Dubit Research has produced an exclusive report for the Virtual Worlds Forum giving key statistics for how tweens use virtual worlds and their attitude towards advertising. Dubit Research, a youth marketing agency, runs a standing panel of 600 7-12 year olds in the UK, and has asked them a series of questions relating to which virtual worlds they use and how they feel about advertising in virtual worlds.
The results show that 73% of British 7-12 year olds are using some sort of virtual world. Club Penguin leads the pack with 43%, Habbo following with 27%. There is remarkably little fragmentation in the market: only 8% use a virtual world other than the top 10. What surprised me most about the statistics is how even the gender split is on many virtual worlds – entirely even on Club Penguin, and similar on most other games, although Runescape is, as one would expect, far more popular with boys.
In my interview with Richard Bartle last week, he argued that the reason children play virtual worlds to a far greater extent than adults is because they are simply more comfortable with a new form of media, rather than because virtual worlds are inherently more attractive to children. His thesis was that 'the mainstream will come to virtual worlds' as the children literally grow up. Yet that isn't an argument that seems to be supported by these statistics. There is a clear drop off in the percentage who visit virtual world usage after the age of ten, rather than a sustained level. This is far from conclusive, however, since it is entirely possible that not as many current 11 and 12 year olds are playing virtual worlds for precisely the same reasons that adults don't – because they were older when they first appeared. Only after a few years of this kind of data will we be able to come up with some conclusive results.
There are also some statistics on advertising. On the downside, only 45% of kids definitely remember noticing advertising, suggesting that it is often missed. The good news, though, is that about 70% of those asked rate brand presence in virtual worlds as 4 or 5 out of 5, indicating at least a lack of antipathy.
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