Numbers

 Posted by (Visited 10754 times)  Game talk, Music, Reading, Watching  Tagged with: , , , ,
Jun 262008
 
  • Number of users in Habbo Hotel worldwide: 20,000,000
  • “Hottest” book in the US last year according to Time Magazine: 1,500,000+. (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
  • Best-selling graphic novel in the US last year: 80,000. (Naruto)
  • Digital sales of a hit song: 2,100,000 (Leona Lewis, “Bleeding Love”)
  • Average downloads of a downloadable Rock Band track: 100,000
  • Viewers of the #1 show on US TV (including DVR): 28,800,000 (American Idol)
  • Viewers of the #150 show on US TV: 2,400,000 (Gossip Girl)
  • Users of World of Warcraft in North America: 2,500,000
  • Monthly uniques for Gaia Online: 2,000,000+
  • Total number of movie tickets sold in the US in one year: 1,400,000,000
  • Estimated tickets sold to the new Indiana Jones movie in five weeks: 42,290,849 (using 2007 average US ticket price and grosses to date).

Just some figures that caught my eye while browsing a few different publications…

Habbo hits 100m registered

 Posted by (Visited 8672 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Jun 262008
 

Sulka Haro just forwarded along a press release stating that Habbo has reached 100m registered users worldwide. For those counting, that means 1.5% of the population of the planet.

Some more stats gleaned from the release:

  • They get around 10m monthly uniques, apparently.
  • 20m registered in the last six months
  • 50/50 gender split
  • 70% 13-16 years old
  • 64% visit daily (which is higher than my usual rule of thumb of “half” — I usually use 2/3 for the week, not the day).

How many hot startups are VW-based?

 Posted by (Visited 9402 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Apr 292008
 

The SIA 25 Live (a snapshot from CNet)

The SAI 25 Live is this new index that is trying to track the hottest startups based on an estimated valuation figure. As you look at the chart, realize these figures are in thousands, so the top of the chart is valued in the billions.

Several of the top 25 are familiar names to readers of this blog and folks who hang around the virtual worlds space:

  • Webkinz
  • Habbo (why it’s not listed as Sulake, I don’t know)
  • Linden Lab
  • Stardoll

Of course, if you are on the Metaverse Roadmap bandwagon, then the stuff like Twitter also fits into the eventual metaverse picture, via the “lifelogging” quadrant. And Meebo, which many think of as just a chat app, has had great success with Meebo Rooms, which is basically am embeddable chat room that you can put on any website — another step towards web-wide synchronous interaction.

The table is intended only to show privately held companies, so many of the big players are absent. And many of these valuations are purely hypothetical — there isn’t necessarily a buyer at that price, and the markets aren’t exactly hot for IPOs right now either. But it does serve to demonstrate the attraction of virtual worlds as a category.

It’s also interesting to me how many of the others are ones I have never heard of. Tudou is a video-sharing site in China. Ozon and Yandex are Russian. There’s a bunch of job-seeking sites, and a bunch of ad networks.