The bulk of the current avatar/virtual world press is focused around a younger demographic, starting with the tween worlds of Webkinz, Club Penguin and Runescape, and then followed by slightly older-leaning sites like Habbo, Zwinky and Gaia Online. What's interesting is that at Meez we definitely see a primary user base in the late-teen audience, but we also see a hard core user base among mothers, originating mostly from Cafe Mom, Babycenter, and 2 Peas in a Bucket.
We originally thought that this was primarily due to an aspirational group of teenagers role playing as mothers in our forums and other community areas, but it became clear when looking deeper at the data that this was actually a significant group of 25-45 year old mothers, with an intense interest in online communication, but without a suitable identity until they found Meez. Why use an avatar? Since it is both more flexible and less personal than a photograph, it ends up that an avatar is perfect for forums, IM and social media.
So we see thousands of incoming users a day looking for our pregnant and mom's item boutiques, and those items are generally in our top 10% of all items saved or purchased each week on Meez. Our older users repeatedly asked for additional body types ("my meez is too thin" was the top comment), and we delivered a wide set of 3D body types, including, thin, athletic, curvy, plump and pregnant, and one would be amazed at the diversity of female choices each day, unlike men who almost always choose "Buff" (who knew men were visually oriented ?). And we continue to be surprised at the velocity and variety of You Tube Meez videos produced each day, including this Alison Krauss-themed, child-related music video (here) so we're pretty jazzed about the overall trends among a large set of users.
The key point is that avatars are used by a much wider audience than just teenagers - moms are a growing demographic for Meez, and we'll easily see a time within 5 years where literally everyone who is regularly online has a primary avatar. This will create an additional revenue source beyond teens since this demographic is an incredibly attractive advertising target as well as a lucrative virtual item audience - e.g. most of our pregnant-related items are our top-selling virtual items. So we're looking forward to diving more deeply into this sector.
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