Some Virtual World Market Numbers

There is a growing number of teens visiting virtual worlds. What is possible to deduce from this figure is that a teenager who is 16 in 2006 will be 21 in 2011. So maybe penguins will not be fun anymore. We can assume that grown-up virtual worlds will thus become increasingly more visited.
















From this second figure we can see that search engines are really the way to display influential ads. That's true, sometimes we query google not to get search results, but to get very relevant ads. For example, when you are searching for a specific hotel in a specific city, you want to see who is willing to pay to advertise their product on the top (or right) of the page. Interactive ads are the second winner for the most influential ads. I consider advergames and adverworld as being cutting-edge interactive ads, and there is still a lot to be made in that field, that's encouraging ! Advergames and adverworlds are not just ad billboards in an online environment, they are really created from scratch around a brand to advertise.





















To finish this post, here is an interesting figure about the number of hours spent on second life, which as you can read is provided by linden labs. This seems to go towards the opposite of rumours spreading over the internet and local newspapers. But let's be careful because the source of information is not so neutral.






















(eMarketer figures grabbed from this post)