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Interesting IMVU stats

June 24th, 2008 (Visited 4213 times) Tags: 3d web, imvu, ugc, zwinky

These all come from this interview. They sort of put paid to the notion that a mass market UGC business cannot thrive, I think!

They seeded the market with 2000 items
Have now registered 100,000 developers, with “tens of thousands” active
And 20,000,000 users registered (no word on active uniques)
There are 1,700,000 assets on their marketplace right now
1,200,000 of them are full 3d
3,000 new ones a day and 100,000 new ones a month
Resulting in revenues of $1,000,000 a month from digital currency sales for IMVU
And $1,000,000 a year in revenue for the top developer
60% female, 40% male
40% of users outside the U.S.

For comparison, Zwinky reported 9.5m registered and 4.6m active back in September.

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12 Responses to “Interesting IMVU stats”

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Second Life - Forum, Community, Portal - Aw: Interessante IMVU Statistiken und Fakten - Forum fuer Second Life wrote on July 17th, 2008 at 3:18 am:

[...] Gefunden auf Raph Koster�s Blog: * 100,000 registrierte Developer (zehntausende aktiv) * �ber 20,000,000 registrierte User (keine Uniques) * �ber 1,700,000 virtuelle Produkte sind im IMVU Marktplatz gelistet * gerade einmal 2000 sind vom Betreiber IMVU inc. selbst * 1,200,000 dieser G�ter sind full 3D * jeden Tag kommen 3,000 neue Items dazu * IMVU erwirtschaftet monatlich $1,000,000 durch den Handel dieser virtuellen G�ter auf der Plattform * $1,000,000 erwirtschaftet der Top Developer durch IMVU im Jahr, viele weitere mehrere $100,000 * 60% der IMVU User sind weiblich, 40% m�nnlich * 40% der IMVU User wohnen au�erhalb der USA Link & Quelle: http://www.raphkoster.com/2008/06/24/interesting-imvu-stats/ [...]

Reader Comments

Richard Boehme said on June 24th, 2008 at 8:26 pm:
That’s great news. With this news comes the question of how content is organized and sorted. With something like this, the ability to know what you can choose from is as or more critical than the variety of content itself. If the content is there and you can’t easily find an combine it, it doesn’t help you.
John Swords said on June 25th, 2008 at 6:32 am:
I would guess that the active user base is 10-20% of total registered, similar to what we’ve seen in other worlds and services. Because IMVU is a persistent desktop application, I do wonder how they internally calculate what an active user is. For example, I see 9 million people online in my Skype application every day, but who knows how many people are concurrently active.
Laura said on June 25th, 2008 at 10:31 am:
This is great to see… free client + micro transactions is a great business model to get your product out there, let people try it, and encourage the people who like it to actually pay you money. Taking it a step further and letting other people create the content which is making you profit? Now that’s a stroke of sheer genius…
Michael Chui said on June 25th, 2008 at 6:05 pm:
For example, I see 9 million people online in my Skype application every day, but who knows how many people are concurrently active.

It would depend, as always, on what you mean by “active” and why you’re tracking it. =P
Brian Gilman said on June 25th, 2008 at 6:49 pm:
I think that the stats show that this kind of model may have the potential to be viable in the future, but going by what they’ve presented, I would be surprised if they are breaking even.

Going on the assumption that 20% of the registered users are active, that leaves us with 4,000,000 users. 1 million dollars per month of revenue, split between the active users, gives us an average of 25 cents spent per user. Not very impressive.

Unless they are running an insanely efficient operation, I don’t think they are seeing black. It’s worth noting that the word “profit” wasn’t mentioned once in relation to their company in the interview.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the future however.
Jessica Mulligan said on June 30th, 2008 at 5:49 am:
What I don’t yet have is a clear picture of how they make $1 million per month. IMVU states they make 90% of their revenue on credit sales, but they give back the great bulk of those to 3rd party developers when users buy virtual items. Developers do pay a one-time 500 credit fee to submit an item, but that amounts to only around $1 million total revenue since the 2004 Beta launch.

Am I missing the obvious here? If a user pays $5 for 5,000 credits and then buys a 3rd party developer item for 5,000 credits, and the developer gets to cash that in for $5 USD, where does IMVU make money with credits?
Diana said on July 2nd, 2008 at 6:36 pm:
When you but credits from IMVU it costs $1 for 1000 credits. When you buy something from the catalog the credits split up in a few different ways depending on the item but IMVU gets a cut and so does the developer and anyone else that may have developed and worked on the item in between.
Now when someone who earns credits from sales of IMVU items sells the credits for real money 1. they do not sell them to IMVU, IMVU does not buy them back and 2. they never get $1 per 1000 credits. Its more like $1 for 2000 credits. They user gets a better deal from credit resellers but all credits start from IMVU to begin with.
Krissy said on July 2nd, 2008 at 6:44 pm:
Hi there, well as stated above, the credits are split up between IMVU and the developer. I am a developer on that site, and I know first hand that IMVU is a great place to expand your creativity, and even make a living off the profits gained as I do This site means alot to a large and diverse range of people in so many ways.
Jessica Mulligan said on July 2nd, 2008 at 11:47 pm:
Thanks, Diana and Krissy, for the explanations. In the interview Raph cites, though, IMVU CEO Cary Rosenzweig states that they DON’T take a cut of item sales, i.e. the transfer of credits from the buyer to the seller. I must be simply misunderstanding what he was saying, I’m sure, so I’d appreciate some more enlightenment,

And what is the average split on the credits between IMVU and the developer?
Dan said on July 6th, 2008 at 7:57 pm:
Cary Rosenzwig states in response to a user’s comment on another website that the developers are not paid by IMVU. Instead they can sell the credits they earn to other users at a price determined by those two parties. Perhaps Krissy can elaborate further.
Raph said on July 6th, 2008 at 11:13 pm:

Oops… Dan, I zapped your second comment by accident when clearing out spam. Sorry!

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