I have noticed over the last year or so a huge boom in online financial comparison services. From the likes of Money supermarket who started comparing loans to confused.com and now gocompare.com that lets you find a range of prices for car insurance. Its a booming market and is effectively just affiliate marketing on a national mass market scale. I like the idea, I mean its a win win deal. All the companies using them to sell get more car insurance sold, the middleman gets a cut and the customer gets cheap car insurance, I mean that’s pretty mutually beneficial for all parties. Its rare that on such a large scale something can work so well. I cant help but think that if the insurance companies were dynamic enough they would have started their own equivalent sites, or sold more successfully to avoid the need to use these middle men sites. But then I suppose they may well do, and even if they do perhaps the extra sales are always welcome so they can never have enough outlets to sell insurance.

In that way I cant see that a well implemented version of a comparison site can fail. Provided it is run well, set up with flare and allows you to easily compare car insurance or another financial product then it cant really fail, the moneys there!

Now don’t get me wrong I had a misspent youth, in one year I spent over 1200 hours on a first person multi player shooter (some of you may know it) named Counterstrike source. Xfire the gaming messenger was the deliverer of that life culling statistic (it only monitors your gaming hours when on it - so god forbid the actual figure!) To start on the list of games I completed, owned, rocked and played would be a long list of wasted time so I will shuffle on.

Games are big business, 10 years ago they were there, great at the time but in comparison to modern fps titles they were drops in an ocean of content. Of course Hollywood has been along for the ride - but then when hasn’t Hollywood been involved in big money media’s?

The unseen market I mean to discuss now is that of online gaming. Its big, it combines the network aspects that founded the thing we call the internet with the fibre of fun. It is addictive, consuming and insanely entertaining and only really beginning to become dominated.

Gamers are techy people, so if you wanted to sell techy stuff, particularly online - there’s almost no better audience to target. But on the 5 gaming clan sites I just checked out, all you can see is game server hosting banners and these forums are abused let alone used. So acting as an affiliate marketeer I see that gaming related sites could produce well.

With a bit of cash you can compete on a serious level in the gaming market, powered by the fact that there’s a world of clever, active and lifeless gamers - and there’s without a doubt millions online now. They provide cheap labour, effective administration and great up to the minute content. Start a gaming community, let them manage it and move on to another?

Ok I got completely side tracked there…more on this another time..