IAC Launches Zwinktopia At Peak of Virtual World Hype
Michael Arrington
38 comments »
The timing couldn’t be much better for InterActiveCorp to launch Zwinktopia, a new virtual world for young teens. Other virtual worlds, such as Gaia, Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, Neopets, Club Penguin, Webkinz and others, are exploding in terms of unique monthly visitors and total time spent at the sites.
Until today, IAC’s Zwinky was a site to make customized avatars, choosing from 10,000 different outfits, accesories and other items, and embed them onto other websites such as MySpace. Users could also become friends with other users and enage in basic social networking activities. See Stardoll as well in this space.
Most of the functionality at Zwinky is accessed via a non-mandatory browser toolbar that users install. Zwinky says that they have 20 million active toolbars that were used in March 2007. Part of Zwinky’s business model is to collect search advertising revenues from toolbar usage.
Today Zwinky will add a virtual world to the site called Zwinktopia - users can use their avatars to roam around the world, chat with other users and engage in activities to earn Zbucks, the virtual currency of Zwinktopia. Zbucks can be used to buy virtual clothing and other goods.
Zwinky is part of the Fun Webs group at IAC, which includes Smiley Central, Cursor Mania and other sites and generates over $100 million in annual revenues. The Fun Webs group is part of the Consumer Applications and Portals group (iWon and Excite are within this group) and is led by Scott Garell.
Zwinky alone has 4.7 million worldwide unique visitors in March (Comscore), far more than Second Life and the other competitors listed in the first paragraph above. If a reasonable number of them can be converted into exploring Zwinktopia, it will become the largest immersive world outside of the gaming sites like World of Warcraft. See Comscore comparision data below (U.S. only).
See GigaOm’s recent article on Gaia, which is probably closest to Zwinktopia in functionality.
Update: The company will be running the television ad promoting Zwinktopia embedded below on NBC on Monday.
Time to get yourself cloned. Got clone?
Can’t wait for the killer app of social + third party data confirmation + porn.
yea i want web 2.0 interactive porn
Larry: no need to wait - look around - they are already here.
Teens?
As you note, its really interesting that IAC is employing a different business model than the other virtual worlds which have either relied on advertising, digital goods or subscriptions. Zwinktopia relies on a toolbar that enables much of the functionality includes a search box and will be usable both when the user is AND is not “in world”. Note that the search box occurs to the LEFT of the URL box… This tactic worked great for previous IAC products such as Smiley Central and Cursor Mania.
Will be interesting to see how they keep everything teen friendly and engaging while avoiding becomming a hunting ground for sexual predators.
I hope intense community moderation is in the plans.
what is behind the craze/hype around these virtual online worlds?
a short while back, i tried out Second Life - after about two hours total time, I uninstalled it. as a pc game, it sucks. as a business tool, i don’t see it.
all Zwinky is, could be wrong, is an avatar, to the next level - so to speak.
But Zwinky has been advertising like crazy online - i see their ads everywhere, so that should be helping their cause.
the myspace community likes to use photos of themselves; not some zwinky.
lol - that televIsion ad looks like something that came out of a cartoon from Asia.
What ever happened to The Palace? They were way ahead of the useless 2D-graphical-chat-system curve back before the thing we now call web1.0. Do any of these things have sticking power?
I must admit I’m over the age limit of a “young teen”, but I do enjoy these sites for “young teens”!
I guess this article shows that spam and pop-up ads work and that teenagers/pre-teens pay attention to advertising on the internet.
This is something that TC users will baulk at “What is this crap” -
- but the truth is 70% of Teens, would look at this and say “This is soooo cool”
- Just like they did myspace
This song should be to Will Smiths “Gettin Jiggy wit it”
i.e. “Getting Zwinki with it, nah nah nah nah, oh im getting Zwinki with it, nah nah nah nah nah”
fuck………….i should be in advertising
Wow. Those are some rather high stats for a site that appears to be targeted at an age group that falls younger than the suggested ‘young teen’ demographic. Sustainable user base? I doubt it. I suppose it depends what we consider young teens though. Based on the look and the absolutely horrid TV spot, I would guess they would pick up users in the 9-13 range a rapid rate. Anyone older than 13 being a regular user? We’ll see.
What I would be interested in seeing though is the effect that sites like these have on the social and psychological development of their target market. Our youth. One would think that promoting the tagline ‘Be Anyone’ in this type of envionment…for this age group, can’t be all too healthy.
Does anyone think it is kind of strange that all the pictures of the site are from a girl avatar? I’m hoping those aren’t from Michael’s personal Zwinky account…-Metagg
Does your Google have avatars and virtual worlds? I didn’t think so. Although they are probably ready to overpay a $1B to some online virtual universe and then do a mashup API (of course you still won’t be able to get to Yahoo’s HQ on their virtual world API maship map).
I recently saw a few stories on Digg (of all places) about a Barbie/Mattel “platform” doing the virtual world thing, girls can hang out and chat, buy virtual things with money and so on.
http://techwag.com/index.php/2.....on-web-20/
Kids playing “dolls” though computers as opposed to in person seems a bit odd, but perhaps I’m old and out of the loop.
It kind of reminds me of NeoPets, but without the horrible commercial bludgeoning.
I’m still wondering, long-term, how these metaverse-type things are going to hold up. The only ones that seem to persist and flourish are MMOs, probably because they’re compelling games, as well as 3D chatrooms. I’m looking forward to seeing more of these, until one eventually gets it awesomely right.
Isn’t something like this huge over in S. Korea, doing millions of business daily?
Look at whatever is popular in places that are more advanced / have more broadband penetration / etc, and something like that will likely gain traction eventually here, too.
Shanti - I think you are talking about Cyworld. That is huge. I don’t completely agree with your belief that looking to South Korea and Japan for trends makes sense. Culturally, they are very different countries.
SK Telecom tried to make a big splash by partnering with Earthlink to launch Helio in the US and Helio is bleeding cash.
@Arrington:
You forgot Runescape, Club Penquin and Mapplestory (or rather missed another 350m in this market)
@Lawrence:
“what is behind the craze/hype around these virtual online worlds?”
These 12+ tween and teen VW genrerate in excess of 6bn annually on a global scale, the largest users of ring tones, flash based mopbile games and social networking sites are used by this demographic, this demogrphic and thier parents who form the household purchasers of these products will be spending in excess of 27bn per annum on 3d VW, casual, mobile, based SN sites and games by 2011.
The demographic shift as well as purchasing pattern changes are in favor of this segment, they are gowing up and using tools based on a 3D VW enviornment metaphor.
That is the impetus behind this “crazy/hype” if you dont understand this perhaps go ask a 12 year old what runescape or mapplestory are, just dont be shocked when they look at you like your an outdated dinosaur.
I’d be interested to know what % of that 4.7M monthly unique number were repeat visitors and the average session time. Zwinky has been advertising pretty heavily so, I’m not surprised they’ve got traffic. I would however be surprised if they had customers that stuck around.
The 30 second television spot for Swinky — not Swinktopia — see above appeared last night during Heroes and agin during WEDDING CRASHERS — doesn’t look to me like that media buy is aimed at teens at all…nope Gen Y oe Gen x …How many teens are still watching TV at 10 p.m. at night– okay maybe they do? But I’m guessing this could skew much higher…in age. js.
Comscore measures website traffic. Second Life and WoW are client-based VW’s so Comscore only measures traffic to the signup page for new users and ancillary traffic. More accurate measurement (apples to apples) would be total usage hours which for Second Life were in the neighborhood of 13 million in April.
..and the zwinky client installs some kind of spyware/adware, including some “registry checker” and other such junk that ends up with about 20 popups. nice.
I want to zwinky games
I want to play zwinky games
I think zwinky is the best out there but if you can’t get on try MillsBerry.com and yuo see most of the same thing on here.
I know I forgot my glasses in the other room - but doesn’t the chart show five sites on the legend, and only four sites on the chart?
Why list Second Life if it didn’t make it on the chart?
HOLA