The world's second greatest website (behind this one)

Journal entry for website content, target audiences, benefits and drawbacks

The website that I chose is called Penny Arcade. It is a comic for the online community that spawned from humble beginnings into the online comic with the largest readership on the internet with over 518 650 unique IPs a day

The comic is based on the cartoon lives of two people named Tycho and Gabe who are gamers. As such a fair proportion of the material used in the comics is geared toward a target audience of gamers. Without some understanding of the games industry including products, games and developers and other genres associated, such as anime, the absolutely friggen hilarious humour may go unnoticed until a more generic subject is found. However, it is possible to understand some of the gamer – minded humour without knowing the background to it. The links below highlight this point:

Anime

Gamer 1 Gamer 2

Slight understanding

Generic 1 Generic 2


As you can see, ball bustingly funny.

The content is generated by the crazy minds of the two blokes who have an uncanny ability to ridicule and satire the industry they are a part of so well. The fact it’s done so bluntly and randomly makes it absolute comedic gold. Articles relative to the industry come from news, reviews of games, cons currently going on etc. The generic humour tends to be the more random stuff.

Revenue from this site is generated by advertising (with so many UIPs per day, people are willing to pay to hit the target audience so specifically) and merchandise. (t-shirts, hoodies, stickers, posters, shot glasses etc.)

The only draw back of the site is that the target audience could be seen as “narrow” compared to other websites. But, one needs to consider that the game industry is now a multi-billion dollar one with young children to 30+ adults. So thinking of it as a “gamer” site makes it seem like a small target audience, yet in reality millions of people could view it daily.