Amazing New Numbers on Virtual Worlds

Follow this if you can: I found this article in the blog of Jiggy Stardust (Greg Verdino in RL), who found it in the blog of Neil Perkin (SL identity unknown) who found it in an article by Victor Keegan, writing in the UK online newspaper The Guardian about the theft of virtual furniture from a room in the virtual world of Habbo Hotel. Keegan listed nine statistics that show virtual worlds are slowing taking over, and some day everyone online will have a virtual self:

A few that I lifted from Neil’s article that he got from Victor:

– In South Korea, 43% of the population are already members of the virtual space Cyworld, a penetration level which means that every consumer brand wants a presence there. 300,000 business already offer over 500,000 virtual items for sale. (Note: this URL points to the US site.)

– China is currently investing $30 billion dollars in a 100 square kilometre site that will house the infrastructure (server farms, electricity, transport logistics etc) to host nine or ten virtual worlds, each of them capable of supporting over 150 million avatars. The underlying strategy of why they are doing this is ’strictly economic’.

– Corey Bridges, co-founder and exec producer of Multiverse (a company that provides virtual worlds for others and charges only when they make a profit), believes that virtual worlds will be bigger than the entire entertainment industry is now. “Virtual worlds are instantaneous while Facebook is timelagged,” he says.