Seeding a game provides more consistent results
Because of the massive number of online gaming arcades and community sites and lower competition, it's much easier to guarantee traffic to a viral game. It's relatively easy to get your game on the front page of a few high traffic gaming sites, due to much less competition. Try doing that with YouTube or any of the other high traffic video sharing sites. Over-saturation has occured on the video sites, due to the fact production time and effort along with technical expertise required to make videos is much, much less than with games. Anyone can make a video in a matter of minutes, with increasingly inexpensive equipment and little know-how, and they often do. This has lead to massive competition for the audience's attention on the main video sharing sites.
You can get consistently higher viewing figures with a viral game
With effective seeding being easier and less competition for exposure, viral games typically (and more consistently) get many time more views than viral videos. It's common for quality viral games to attract millions (or sometimes tens of millions) of plays over their lifetime. Achieving these kinds of figures with viral videos is virtually impossible and reserved for only a very, very small number of videos.
Viral games can contain direct, clickable links to websites
One of the main advantages of viral games over videos is the substantial referral traffic they can generate. High clickthrough rates on embedded, clickable links can drive huge amounts of traffic to business websites or even individual product microsites. Clickthrough rates can be over 10% and are much higher than most other forms of online advertising, such as banner ads.
Viral videos, on the other hand, provide no way to embed clickable links. The best you can hope for is to insert web address text into the video itself and hope people that watch the video will enter the address in the address bar. Obviously, doing this just can't compete with the sort of traffic the direct web links embedded in a viral game can generate.
Viral games are interactive, not passive
With viral games, your audience aren't just passive viewers, they are able to fully engage and interact with the advert. This level of engagement can have a much greater impact, make your advert much more memorable and have a much higher chance of people coming back to see your ad more than once.
Viral games are trackable
Unlike videos, tracking code (such as Google Analytics) can be inserted directly into a viral game to not only show demographic info on players, but also track specific interactions with your advert, wherever it appears. This is invaluable to measure the success of a viral campaign, allowing accurate monitoring of actions like clicks on web links.
Viral videos can be used to promote viral games but not vice versa
Although it sounds a bit odd, we've often used inexpensive gameplay videos to effectively boost traffic to a viral game. Because it's a simple gameplay capture, it's fairly easy to make and therefore there's little cost involved.
Although videos are the first thing that springs to mind when discussing viral marketing, viral games are often worth considering as a better alternative. Costs are comparable, but the interactive nature of games can make them much more effective at engaging potential customers for longer as well as driving traffic directly to business websites.
Simon Walklate co-founder of multi-platform casual video game producers The Motion Monkey. For more info about viral Flash game production services please read here.