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I am producing this awesome conference, the Virtual Goods Summit, with my friend Charles Hudson. We wanted to put together a conference that moved the dialogue beyond “Virtual Worlds: Hype or Not” to discussions that can inform meaningful industry evolution and actual implementation. With companies like Tencent ($500M+ yearly revenue) and Habbo Hotel ($65M yearly revenue) generating a significant portion of their revenue from virtual goods, it’s clear that virtual goods represent a real, viable business model and will likely have a huge impact across all of the consumer Internet. [update: Note that this isn't just for people interested in gaming. There's a reason we only have one session related explicitly to virtual goods in gaming & entertainment!]
What: Virtual Goods Summit 2007
When: June 22, 2007 from 10 AM - 5 PM
Where: Annenberg Auditorium Stanford University
Virtual goods and virtual currencies are growing beyond their traditional
roots in online gaming and beginning to exert growing influence on the
development of social networks, community sites, and casual games. This
growing influence is due in large part to the fact that consumers have shown
a willingness to embrace virtual goods as a way to express themselves
online. From pets to coins to avatars, virtual goods are becoming a real
opportunity for companies who are looking to build more engaging online
experiences:
- Neopets users have created over 206 million virtual pets
- Tencent has over 250 million active users in China and generated $100+ million in Q1 2007, 65% of their revenue comes from virtual goods and services
- Nexon generated $230 million in 2005, 85% of which came from virtual item sales
- Habbo Hotel has over 75 million registered avatars in 29 countries, 90% of their $60 million+ yearly revenue comes from virtual goods
- Gaia Online does over 50,000 person to person auctions a day - making them the 3rd largest auction site on the Internet. Their average user consumes 1200 page views a month.
The Virtual Goods Summit will bring together leading entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and technologists to discuss the present and future of this rapidly growing market. We encourage you to join us at this year’s event and participate in what promises to be an exciting and lively conversation around some of the key questions facing the virtual goods market today:
- How will virtual goods and virtual currencies impact social networking?
- Are virtual goods the next big business model?
- What does it take to successfully launch a virtual goods offering?
- Are virtual goods poised to go mainstream?
- What does it take to nurture and develop a successful virtual economy?
- Why are users embracing virtual goods?
We’ve assembled a strong team of industry experts to join us for the day and share their views and experiences:
- David Wallerstein, Tencent/QQ
- Paul Thind, Habbo Hotel
- Kyra Reppen, MTV Networks (Neopets)
- Craig Sherman, Gaia Online
- John Chi, Nexon USA
- Amy Jo Kim, ShuffleBrain
- John Vars, Dogster
- James Hong, HotOrNot
- Jia Shen, RockYou
- Erik Bethke, Go Pets
- Tim Stevens, Doppelganger
- Raph Koster, Areae
- Mark Wallace, 3PointD
- Dan Kelly, Sparter
- Daniel James, 3 Rings
- Sean Ryan, Meez
- Jim Greer, Kongregate
- Joshua Hong, K2 Networks
- Robert Scoble
- Susan Wu, Charles River Ventures
- Kevin Efrusy, Accel Partners
- Nabeel Hyatt, Conduit Labs
I highly encourage you to register. I think it will be a fabulous event full of lively discussions and great people. We’re in the process of setting up an IRC backchannel, a Twitter stream, and other communications channels, so keep posted.
Sincerely, your friendly conference hosts and organizers,
I’ll be moderating a panel from 3:50 - 5:00 pm at the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica. My panel is called “Micropayments & MicroEconomies - Establishing a New E-Commerce Gateway to the Future”. I didn’t name it. Had I named it, it would simply be called “Microtransactions and Virtual Goods, the next big business model”. You know, something catchy and simple.
The speakers on my panel are
- David Wallersten, Executive Senior VP of International for Tencent [China's largest portal with 236 million active users. 65% of their revenue comes from microtransactions and virtual goods/services sales.]
- Craig Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online. [Craig is a super interesting guy and would be great on a panel on just about any topic. At a billion posts total and 1 million new posts a day to its forums, when might Gaia overtake Yahoo! Groups in usage?]
- Susan Choe, CEO of Outspark. Outspark is a casual MMO company that is taking already successful Asian games, primarily from Korea, and porting them to the Western market. They plan on releasing a handful of games this year, so it will be interesting to see if their portfolio approach to aggregating titles pays off. Susan’s background in overseeing part of the development of CSFB’s online retail brokerage system has given her a unique perspective as to why it’s so challenging to create a clearing house and exchange for microtransactions across multiple sites/properties. Someone’s gotta be the bank, and it’s probably not going to be your average casual MMO company.
- James Hong, Co-Founder of HotorNot. James recently walked away from $500K a month in primarily subscription revenue to reinvent HotorNot as a free service. It’s a big gamble - cannibalizing your existing revenue base and experimenting on new business models.
If you’re at Digital Hollywood, come by and say hello to us.
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