Last semester in Professor Snyder's MCS 222 class we had a guest speaker named Joel Breton come talk to us whose job happens to be working on addictinggames.com. I learned that MTV had recently bought Atom Entertainment for a whopping $200 million, but continues to limit the number of advertisements and does not feature any ads specifically for MTV. The types of ads you can find on addictinggames are ads for Shockwave games (some are free, some you have to purchase to play), Comcast, Disney-related ads, and a large amount of ads for the social networking site Habbo, as well as the virtual pet site known as Neopets. For the most part, these ads seem to be directed at tweens to teens who probably spend a lot of time playing online games. Habbo specifically labels itself as an online hangout for teens. I think the prevalence of websites such as these shows how often we turn to the internet for entertainment and to socialize with others rather than the real world. When you are chatting with someone on a social networking website, you really have no idea who that other person is and it becomes a very impersonal way of socializing. I also think that by advertising to the younger generation means that teens will pressure their parents to buy them the games they can't play for free online.
