A new way to see the web, and gaming looks good.

The first annual Virtual Worlds conference last week in New York was somewhat.. uhm.. underwhelming. Basically it felt like the entire conference was people who worked for Linden Labs, Electric Sheep, or mid-level brand managers with $20k to spend so they could say "they get" virtual worlds. And don't even get me started on the improper analogies between the beginning of virtual worlds and the beginning of the Internet.

As much as VW07 was all about brands, GDC felt like just the opposite with chatter about their social power and role as a third place. That got me all primed to write about how the one analogy from '96 that will repeat itself is that big brands think they are there, but they just don't get it (anyone remember Pathfinder?).

In the midst of this, I get an email from David Cancel of Compete.com about their big launch of new tools including Attention tracking (for a background on Attention see here, or here). So I convinced him to run a couple of pre-launch images for me so I could make the same point in images instead of text.

With the exception of Metacafe, online games compare very well indeed to the other hot topics of the Internet. Social networks may have owned 2006, but online games look great from a velocity perspective for 2007/08. Go check out the new tools at Compete.com.

Comments

[Sulka]

Hmm.. I checked the numbers for various Habbo sites depending on the domain, Compete seems to register between 25% to 5% of the actual traffic we're getting. Makes me wonder how accurate the other sites' data is.

[Mathieu Nouzareth]

Sulka,

Maybe compete cannot count Macromedia director plug in users ? That could be a reason you see lower numbers.

I believe there is the same issue with downloadable casual games. The "attention" measured by compete.com is only done on the actual web pages and not during gameplay once the games are downloaded. And believe me, the time spent playing on games is an order of magnitude higher than the time spent to browse the web site !

[Nabeel Hyatt]

Sulka - Compete's data is US-only. At least now we know what percentage of Habbo's audience is from the US. :) This may make it not as relevant for Habbo to use, but it great for comparisons in the US market. I'm sure it's not even a race between you and most folks on a fully global basis.

The other thing that Compete is doing is only counting real users/time, so it is usually about 5-10% lower than internal stats because it isn't counting bots.

There is more on Compete's website about their methodology, but after looking at a whole bunch of stat folks (Comscore, Alexa, Quantcast) I'd say they are by far the most consistent.