UPDATE, April 26th, 2007: Barbie is now also getting in on the action with Barbie Girls. This story is about human context, social proximity, and a sense of place. Susan Wu thinks so too, and her prediction about web 3.0 (are we there already?) is that it will be:Ĭontinuing down this path of improving the user experience of living and socializing online. If demographics are destiny, then we can expect more and more people to interact with each other in casual immersive worlds over the next few years. One can’t help but notice that all of these immersive online worlds are targeted at kids and teens. This has likely helped them grow more quickly than other casual immersive worlds such as Second Life and IMVU, which are also growing fast, but not as fast.
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Its worth noting that all of these are websites with no download required. Some are mainly ad supported ( Neopets, and effectively Millsberry), others rely on subscriptions ( Club Penguin) that deliver certain privileges, and others rely on transactions, either in the real world ( Webkinz) or for digital goods ( Habbo Hotel, Gaia. These worlds are all exploring different business models. You’ll need to make sure he takes care of himself, so you’ll need to get food (from the shopping area) and make sure he exercises (by playing games), but you’ll also get to go on adventures, solve mysteries and have all kinds of fun while visiting Millsberry!Įven Lego has announced its plans to release a casual immersive world in 2008 You create a citizen of the city and discover Millsberry through his eyes. Millsberry is a fun virtual city for you to explore. With it, you enter Webkinz World where you care for your virtual pet, answer trivia, earn KinzCash, and play the best kids games on the net!Īnd a dark horse entrant that I was unaware of until recently – Millsberry, run by General Mills (the manufacturer of cereals), is getting 2.2m UU/mth. Webkinz pets are lovable plush pets that each come with a unique Secret Code. Webkinz, who I mentioned last week as one of the few sites getting their users to visit more than 10 times per month, is also at 4.1m UU/mth. Best of all, it’s completely FREE!Ĭlub Penguin, who Susan also got to speak for the first time on her panel at web2.0 expo, is also growing like crazy – 4.1m UU/mth in March.Ĭlub Penguin is a kid-friendly virtual world where children can play games, have fun and interact with each other. With your help, we have built a community of over 70 million virtual pet owners across the world! Neopets has many things to offer including over 160 games, trading, auctions, greetings, messaging, and much much more. Neopets® is the greatest Virtual Pet Site on the Internet. The original casual immersive world, Neopets, is still going strong, with 4.2m UU/mth in March according to Comscore. Interestingly enough, Gaia isn’t the only casual immersive world that is getting meaningful usage in the US. Even press darling Second Life, currently reporting 1.7m log-ins in the last 60 days, is lagging Gaia‘s usage. ( I draw a distinction between casual immersive worlds and games such as Runescape and World of Warcraft). Gaia has been pretty quiet about its growth until recently, but Susan Wu was finally able to get them to break their silence by getting Craig to speak at her panel at Web2.0 Expo last week.Ĭasual immersive worlds have not previously been as popular in the US as they have been in Europe ( Habbo Hotel) or Asia ( Cyworld). Furthermore, he claims 300k users log in each day for an average of 2 hours per session, and in their forums area they are getting an average of 1m posts per day for a total of over 1 billion posts so far. (nb Comscore only has them at 700k UU/mth in March).
In an interview with Gaia‘s CEO, Craig Sherman, he quotes that Gaia has gone from 0.5m unique users/month midway through last year to 2.5m UU/mth last month. “The world’s fastest growing online world hangout for teens.” Gaia is a casual immersive MMORPG that describes itself as: Wagner James Au has a great post on GigaOm about Gaia.
Kids and teens have pushed at least 6 immersive online worlds to over 2m UU/mth in the US ApPosted by jeremyliew in Consumer internet, gaming, Internet, kids, social media, social networks, start-up, startups, user generated content, web 2.0.
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