Habbo's Avatar Count Rises to 80 million
Well done sulake.
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Helsinki, Finland, October 25, 2007 – Sulake Corporation, the company behind Habbo, one of the world’s largest virtual worlds for teens, has announced that Habbo has hit 80 million created characters. The announcement was made in London at the Virtual Worlds Forum Europe yesterday.
In 2000 Habbo launched in Finland and has since grown into 31 country sites across five continents. On average, 75,000 members join each day and each user spends 32 minutes per site visit. The global community of teenagers between the ages of 11 and 17 have already created over 80 million characters and currently over 6 million unique users visit the site every month. But as co-founder Sampo Karjalainen explains this wasn’t always the plan:
“When we first created the idea behind Habbo it wasn’t our intention that it should be an online community for teenagers explicitly or that it would run for so long! The first version of Habbo (called Mobiles Disco) was a hobby project that myself and my partner, Aapo Kyrölä were working on, and one which we would only focus on for a month or two. But as the community grew based solely on word of mouth we of course could not take the service down.
“In 2000, when we officially launched Habbo in Finland, we realised that the majority of the community consisted of teenagers. On that basis we took a decision to continue to develop the site but only for teens. Now seven years on with 80 million characters created, it's clear that teenagers get more out of virtual world experiences and that we made the right decision!”
