Virtual Worlds

Many IM services offer buddy icons and animated smileys, but none of them are as eye friendly as IMVU messenger. IMVU allows you to customize your avatar from head to toe, kind of like you would in the Second Life or the Sims. You start out with 1500-9000 credits, based on your ability to chat every day for four days. This amount allows you to buy a very nice new wardrobe (aside from your free stuff), but you can also purchase a beach house, loft or condo in the system. You can also animate your avatar, which is always moving in this 3D world and have your avatar interact with other people from all over the world.

Click here to give me reference credit as you sign up: IMVU sign up!

How it works: It's ever evolving, but basically you click on a T shirt and that will show you all the clothing that you can wear. You can change anything really: clothes, hair, skin tones, makeup styles, heads, wings and ball gowns are just a few things that you can use to customize your avatar. I am constantly making items that go with the California Girl theme. However I also make men's jeans or anything that I get requests for.

Click here to view my Xenina products. Click here to give me reference credits when you purchase IMVU credits.

OUTFITS THAT YOU CAN WEAR AND SOME POSES YOU CAN USE IN IMVU BY PURCHASING COSTUMES IN PART OR IN BUNDLES:

You get a IMVU homepage for free and if you join IMVU, there are no ads on your page. Teens love IMVU, but you can search for people of all ages and believe me there is someone of every age on IMVU. I've seen men and women in their 60s. Yes, they know how to use a computer. :) As for all of you using the Mac OS, sorry - imvu is only available for Windows.
Want to view my IMVU Homepage? See it here: http://avatars.imvu.com/Xenina




IMVU Reaches 20 Million Users

Web-based virtual world IMVU has announced that it's passed the milestone of 20 million registered accounts, although that translates to 600,000 active monthly users. The company is also now earning $1 million a month in revenue, 90% of which comes from selling virtual currency, while 10% comes from embedded advertising. Around 1.7 million items have been created by users and uploaded to the IMVU community too.

According to GigaOM, around 100,000 IMVU users have registered to become content creators, although the actual number doing it - with tools like Maya and Blender - is in the tens of thousands. The world typically has 50,000-70,000 users online at once, of whom 60% are female, and 60% are US-based. However, the company isn’t yet profitable, although it has high hopes for selling prepaid currency cards in US retail chains like Target and Blockbuster - an initiative that kicks off in the next fortnight.
It has to be said though, IMVU has been going since 2004, and is still in beta. Shouldn’t it be ready for a proper commercial launch by now?

Nickelodeon Virtual Pets?

Nickelodeon's Kids and Family Group has released the latest comScore Media Metrix figures for the performance of its websites - judging by the scramble last time they did this, we expect Disney to hit back with its own press release imminently. Anyway, the Nick figures show good growth for its Neopets virtual world, which increased its unique visitors by 22% in June, while average time spent on site per user grew 19% to 173.6 minutes.

As I’ve said before, the latter ‘engagement’ stat is likely to become more and more important to the virtual worlds industry, with companies looking to shift away from pure number-of-users to metrics showing the stickiness of their worlds.
Nickelodeon says it’s now the top-ranked ‘kids and family online destination’ (this is the part Disney may disagree with), attracting 28.6 million unique visitors in June (5% up on May’s figures, and a 13% rise year-on-year).
The company is also benefitting from strong growth in its games sites, with AddictingGames attracting 10.7 million unique visitors in June who spent an average of 30.5 minutes on the site. Nickelodeon says it’s planning to add a massive 1,600 new games to its sites in the coming months, while also launching new virtual worlds Monkey World and World of Neopia (both working titles).