[MUD-Dev] Greetings from Habbo Hotel

[Richard Aihoshi aka Jonric]

At 01:17 AM 05/02/03 +0000, Matt Mihaly <the_logos at achaea.com>  wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Vincent Archer wrote:
>> According to Matt Mihaly:

>>> Counting registered players is a silly way of claiming to be a
>>> certain size, and is blatantly misleading.

>> The most useful measure would be "how many active accounts do you
>> have", where active equals "has logged on during the last 30
>> days".

>> And even then you need to be sure these accounts are paying
>> accounts somehow.

> Well, that's one useful measure. There are a lot of ways to
> measure 'size' of an online game. For instance, for an
> advertiser-driven game, you'd want both reach and frequency. You'd
> want a big audience playing a lot, not just a million people who
> logged in one minute each last month.

Speaking as a former corporate marketer, it's important to remember
that reach and frequency are not quite so simple as more is better.
Reach should measured against your target audience, and you have to
take into account various levels of potential buyers as well as what
your particular goal happens to be.  For example, if you're a car
manufacturer, is it better to spend the same amount of money to
reach say 50k people of whom 10k are currently considering a car
purchase or 250k of whom only 5k are?  The answer is that it depends
on whether your primary goal is to sell cars in the short term or to
build awareness and brand image for the longer haul.  And this
illustration is over-simplified because in the real world, there are
often multiple goals to be taken into account and balanced.

As for frequency, there's a threshold below which advertising isn't
very effective in terms of building said awareness and brand image,
mostly because people who are not actively looking for the type of
product you are advertising aren't as likely to notice it.  To use
cars for an example again, you're much more likely to notice car ads
when you're in the market than when you're not.  At the other end of
the spectrum, too much frequency isn't very useful either, a case of
diminishing returns.

Richard Aihoshi  - "Jonric"
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