Guess who just launched the fastest-growing virtual world ever?: Sciam Observations
Guess who just launched the fastest-growing virtual world ever?
A. Blizzard (World of Warcraft)
B. Linden Labs (Second Life)
C. Mattel (Hot Wheels, Barbie, etc.)
All right, so it's obviously C, otherwise why is this blogger jabbering at you, right?
Last night at the Digital Life preview a Mattel rep--who, just to make the conversation extra surreal, actually looked sort of like Barbie--told me that in the first 60 days of its existence, the new online virtual world Barbie Girls has signed up three million members, and they're adding new ones at the rate of 50,000 a day.
Just for reference, it took Second Life 3 years to reach 1 million members.
Access to the world is free, the dolls that get you in-game pets and other goodies are not, and the whole shebang is still in beta.
Between this and the runaway success of WebKinz and Club Penguin (which, all by itself, already has a valuation of $500 million - nearly what Rupert Murdoch paid for Myspace) I can only imagine what a future populated by people who literally grew up living in virtual worlds would look like.
In other words, all the stuff that is now newsworthy in Second Life might become routine: Shareholder meetings in protected virtual spaces? Speed dating in virtual restaurants? What if the 20-years-hence successor to World of Warcraft really does become "the new golf"?
>> More on kids and their virtual worlds from a recent NYTimes piece.
UPDATE:
I had a chance to subsequently verify these figures with the PR rep whom I spoke to in the first place. Lauren Dougherty of Mattel says:
"I had referenced that we were rapidly *nearing* 3 million with 2.75 million registered users to-date and a growth averaging between 40,OOO - 50,000 new registered users per day."
