Back during my corporate years, we created many casual games for women and children. The amount of time both groups were willing to spend playing each game and watching our commercials between games was amazing. Today I learned that the AARP (association to help retired people) launched a gaming portal last week.

The VP for AARP’s Web Strategy and Operations says: "Boomers on the Internet spend more than 100 minutes of their leisure time per week playing video or computer games online.” I know that my mother won’t go to sleep until she wins at solitaire and I’ve seen that take hours.

The games are mostly puzzle games and the top game currently is Mahjongg Toy Chest with over 11,890,013 game plays to-date. It should be noted that the AARP game portal is a white label solution and my guess is that those numbers come from all plays across all networks. In any event, 2 bam, 3 crack!

What a smart idea this is for AARP. Get the seniors playing games and feed them important health information, deals, discounts and other marketing messages for AARP products.

It’s easy when you decide to work on a startup to only think about your demographic or whatever demographic the bloggers are discussing. But remember that there are so many other sets of people that can be marketed to. In this case, the 50+ set have lots of money to burn.

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