IMVU selling over $1m/mth in virtual goods June 25, 2008
Posted by jeremyliew in business models, games, games 2.0, gaming, mmorpg, virtual goods, virtual worlds.trackback
GigaOm says that IMVU is generating over $1m/mth in revenue:
Flying under the proverbial radar for the last four years, the web-based virtual world chatroom IMVU has released new jaw-breaking data: Since April 2004, it has amassed 20 million registered accounts, with 600,000 of those active monthly users. By comparison, Second Life took five years to acquire about 550,000 active users.
The company, well known to web surfers because of its ubiquitous ads, is now earning $1 million a month in revenue, 90 percent of that from the sale of virtual currency and 10 percent from banner ads embedded in its interface, CEO Cary Rosenzweig said. That works out to about $1.66 a month per active user.
This is within the range of monthlyly ARPU for MMOGs. The article notes that Peak Concureent Uers (PCU) is around 70k, so ARPU based on PCU is >$14/mth.
IMVU sells credits to its users who use these credits to buy items from their catalog to personalize their avatars. The vast majority of the items in the catalog are user generated. Of the 20m registered users, 100k are registered to make items in the catalog, but only a fraction of these are active. Still, they have created 1.7m items, so are averaging 20+ items created per active “item maker”.
Interesting stats.
Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog 
Another perspective on the type of money being genrated is tha on the panel at the Social Gaming Summit, Cary reported that 10 users that made custom items for the IMVU store in 2007 had made over $100k from sales commissions. One user made over $1M.
If IMVU really does chose to publicize their company in the coming months as promised, I expect IMVU is going to one of those companies tech/VC people love to talk about and compare their future endeavors to.
Those numbers given at the Social Gaming Summit appear to be speculation and not fact. A serious discussion has taken place between some of the top developers, none of which earned 100k let alone a million. Cary has since apologized to the developing community for this.
Um … wow.
If speculation, even if extreme speculation it still says there is money in gaming and if fact… wow… truly gnarley dude…
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[…] a 3D instant messaging and social networking product with over 20 million avatars and more than a million dollars a month in revenue. Back then, we just had an early product and a vision that we could make money by […]
Nice numbers. Keep up the good work.
Interesting read. I hope it’s up a bit more since last year =)