According to Boston-based Forrester Research, the old stereotype of the young male online gamer is out of date. Nearly half of today's gamers are between the ages of 30 and 59, split almost equally between men and women, according to the research. And now media firms are catching on.

Hearst, Corp., which publishes Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping and Harper's Bazaar, landed a two-year deal with Arkadium Inc., an online game developer. The goal of the agreement is to attract traffic to Hearst-owned websites by integrating a number of online games to the various sites.

"It's a growing source of time for people online…Gaming is one of the things you can do in the web environment that you can't do offline," says Chuck Cordray, vice president and general manager for Hearst Magazines Digital Media.

Even without the Forrester research, comScore's Media Metrix reported in January that Yahoo! Games had received 21 million unique visitors.

In the past few years, Hearst has been one of the few media companies that have experimented with adding games to its website. The results showed that online games alone were responsible from 5-10 percent of the total traffic -- and that was for teen titles such as CosmoGIRL! and Seventeen, both publications designed with the young female demographic in mind. The key seems to be simply to tailor the games to the site.

A game titled "Boy Toy" on Cosmopolitan's site challenges users to manipulate their boyfriends. The user wins if either the relationship lasts for a year or she breaks up with her "boy toy," and she loses if he dumps her.

The CBS Sportsline website, for example, has already added 30 different games and has plans for an expansion to accommodate the various audiences that might be interested in its site. The site also has games designed to tailor to advertisers, such as trying to get the Michelin Man to score a goal.

"We don't think of it anymore as two kids in the garage with tattoos listening to [the band] Fall Out Boy," CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith says. And it's simply not anymore, according to research.