Market sizing and addressable markets (Europe)

I’ll be writing a post later this week about the importance of target market analysis and criteria for companies developing new virtual worlds. This post (and two subsequent ones) will serve as data-points and reference.

As the number of virtual worlds increases and new worlds are launched outside of North American (particularly from Europe and Asia), it becomes increasingly important to understand not just the overall market size but also the addressable market. In other words, identifying and measuring the population of a country and those households with internet access.

So, this post is simply a set of graphs breaking out KT&T segments by age, country and market size. First up, children between the ages of five and nine across Europe. The first graph, show left contains the overall country populations, split by gender.

Turkey leads the way here with 3.6m boys and 3.4m girls, followed by Russia with 3.4m and 3.2m respectively.

Are their home grown virtual worlds for Turkey and Russia? Yogurtistan is the only world that springs to mind at present and is actually targeting an older age range – explaned later in this post.

Now, let’s filter out from here homes without internet access to produce an addressable market place for the five to nine year olds in Europe.

This is the graph shown right. Whilst the sheer size of the Turkish marketplace means it retains a dominant position in Europe, higher internet penetration ni the UK, France and Germany pushes these countries to the top. France actually comes out top of the list with 1.3m boys and the same again for girls as an addressable market place.

Moving onto the next age range, the graph left shows the 10 to 14 year old age range. No need to show the overall populations now because it’s the addressable market we’re interested in (the population of internet access).

This is the most intensely targeted age group from both existing and new (in dev) virtual worlds. For boys and girls, the highest countries in order are Germany, UK, France and Turkey.

Lastly (shown right) is the 15 – 19 year old range. The clear leader here is Germany with 1.6m and 1.5m girls respectively. Virtual worlds in Germany focusing on this age range? More than you might think. We have sMeet, Club Cooee ,Freggers and Twinity plus several more in development (and an expo coming up soon as well.

Interestingly, the UK is next highest for boys and girls, followed by France and then Germany. Considering the size of this market there’s not a great deal of action in this space in terms of virtual world although US users do feature heavily in the top 5 countries for the majority of US-based virtual worlds.

So, finishing off this post, here’s some headline numbers (with a litle rounding up and down) for the total addressable market in Europe based on the countries selected:

Boys aged 5 – 9 = 8.3m

Girls aged 5 -9 = 8m

Boys aged 10 -14 = 8.6m

Girls aged 10 – 14 = 8m

Boys aged 15 – 19 = 9.6m

Girls aged 15 – 19 = 9.1m

Total boys = 26.6m

Total girls = 25.3m

Total = 51.9m

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