turtlethink.com » Statistics

Virtual Worlds more popular than Facebook?

Mark Kizelshteyn — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:39:18 +0000

In a report from Nielson Games, Second Life is ranked the second Top PC game title in March. Virtual World News points us to this latest report, which looked at a 180,000 homes in the U.S and monitored Web and application activity. World of Warcraft is ranked number one, however, Second Life saw an average use of a 760 minutes per week, higher than the weekly use of World of Warcraft. The obvious problem that all virtual world enthusiasts point out is that Second Life is not a game like WoW. Although one of its many applications can be a game, it is not necessarily a fair comparison. Check out the rankings:

I am a bit surprised by this statistic, but it does reveal the underlying popularity of virtual worlds, which are only on the rise. “Massively points out that the virtual world [Second Life] is also topping out over popular social networks like Facebook and Myspace.” Also noting that “This data is measured from actual homes…Almost 200,000 of them, so it isn’t just data that’s centric to the hardcore gamer. This is a random sampling of ordinary people.” Here is a summary of their analysis:

YouTube: 47 minutes per week (via Cnet)
Facebook: 84 minutes per week (via Cnet)
Myspace: 10.5 minutes per week (via ITProPortal)
Second LIfe: 760 minutes per week (via Nielsen)

These numbers are pretty shocking and show both the popularity and robustness of virtual worlds. Where will they take us? Who knows, but we still need a lot of work on the infrastructure of virtual worlds before they become as ubiquitous as social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

[Via Virtual World News and Massively]

Inauguration Day’s Impact on Social Media

Mark Kizelshteyn — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:48:18 +0000

The international nature of this inauguration was unprecedented, but the magnificence lies in the active engagement it offered to millions of people across the planet via the social web. No longer limited to the those directly around ones vicinity, people were sharing and engaged with Obama, DC and the entire world. This campaign has set a precedent for the way politics will employ social media. From the protests at Bush’s inauguration 4 years ago to the hyper-happiness and participatory culture of Obama’s — we will never see politics in the same light. Thank you social web.

One of the neatest things that happened were all of the social image mash-ups that were put together. Millions of people emailed photos to one of the many aggregators (NYTimes, CNN, et cetera), and we were able to see some incredible footage that was simply crowd sourced. CNN, thorough Microsoft’s PhotoSynth, did one of my favorites. Check it out here.

Mark Ghuneim, Founder/CEO of digital marketing agency Wiredset and social media service Trendrr, put together can excellent post on Mashable.com about the incredible impact the Social Media Sphere saw on inauguration day. Not only was it a politically memorable day, but technologically too. Check out the numbers (as put together by Mark):

Twitter — “Tweets containing “Obama” hit 35,000 per hour during his speech, and topped 150,000 for the day.”

YouTube Uploads — “There have been 332,000 new videos uploaded to YouTube with the tag of “Obama” this week, and 17,000 new videos for “Inauguration” in the last five days, 10,000 of which came in the last 24 hours [of the inauguration].”

Images on Flickr — 30,000 new uploads tagged “Obama” in last 24 hours of the ceremony.

And Blogs… — This is was just record breaking. Technorati reported 18,000 new blog entries related to Obama on that day alone.

These are all mind blowing figures. After allowing this to digest for a few days, I am left with the question of whether this all happened because of Obama or the factor of Social Media. Undoubtedly, it is a mix of both, however, what would we have seen if McCain had won. I am sure we would have also hit unprecedented social media happenings as result of technology today, but, is it the embrace of the Obama campaign that has and will keep this fervor alive?

Kzero Virtual Universe Chart

Mark Kizelshteyn — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 04:37:55 +0000

K Zero released a series of charts indicating the population of virtual worlds in the fourth quarter of 2008. They are pretty neat, and I recommend checking them out. They give you a good idea of the evolution and size of virtual worlds and how many there really are!

Here is an example of one. This one shows the virtual world population for those who are between 15 – 25.