Following the recent Virtual Worlds conference in the US, emarketer publishes some interesting stats.
The first is that though the number of regular users (as opposed to dormant or duplicate accounts) in the virtual world Second Life has been stable for the past six months, the total number of hours spent "in world" has doubled over the past year from 15 to 30 million hours.
This backs up recent figures that show that while growth is stagnant in terms of live accounts, among people who are there, Second Life has a high rate of user loyalty of user loyalty or 'stickiness.'
The second relates to kids' virtual worlds being the big growth area in this medium. At the moment, a third (34%) of American kids and teens go into a virtual world once a month or more, supporting the notion of the next generation of web consumers being 'virtual natives'.
The rest of the article and findings are here.
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1 comments:
This is a fascinating trend, and has deep implications for marketers who are now losing their audience.
One thing we've seen in our research on how consumers use media is they tend to take their media habits with them as they age; for ex., senior citizens watch a lot of TV, the main medium of the 1960s, and the average age of today's video gamers is low 30s, while it was teens about 15 years ago.
So what kids are doing with games online will become the trend for tomorrow's main population.
As the new, younger generation migrates to "doing" things online with virtual worlds, texting, blogging, video uploading, and other creation/sharing exercises, they will spend less time hunting for things on Google or receiving content sponsored by advertising.
And that spells a coming crunch for advertisers. How will ads generate returns, if no one is paying attention? What happens to the old ad model of intercepting people who receive content passively, if people are now taking an active role in creating and sharing content?
Anyway, thanks for the thought-provoking charts.
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