Characteristics of Virtual World Users

Hav­ing looked, in the pre­vi­ous entry, at the eco­nomic con­di­tions sur­round­ing vir­tual worlds, I am now turn­ing my atten­tion to the demo­graphic pro­file of those users.

Over­all Numbers

The over­all pop­u­la­tion, accord­ing to MMOG Charts, is cur­rently about 12 mil­lion peo­ple strong. What is inter­est­ing, how­ever, is the growth rate: look­ing at the linked chart, one can see the pop­u­la­tion dou­bling at an increas­ing rate: it took 24 months to get from 6 mil­lion to 12 but it took 48 months to go from 3 to 6. This accel­er­at­ing rate of growth is an inter­est­ing one. Assum­ing that few other fac­tors change, one could envi­sion a 24 mil­lion peo­ple strong pop­u­la­tion within the next 12 months or, on a more con­ser­v­a­tive basis, within the next 18 months. Con­sid­er­ing the upsurge in sto­ries about the phe­nom­e­non in the main­stream press, growth will, at least, con­tinue at the same pace over the next year. A recent esti­mate shows that Sec­ondLife is grow­ing at a rate of 22 per­cent a month though a more con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate shows a growth rate of 15 per­cent. Any which way you play it, this is a fairly high growth rate.

Age

The videogame indus­try has evolved and every year, the aver­age age of videogame con­sumer is increas­ing. At the cur­rent time, the enter­tain­ment soft­ware asso­ci­a­tion esti­mates the aver­age videogamer age to be 31. They also say that the aver­age gamer has played for about 12 years, which would mean that they started at 18–19 year old.

Based on that data point, one could assume that the vir­tual world phe­nom­e­non would slant young. How­ever, research by Nick Yee of Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity points to an aver­age age of 26 years old for those users, with only 25 per­cent of the over­all pop­u­la­tion being teenagers. While Yee’s num­bers are for the cat­e­gory of vir­tual worlds as a whole, more gran­u­lar data is avail­able for cer­tain worlds. In Sep­tem­ber 2005, IGN enter­tain­ment reported that the aver­age age of play­ers in their sur­vey was 27, which seems to be echoed by 2004 research at the Uni­ver­sity of Not­ting­ham Trent (UK) which puts the aver­age age of play­ers at 27.9 years old. Also of inter­est, a recent post on Nature’s weblog points out that the aver­age age for peo­ple in Sec­ondLife at 33, which slants older than even the gen­eral gam­ing cat­e­gory. This seems to bol­ster the claims that those envi­ron­ments are not games but real vir­tual environments.

Edu­ca­tion

In “Vir­tual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Mar­ket and Soci­ety on the Cyber­ian Fron­tier”, Edward Cas­tra­nova, of the Uni­ver­sity of Indi­ana at Bloom­ing­ton, points out that 35.6 per­cent of the peo­ple he sur­veyed in those envi­ron­ments had a 4-year col­lege degree or more. Yee’s study showed that 33 per­cent of the peo­ple he sur­veyed were stu­dents. How­ever, he also showed that, for the non-student pop­u­la­tion, 44.8 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion had at least a col­lege degree. This num­ber in and off them­selves are mean­ing­less but, when com­pared to the US Cen­sus data, they are amaz­ing: accord­ing to the 2004 cen­sus, 28 per­cent of the over­all US pop­u­la­tion had grad­u­ated from col­lege. What this shows is that this phe­nom­e­non is pri­mar­ily dri­ven by more edu­cated peo­ple than the average.

Employ­ment and salaries

Of course, this higher level of edu­ca­tion has some effect on the employ­ment pro­file of denizens of those worlds. Castranova’s paper high­lighted that 53.4 per­cent of his respon­dents were employed, with hourly salary aver­ag­ing $20.74. Assum­ing 2,000 work hours a year, this trans­lates into a $41,480 yearly salary. By com­par­i­son, for 2002, the last reported year, the US Bureau of Labor and Sta­tis­tics reported an aver­age US yearly salary of $36,214. Assum­ing a sim­i­lar 2.5 per­cent yearly increase over the next two years, this would trans­late into $38,047.34. What this means is that vir­tual worlds denizens tend to be more afflu­ent than the aver­age Amer­i­can citizen.

Engage­ment

While the demo­graphic data is inter­est­ing, the engage­ment met­ric is the one I’m most excited about. Nick Yee esti­mated that Everquest play­ers spent 22.9 hours per week in that world and that peo­ple spend 21.9 hours per week across the cat­e­gory as a whole. Sim­i­larly, Ed Cas­tra­nova found that Denizens in Nor­rath, a World a War­craft server, spent an aver­age of 29 hours there a week. When taken together, those sta­tis­tics point to a level of engage­ment that is on par with tele­vi­sion in the United States, which presents new oppor­tu­ni­ties for marketers.

Con­clu­sion

The demo­graph­ics pro­file of vir­tual worlds shows users who are young but more edu­cated and more afflu­ent than the gen­eral pub­lic. The trends in user num­bers show a hockey-stick growth pat­tern that will look famil­iar to any early adopter of tech­nol­ogy, high­light­ing that this is a nascent indus­try about to go main­stream. Because the lev­els of engage­ments for those users are very high, I expect sto­ries in the main­stream media to soon come out talk­ing about addic­tion to those worlds (in a fash­ion sim­i­lar to the sto­ries that came out about inter­net addic­tion, blog­ging addic­tion, etc…) which will val­i­date the stay­ing power of those worlds.

From a busi­ness stand­point, I’d rec­om­mend to my read­ers that they take a seri­ous look at how they can expand their busi­ness in this arena. In my view, what we are see­ing here is the emer­gence of a new way to engage with the Internet.

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