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11 Oct

New KZero report: Toys, Media and Virtual Worlds – Creating the Golden Triangle

Kids/Tween Worlds, KZero Clients, Teenage+ Worlds, Virtual Goods, Virtual World strategy

We’ve just released our latest report called ‘Toys, Media and Virtual Worlds – Creating the Golden Triangle’.

The report, in presentation format, aims to provide professionals in the toys, games, TV and movie sectors with guidance and insight into the key opportunities and strategies available in the virtual worlds sector.

Importantly, it also recommends how to align all three elements into a cohesive community building and revenue generating platform.

Areas covered include branded virtual goods inclusion, community and awareness building, research and development, character development and many others.

Also included in the report are examples of projects deployed to date. The free report can be requested here.

 

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6 Oct

Some Monsters are for Nurturing, some are for Fighting

Kids/Tween Worlds, KZero Clients, User Analysis, Virtual Research

Leading UK virtual world Moshi Monsters is getting a lot of the limelight at present with various brand extension strategies such as toys, tv and music. Hot on their heels are Bin Weevils, going from strength to strength from a user acquisition perspective. Now there’s a new contender in the mix, or rather a Monster – Fight My Monster.

Whereas Moshi Monsters leverages a core play mechanic of Nurturing (definition:Interested in looking after their avatar and pet if applicable. Likely to be younger boys and girls, plus older girls), Fight My Monster focusses on pvp battles adopting a trading card style mechanic. Of course, like most other worlds and online games in this demographic there’s also a raft of mini-games.

Fight My Monsters is growing relatively quickly, up to 300k users since their launch in Jan 2011 (91% from the UK). The chart below shows registered account growth (summer holidays are always good for acquiring users in the KT space).

Average session lengths are also on the rise, indicating a strengthening user engagement relationship. Continue reading →

1 Sep

Fans flock to Virtual Worlds on Facebook

Kids/Tween Worlds, KZero Clients, Teenage+ Worlds, Virtual Research

A year ago we looked at the popuarlity of Facebook fan-pages for a number of popular virtual worlds, including those with users under 13. The results, i.e. the number of respective fans for each virtual world were not surprising, with the larger worlds enjoying a higher number of fans than the smaller ones.

The chart below shows the same analysis one year on. Across the board – increases. But of course that’s to be expected as these virtual worlds (and most others, regardless of target market) use Facebook for a variety of reasons. And, of course Facebook itself is grown.

Some worlds actually use Facebook to communicate directly to parents of their users, whilst others promote events and competitions. Another growth area is using Facebook during beta trials to both recruit new users and . Probably the area with the biggest potential is . More about that in a future post.

 

So what do we see here?

maintains pole position with a huge number of fans (in reality they actually even more fans then we’re showing in the chart but we’ve taken the fan-page with the highest following).

They’ll be breaking through 1m fans and on the tails of pretty soon. We’ve taken IMVU out of this analysis because this focus is on KT&T.

has grown massively during the last year with 500k fans now with Hello Kitty Online (note – a young brand) coming in with over 300k fans.

Another future post and supporting report will look right across the spectrum of all virtual worlds using Facebook as an acqusition and retention tool.

Moving on, some of you may look at the chart above and comment that Facebook itself has grown significantly over the same 12 month period so seeing increases in the fan-pages of virtual worlds (and any other group on Facebook) shouldn’t be a surprise. We asked ourselves the same question and did some further analysis. Continue reading →

18 Aug

Age Profiles: All worlds

Kids/Tween Worlds, KZero Clients, Teenage+ Worlds

This is the final post in our series looking at age profiles of popular virtual worlds. Here’s the full presentation:

VW age profiles 2011
View more presentations from KZero Worldswide

 

Shown below is the summary chart containing all worlds in the analysis.

Post one looked at Bin Weevils and Moshi Monsters, post two featured Chimpoo, Stardoll and Poptropica and this chart now pulls in age profiles from Habbo and SmallWorlds.

For SmallWorlds the chart shows a fifth of the user base aged 13 then a flattening out at the 7% – 9% level from 15 t0 18.

Interestingly, Habbo shows nearly an exact opposite trend.

In the last post the topic of play profiles and visual appearance was highlighted as a key factor that determined the ages of users attracted to worlds. Shown below are the avatars of the worlds featured.

 

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18 Aug

Age profiles: Chimpoo, Poptropica and Stardoll

Kids/Tween Worlds, KZero Clients, Teenage+ Worlds, User Analysis, Virtual Research

This is the second post in this series looking at age profiles of popular virtual worlds (the full report is the next post). This post looks at two of the largest worlds, Poptropica and Stardoll, along with an ‘up and comer’ in the form of Chimpoo.

Stardoll has over 116m registered accounts with a user base pretty well distributed between North America and Europe. Poptropica has over 170m registered accounts and is strongest in the US. Chimpoo has 4m registered accounts with a user base largely from India. Here are the age profiles for these three worlds.

This chart highlights the impact that different play patterns and user experiences have on the ages of users inside virtual worlds.

For example, Stardoll is primarily dress-up, with users (predominantly females) customising their avatars with clothing. This is an evergreen play pattern, appealing to tweens just as much as teens.

As this post from 2008 shows, Stardoll even resonates with the Mothers of users, with over 60% playing Stardoll alongside their children and of this group, another 60% visit Stardoll without their children. Continue reading →

16 Aug

Age profiles: Moshi Monsters vs Bin Weevils

Kids/Tween Worlds, KZero Clients, User Analysis, Virtual Research

We’re a few days away from releasing our latest report on user age profiles in the Kids, Tweens and Teens virtual worlds market. So, in the meantime, here’s a look at two UK-based worlds gaining significant traction – Moshi Monsters and Bin Weevils.

Our age profile analysis visualises the ages of registered users in a simple to understand chart. First up – Moshi Monsters. The chart below compares 2011 data.

The sweetspot user age is 11 to 12, showing a one year increase from last year, indicating that Moshi is doing a great job with user retention – not surprising given the amount of brand-driven marketing they’ve been doing.

The profile has also widened slightly from last year into younger ages. As this brand continues to grow, the virtual world element becomes part of a larger brand framework and therefore kids are interacting with Moshi via multiple touch-points.

This ‘widening’ might also be as a result of increased efforts in the US. Year on year, the US element of their userbase has proportionately grown against the UK. The chart below shows the top eight countries for Moshi Monsters. Continue reading →

27 Jul

Q2 2011 VW cumulative registered accounts reaches 1.4 billion

Kids/Tween Worlds, Teenage+ Worlds, Universe Graph

With the largest quarterly increase since we started tracking in 2008, the virtual worlds sector now has 1.4 billion cumulative registered accounts. That’s an increase from Q1 2011 of 214 million. Not bad.

Growth has come from several sources in Q2 2011. The big boys of the sector continued to grow strongly, with excellent numbers from Moshi Monsters (up 16m to 50m), Poptropica (up 26m to 170m), Habbo (up 20m to 220),  IMVU (up 5m to 55m), Minecraft (up 5m to 10m) and Stardoll (up 22m to 116m). Encouraging growth all round and also interesting that these worlds span a variety of different play and socialisation types, such as dress-up, nurturing/pets, casual gaming, chat and UGC.

The table below shows the quarterly numbers by age range.

The five to ten year old segment grew 17.6% from Q1 to Q2 assisted primarily by increases from Poptropica and Panfu. The next age segment, 10 t0 15 year olds grew by 16.2%, with Moshi Monsters and Stardoll leading the charge. Next up, the 15 to 25 year olds increased the most with a quarter-on-quarter uplift of 23%. A modest increase was seen in the 25 and older segment – this is a growth area with several companies looking to tap into this underserved market over the coming months,

Here’s the Universe segment for the 10 to 15 year olds.

 

The full high-res versions of the Universe charts can be ordered here. We’ll be releasing lower res versions via our shortly and via Slideshare.

 

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28 Jan

Q1 2011 Radar chart: Existing brands, sports and content creation

Kids/Tween Worlds, KZero Clients, Virtual Worlds Radar Chart

After a short hiatus the Radar chart is back with a bang for 2011. The first segment is shown below and contain live and in-development virtual worlds. This part of the Radar shows worlds based on sports, existing brands/IP’s (books, movies and TV mainly) and content creation.

The sector for existing IP’s being turned into virtual worlds is the hot-spot for 2011. New entrants and in-development projects are mainly based on existing brands with a heritage, i.e. they are well-known established properties such as Dorothy of Oz, The Ministry of Silly Games (Monty Python), Star Trek, Tom and Jerry and Back to the Future. These are properties with existing fan-bases, therefore providing major opportunities to leverage the incumbent awareness into active users.

The full Radar chart can be ordered here.

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30 Sep

Universe chart Q3 2010: 10 to 15 year olds

Kids/Tween Worlds, Teenage+ Worlds, Universe Graph

Virtual worlds with an average user age of between 10 and 15 account for 46% of the total market – that’s 468m of the 1.009bn as at Q3 2010.

Shown below is the updated Universe chart for this age segment. Stardoll leads this segment with 69m total registered accounts and has experienced extremely strong growth year to date.

Neopets pops into second place with 63m with Club Penguin in third with 47m, accordingly to our estimates and data access.

In terms of worlds in development (blue dots) there’s some interesting concepts entering the market.

Lego Universe will of course be an interesting one to watch, particularly bearing in mind the client download factor.

The other in-development worlds are largely what we call ‘Vertical’ worlds – virtual worlds themed into specific genres, as opposed to the more generalist casual gaming and socialising platforms already in the market. Adventure in Oz and Star Team (both KZero clients) are examples of movie/IP-led worlds coming to market.

Our complete report covering Q3 2010 registered accounts and all segments of the Universe chart can be ordered here.

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Strategy

Business Planning

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24 Sep

Virtual worlds successfully using Facebook to grow user bases

Kids/Tween Worlds, Strategic Marketing

You might be interested to learn that virtual world IMVU has almost 1.4m fans of their .

Why do they use Facebook? Lot’s of reasons…

  • It’s a marcomms channel: IMVU communicates the latest news, competitions and user updates
  • Their users also use Facebook: So it makes sense to go where their users are when they’re not in IMVU
  • Rewards: IMVU offers ‘secret sales’ to their followers on Facebook
  • It boosts viral activity: Push notifications from users extend the viral reach

The second point above is the no-brainer of course. But, you might be even more interested to learn that virtual worlds with users below the minimum age requirement (13) for Facebook for similar purposes (and more, explained later). Let’s not kid ourselves – Facebook is chocka-block with under age users. And it’s also full of users at the higher age range end of these kids/tween worlds.

As shown in the chart below (worlds ranked by average user age), whilst these KT&T worlds are not quite at IMVU levels in terms of followers, they’re not doing badly.

Some of these worlds integrate elements of their virtual world experience into Facebook, therefore broadening their reach. Others (most actually) use it is a marcomms channel to speak to their users and the parents of these users (Jumpstart is a great example of this). Others use the Facebook Connect feature to automate the registration process – a great idea.

Continue reading →

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