Miniclip's Rob Small

I set the business up in 2001. I'd just left university - I'd done a degree in tourism management, so totally unrelated to what I do nowadays. But I met Tihan Presbie who's my co-founder. He was a trader in the money market in the US, had done quite well for himself but was interested in climbing over the fence and no longer investing in successful companies but really wanting to establish one himself. He'd seen the growth in a lot of the internet stocks and I was looking for something to get my teeth into, so it was good timing. We got together with the ambition of setting something up online, although at that stage it wasn't exactly clear what that was going to be.

We were fortunate that we discovered early on macromedia flash, which of course we know nowadays as being a very big and successful software used for entertainment, but back then it was in its infancy and not really being used by very many sites. But we backed that horse - we thought it was going to be a crucial technology. Tihan came up with the idea of doing a dancing George Bush animation. He pulled a few dance moves in his kitchen and I filmed it and animated it into a little interactive movie clip.

We really had no idea has this was going to perform. We just pushed it out and sat back and for the first couple of weeks nothing really happened. Then I remember I got a call one Saturday afternoon from the tech company we were using for our hosting who informed me that our servers had gone offline due to the amount of traffic they'd received. It had got picked up by someone in the US and had gone like a viral rocket. We got calls from news and TV networks who, I guess, had never really seen anything like this before.

I think even now it could be one of the most widely played viral releases on the web ever. We estimate it's been played over 300 million times. But we needed content that would keep visitors on the site for longer, so we started sourcing more mainstream games, we started building games ourselves and hired a few people.

We're very pleased that we had, I guess, quite a first-of-its-kind and unusual business model and were able to start monetising through advertising while giving away our product for free. And there weren't many businesses back then doing that. Most operating then were the big MTVs and Disneys who were re-purposing a lot of their old content. I don't think they understood what the web was going to be or how to tackle it.

Fast forward nine years and we've got 100 people working for the company, we've been profitable for eight of our nine years, we've got 550 games on the website of all different genres and 57 million unique users every month spread very far and wide.

You're right. We were fortunate that we had that stroke of genius. Sites were desperate to hold onto all of their stuff. If you were Viacom and you had made a music video, why would you want anyone to be able to publish it except you on your official website? They were also going through the nightmarish problem of all of the issues around piracy of music online. So that kind of reinforced their stance - they all sort of pulled back immediately from any way of wanting to share their content online. We thought that, at the end of the day, it's intrinsically in the make up of a lot of these young people that they can access stuff readily and freely. And whether or not you choose to make it accessible, they will get their hands on it. So we embraced that and thought, well let's just package up the games so they've got branding in place to drive users to our site then just let people come and take them.

And what's happened, I guess because we were one of the first in this space, is that a lot of the companies that come in - a lot of the copycat businesses - and created the million and one flash games sites that are out there, often feature Miniclip games on them. So the success of those sites, in a way, helps benefit us and grow our popularity in the market as well. Had we not done that then I think we would have been forced to compete more directly against some of these up-and-coming casual games businesses who wouldn't be using our content and helping us to grow our audience. They need games, they're generally set up initially by hobbyists who are in exactly the same position as we were, and it's a no-brainer for them to take some of our games for free and publish them on their own site. We cover the hosting of the games too, and now provide high scores in them, so it's pretty much zero risk for them.

I saw Alex St John's comments on that. He was saying that Facebook really had no idea that games were going to be as successful as they were - it just got dropped into their lap off the success of one or two titles... And yes, clearly we see the success of Facebook and we can all learn from that. I see it as being a slightly different angle from what we're trying to do. Our focus is on building a single destination site that is the number one place to go and play casual games. The social games on Facebook are more about cooperating with groups of friends and are slightly more simplistic in most cases, like Mafia Wars.

Also there's a lot of issues around the age problems with Facebook and youngsters lying about their ages to get onto the site and create accounts. And the security issues surrounding that. I think we can learn from that and certainly if you look at Miniclip we are embracing to some degree those social aspects - multiplayer gaming, challenging friends, we've got a cool new feature that allows kids, and anyone else who plays, to create a little league of their friends for every game that they play in. They can create a little physical representation of themselves that we call a YoMe and then compete head-to-head. These are the kinds of things that are driving usage on the social networks and things that we can learn from and benefit from on our own site as well.

It's a reasonably high number. I don't know off the top of my head, but because of the success we've had with things like Club Penguin, we've obviously driven quite a deep connection with that demographic. And that's been deliberately from our perspective because that's been a very elusive demographic that people like Disney and Time Warner used to have watching their cartoons on TV, but who now are spending much of their time online and who advertisers see to being a very valuable demographic.

So we want to make sure that we capture that audience. But with the success that we've had, and the number and breadth of the games we've built, we obviously have users in other demograpics that enjoy playing perhaps some of the more mainstream games that appeal to say the housewife demographic - the puzzle games, hidden object games, sudoku, those types of titles.

But part of the reason that Miniclip has grown to 57 million users without spending one pound on advertising, ever, is because we have been able to capture that demographic and they're so chatty. They're in the playground and they're talking about the games they're playing. You seed an idea with one of them and, before you know it, every friend is playing the same game. It's a really powerful group to connect with, and advertisers know that we haven't spent money on advertising and therefore we can do for them what we've done with our own brand.

Yes, well that's what we're seeing. We're seeing the demographic mix extending because, as you say, a lot of those initial successes that we had were nine years ago now and those guys are probably at university. But when we speak to our audience and get feedback from them we see that they're university students playing all the new games and all the old favourites they used to love.

We can't compete against consoles clearly on quality. But we can compete on the fact that our games are predominantly free. And that they're very successful from any device that you might choose to access them - we now support iPhone, we're just about to release games on the DS and the Nintendo Wii, we showcased in the keynote that Eric Schmidt did for the new Google Nexus phone because our games play in the browser on that phone.

So we believe that by having our content available through the browser, however things might move in the future, we will continue to be able to reach the audience. I think the concern when you're going down the console road is that things move so quickly in that market it's very easy to get left behind, and although you might have an intensive period of success for a year or so, it's very difficult to build a very long pipeline of successful titles. You can see that by the bumpy road a lot of the older development studios have had in recent times. Even having something like a Tomb Raider under your belt doesn't guarantee you're going to be successful forever and a day.