We just self taught and made a few politically themed games: the first big hit was Dancing George Bush, which we sent out to about 4,000 people, and in a couple of months it had been played by about 2 million people. I think it was maybe Flash 3 or Flash 4 back then. We started using Flash as a development tool. Back then, a lot of the media companies who were in that space were the kind of old-school MTVs and Disneys and Warners who were trying to repurpose a lot of that content they’d made for TV and still trying to figure out what they were doing. We met through mutual friends, and back in 2001 we wanted to start an online business, and we had looked at the overall sector.Īt that point, it was just prior to the big explosion that happened, and we saw that there was an opportunity – we discovered Flash fairly early on, and saw that there was an opportunity to use it to develop content specifically for the web. I was fresh out of university and an avid console gamer evens since my parents gave me the ZX Spectrum 128K with a little tape deck on the end! Tihan had come from a trading background – he’d been trading the futures market and things like that. Well, background-wise, we started in 2001, and I set it up with my business partner Tihan Presbie. How did the site start, and what was the initial pitch? We spoke to Small recently and asked about the site’s history, its plans for expansion into social networking, and its developer relationships. The site’s biggest demographic is the “tween” market – users between the ages of 8 and 12, and the age group responsible for $170 billion in spending in 2006, according to Euromonitor – though Small notes that the company is careful to source and develop content to target many different demographics. Much of the content is also advergaming, with companies like Coca Cola, Disney, Gillette and Warner Bros. Currently, the site hosts over 260 games, the vast majority of which are unique to Miniclip.
Founded in 2001 by CEO Robert Small and his business partner Tihan Presbie, UK-based Flash gaming site Miniclip has since gone on to become the most popular gaming website, with over 36 million unique users a month – an astonishing number, and one that makes the site the largest privately owned entertainment portal on the internet.
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