‘Stick Cricket, the world’s favourite online cricket game and cricket’s biggest independent website, has announced the renewal of its hugely successful partnership with Fox Sports. The new deal, which came into effect on 1st August, sees FOXSPORTS.com.au retain its lucrative position as sole distributor and promoter of Stick Cricket in Australia.
Stick Cricket is part of the Stick Sports family, which includes online football and baseball games that have captured the attention of male professionals around the world. As well as providing fun, free-to-play Flash games, Stick Sports have been pioneers of promotion via casual online games – one of the most exciting and effective marketing platforms to have emerged for years.
Last year’s partnership proved to be perfect, as big-name sponsors including Microsoft, Intel, KFC and Pepsi saw the potential of marketing through Stick Cricket. Companies pay to advertise both on www.stickcricket.com.au and in the game itself, with billboards and pitch areas displaying logos – just like in real international cricket.
Chuck Smeeton, publisher of FOXSPORTS.com.au, said: “We’ve been overwhelmed by the response to Stick Cricket . It’s a brilliant game that has become a favourite with our audience – for good reasons. Last season traffic to Stick Cricket increased by a third, with more than 3.5m unique visits, and we expect even more growth this season. Our partnership with Stick Cricket is an integral part of us becoming the number one cricket website in Australia, with 450,000 Australians visiting the site every month.”
In the four years since its inception Stick Cricket has become an internet phenomenon, growing rapidly from an online cult to its current position as the second biggest cricket website in the world. The explosion of interest in Stick Cricket has turned the game, which started as creator Colin Rowe’s hobby, into a money spinner.
The key to the site’s success is not only its extraordinarily high traffic – over 15 million games are played a month – it’s the demographic of young, professional men that has big brands keen to market themselves on stickcricket.com. Although many online games are targeted towards teenagers, Stick Cricket captures the key 18 to 30 professional market – young males with disposal cash.
On top of this, Stick Cricket has proved its “stickiness” – gamers keep coming back to play a steady stream of new branded games, to improve their online stats or to try to advance up the high score table. Players spend an average of around ten minutes on each game, giving sponsors a much better return on investment than traditional pop-up or banner advertising.
Paul Collins, Director of Sticksports, said: “Free online games are big news for marketing right now – especially for the overwhelmingly young male professional demographic who play Stick Sports’ games. We’re helping advertisers to take advantage of the trend towards viral and online game marketing, which is only going to grow with time.”
“By virtue of our success last year, with even more advertisers realising the huge marketing potential of Stick Cricket, re-signing to FOXSPORTS.com.au will effectively double our revenue from Australia in the coming year. It’s good news for FOXSPORTS.com.au, for Stick Sports and for the millions of Stick Cricketers in Australia.”
Paul added: “We’re expecting an increase in the numbers of users and the amount of time people spend playing Stick Cricket too. These will largely come from new developments such as online multiplayer games, two player same keyboard functions and even a full five day test match.
“We’ve recently launched Stick Baseball for the US market, as well as an addictive online soccer game – Stick Football. So we’re not just after cricketing countries; we want world domination.”