and stuff like that, now he leads more then 200k members and gets daily revenue from atleast 4 VIP subscriptions in value of 100 USD, i think gaming related forum is much better investment.
The market is too competitive I'm afraid, If you really want to launch a gaming site out there, you will require a good amount of start up cash to get get some sort of leverage over your competitor sites. Even in doing so, it will still be very difficult to generate viable returns. If you look at games like farmville, mafia wars etc there are always incentives in place to come back every day and login. And there are also potential repercussions should you not login in, so therefore the dedicated gamer always gets rewarded, I would advise to incorporate this to somehow incorporate this to your site
You can go into gaming niche but it is competitive. But the plus side is there are more than enough audience. You will need regular updates. The site will start earning after few months. It is easier to rank for smaller niche like "car racing games" or "Puzzle games for kids" or "Super Mario Games" or "Girls Dress-up games". Another idea is to make a site for specific language or country like a "flash game site in French". Its a lot of hard work but again nothing is easy. My 2 cents.
Thank you all for your valuable and realistic suggestions. I really appreciate it. @Cabrelle, I would like to discuss few things regarding your response to my thread. Will send you a PM shortly. Thanks,
Yes, if you can manage to get a catchy name and have something original about your site. Also, you need a viral marketing campaign. It depends on how you plan on promoting the site. As far as SEO goes, you can't compete with too many keywords. Search engines are the most valuable traffic source online but if you can find a good way to monetize lower quality traffic than you could focus on a wider variety of categories. There are both. The biggest network that supplies free games for gaming portals is MochiMedia. They let you upload games to your site but all the games feature their ads. You will also get a cut from the ad-revenue that your site brings in, if you host the swf files on your server. Hopefully that helps. PM me if you have any other questions. I am also just starting out in this niche and I don't mind helping out a fellow webmaster
Thank you very much mate for the detailed response. Yet, this is the most helping response I have received so far (with facts and resource). I will be in contact with you for further discussion. Thanks,
There's a few ways to go about it when looking for games. One way is to look for places that sell flash games as a package such as AV Arcade. Its a killer deal for a bunch of cheapy games. The second way is call MochiAds which is a system that places games in your site and you actually get paid when people play them. I cannot be sure how credible the company is for paying out but a lot of people use em so I think its all good. The downside to this sort of thing is I don't think you can create your own description for the games and without unique content it will be hard to rank up in google.
I have created a game site about 4 month ago, i have done just a little seo i am Google page 1 for several high target keywords, if you know seo and have the time to do the linking then you wont have a problem getting traffic
biztrendz - most of these guys dont know what they are talking about. I as well run arcade websites (see sig) and they are very profitable. If you can do SEO, you can also be competitive in online arcades. Hell, you can even just buy and trade traffic and I know guys making a killing doing this. Visit the arcade webmaster forum for more info, Im a mod over there and we're all very helpful! edit: I only read the first page, but brainstormingin gave some good advice also.