Alan O'Dea

Where in the World is the Money? Our virtual goods monetization platform is used by developers around the globe. Over the past four months we have been gathering data and analyzing how our users are interacting with online games and virtual goods. This data was first released on Mashable last week. Yesterday we shared part of our recent research findings in a blog post on virtual goods spenders in social games. Today we are sharing the rest of our findings. There is a wide range of monetization happening in key regions around the world. After tracking users’ spending habits on virtual goods we’ve pinpointed the hot spots and found where in the world players have the highest lifetime value (LTV). The specific formula used to calculate the LTV of users is total dollar purchases divided by the number of users in a given class.

The users included in this study group are Single One-time Purchasers, 1st Month Purchasers, Loyal Repeat Purchasers, and Hard Core Purchasers. Instead of slicing the data by the frequency of purchases, the data is sliced by geographic region worldwide. While the average LTV of paying users globally was an impressive $55, LTV varied by region. We found that our North American and European consumers spent significantly more than Asian gamers. North Americans exhibited an LTV of $74 with Europeans close behind at $62. Latin American users had an LTV of $57 while Asian players spent the least with an LTV of $30. We also broke down our findings to examine the differences among our loyal paying users across various regions. A loyal user was defined as a user who continually made repeat purchases (not just a one-time paying user) for at least 4 months. The average LTV of these loyal users was a remarkable $247. We compared the LTV among the loyal users across each region and found that loyal users located in Latin America, brought in the most money with a LTV hitting $300. European loyal users had a LTV of $272, followed by North Americans and Asians with LTV for loyal customers of $258 and $202, respectively. We expect this data for repeat purchasers is conservative given that the data was gathered in only a 4 month period and since many of these users will remain active for a much longer timeframe. Check out the picture below that summarizes our findings. Want to learn more social gaming stats? To see our data on top spenders in social games, check out this article from Inside Social Games. To read about the impact of holidays on virtual goods sales, you can check out our blog here. via Where in the World is the Money? (Part 2 of 2) « Social Gold | Virtual Currency. Real Commerce.