It almost sounds like a word game. It’s called Yoo-Mee, as in I play against you. Or better yet, yoo the advertiser get to play with mee the content owner. The concept may be as innovative as it is complex, as Hooked Media announced today a new a gaming platform aimed at the over 200 million people who play casual games.

Here’s how it works. Yoo-Mee engages players wherever they play – on websites, in social networks, and via mobile devices – to create communities. Within that community the players keep coming back to play, compete, and discuss.  For publishers, by plugging into the Yoo-Mee platform, their existing user-base pulls players from social networks and across the web to their sites using one simple embed code. With deals in place with top game studios, Hooked Media is in a unique position to continue to grow the Yoo-Mee community by distributing games through the Yoo-Mee platform.

“We are creating a more emotionally invested experience for casual gamers. Yoo-Mee makes any game social by creating a community experience around each game,” says Hooked Media CEO Prita Uppal.  “Developers can integrate their existing games into Yoo-Mee, web publishers can embed a full game experience onto their sites, and everyone benefits from additional revenue.”

There’s a virtual currency angle as well. Yoo-Mee allows players to compete one-on-one with each other or in group tournaments, and keeps track of high-scores, virtual currency, and social media connections. Casual gamers will be able to obtain virtual currency by playing their favorite casual games and wagering against one another.  Yoo-Mee will support two types of virtual currency: the first currency, Tokens, is a loyalty currency that users obtain by simply playing games, inviting friends and playing with one another. The second currency, Gold, is purchased and used in one-on-one challenges to earn real money.

Hooked Media partners with publishers by turning content rich pages and existing solitary game experiences, like crosswords, word puzzles, and Sudoku, into money making pages. This creates new ways to conduct user acquisition, and brings virtual currency into the publisher revenue model where it did not exist before.  Publishers will connect to their user base wherever users are engaged.  Through Yoo-Mee, users directly bring their social connections back to the publisher's site to play games against their friends through social media, like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.  This increases page views and traffic per month. Publishers reap the benefits of increased engagement for their websites and newly directed traffic via social media. They will additionally receive revenues generated at their websites from the micro-transaction based virtual economy.

Who is Hooked Media? It’s a San Francisco-based a social gaming company backed by $4.5 million in funding from U.S. Venture Partners and Altos Ventures. It has been innovative so far in getting content and advertising together via gaming platforms. For example, advertisers benefit from Yoo-Mee by reaching target audiences when they are most engaged across multiple channels. By sponsoring game plays and tournaments in the Yoo-Mee network, ad messages can be pre-rolled before games start or become a sustained part of the visual frame in which the game is played and can target by demographic, content and gaming genre. Marketer messages will have multiple exposures because of the social media features incorporated into Yoo-Mee, such as users posting their scores and challenges to their favorite social media pages.