Isometric teen online community Habbo Hotel says its tenth year was its best ever. In fact, it attracted €22 ($29.53/£18.89) in virtual goods from each paying customer.
Although Habbo is free to play, users can create custom content using a €1 ($1.34/£0.86) SMS or a monthly subscription. A minority of users does so, but three quarters of one-time buyers become repeat customers.
That made for €4.5 ($6.04/£3.86) million in virtual goods sales in December alone, and 25 percent higher annual income for the company, which did not state its profit/loss but did say: “We have pretty exciting new things and improvements coming out this year, we expect to grow our revenue in 2011 at the same pace and to further improve the company’s profitability.”
Here are Habbo’s other 2010 numbers…
— Peak monthly active users: 8.7 million
— Total active player characters in 2010: 42.5 million
— Facebook users: 2.6 million
— Average annual player time: 93 hours
— Virtual items exchanged between players: 1.4 billion (that’s five times more than users bought directly from the game itself).