Rafat Ali wrote, "While it is not for sale officially . . . they will consider it if they get the right offer for it.  This would be a decently big one – until last month when its 19.2 million uniques came in slightly lower than EA, according to ComScore, Yahoo Games has been the top gaming site for the past five years."

The question, then, is who might buy Yahoo Games.  Ali put forward Best Buy and GameStop as two possibilities.  Or as MySpace pursues a new image as an "entertainment portal," it might become a contender, as well.

One more important note: theoretical prices haven’t been mentioned.

Anyway, HotJobs and Yahoo Small Business are the two other Yahoo properties that we’ve previously mentioned as being on the auction block, and at the rate things are going, it’s possible that quite a few other sites could join them up there before long.

The category attracted 87 million U.S. visitors in May 2009, up 22 percent compared to a year ago.

Yahoo Games was the most popular with 19.4 million visitors, representing a 6 percent increase over the past year, followed by EA Online with 18 million visitors (up 34 %), Nickelodeon Casual Games with 14.8 million visitors, and WildTangent Network with 13.8 million (up 16%). GSN Games Networks saw particularly strong gains in the past year, growing 563 percent to 6 million visitors, due in part to the additions of WorldWinner.com and CrazyMonkeyGames.

"Online gaming continues to be one of the top gaining categories over the past year growing at ten times the rate of the total U.S. Internet population and reaching nearly one out of every two Internet users," said Edward Hunter, comScore director of gaming solutions.

"And the growth in the category is occurring not only at the top gaming destination sites, but also through viral distribution platforms, including widgets and applications. In fact, some online gaming companies that distributed their games across sites are reaching as many people as the top online gaming sites."

Distributed content platforms can often reach audiences of a size comparable to online gaming destination sites. MochiMedia reached a combined audience of 16.9 million in May, greater than all but two sites in the online gaming category. Games2Win reached 1.8 million people, which compares favorably with the top twenty sites in the category, while Tetris Online reached 165,000 people.

American’s total amount of Internet time spent playing online games grew from 3.7 percent in December to 4.9 percent in December 2008.

Yahoo Games ranked as the most visited site with 19.5 million visitors (Up 20%), followed by EA Online with 15.4 million visitors (up 21%), and Disney Games with 13.4 million visitors (up 13%). The tenth most visited site, Spil Game, saw traffic boom 269 percent to 6.7 million visitors.

 ComScore

"It appears that online, ad-supported gaming is one of the activities that has benefited during this economic downturn," said Edward Hunter, comScore director of gaming solutions.

"Not only have consumers turned to outlets such as gaming to take their minds off the economy, but as they curtail their discretionary gaming-related purchases they are turning to free alternatives."

Online display advertising is also doing well in online gaming.  From November 2007 to November 2008, the total number of display ad views in online gaming grew 29 percent to 8.6 billion.

The increase in display ad exposure is due mainly to the increasing number of visitors (up30%), while the average person’s frequency of exposure has remained relatively constant at 127 ad views per person.

"The growth in display ads in the online gaming category not only underscores the assertion that gamers are increasingly accepting of ad-supported games, but also that the advertising community is recognizing the value of this highly engaged audience," added Hunter.

"It is also likely that the advertising agency community will begin to demand more evaluations of campaign effectiveness in this space as spend and impressions continue to rise."