Popular mostly outside of the U.S., Habbo Hotel is a mostly free online virtual world which earned $30 million in revenue in 2006. The site is targeted towards a younger demographic ranging from 13 to 18 year olds (90% of users fall in this range). It is free to register and walk around the hotel, yet users can pay extra for more functionality, club membership and furnishings for their hotel room. Users join on to chat, play games, go virtual swimming and do anything else one might do in a real hotel. Since the hotel is mostly populated by youths, all chats are filtered and all rooms monitored. Users cannot give email address or phone numbers to others neither can they use offensive language or sexist terms.
To pay for services or items within Habbo Hotel’s miniverse, users need Habbo Coins. These are available for purchase by home phone or through a text message on your mobile phone. Habbo has plans to add a complete mobile miniverse, but currently has only added Habbo Home; a social network done Habbo Style.
Habbo has almost 80 million registered users and 7 million unique users per month. The average visit is 30 minutes while the average page impressions per month are 400 million. For a virtual world with much less impressive graphics and less functionality than a Second Life, it is doing incredibly well.
Source:
Habbo Hotel on Crunchbase