Here's a really interesting graphical representation from KZero of the population sizes (based on registered users) of many different virtual worlds. A wonderfully simple to understand chart that shows how long the world has been in existence, the size of the population base and the average user age.
It's clear immediately how popular these worlds are with kids and teens, with Habbo being the most popular overall world very much in the 10-15 year old market and sites like Poptropica and Club Penguin doing very well in the 5-10 year old segments.
A few years ago all the buzz in the market was about Second Life and it is interesting to see that their population of registered users is still relatively very small - only a fraction of the bigger kid focused sites.
This all has long term implications for how todays pre-teens develop their social skills and the 'norms' they become accustomed to. Mark Holden of PHD wrote a brilliant book recently about the future of the media agency and one of the things he hypothesises is that today's kids will have a complete blur between their virtual and real world identities, where they don't separate the two in the way that the 'analogue generation' do. You can read Mark's full ebook here.
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