At a time when kids have access to more digital devices that ever before it’s good to see in that children’s magazines are doing great business – compared to the same period five years ago circulation has increased by a 29%!  The numbers look even better when put up against an ever declining “men’s lifestyle” magazines. Even women’s weeklies have seen sales fall.

These numbers come from the latest release of the audited circulation figures for consumer magazines (January-June 2013), which reveals sales of more than 2 million copies of children’s magazines and comics and an increase of 1.5% period-on-period.
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When we cover children’s online gaming we focus on games played by the under-12s But with so many children over 12 years-of-age still playing browser-based games it’s about time we posted on this age group too.

The slides below are from a survey of 732 children and highlight that while some children’s games suffer a significant drop-off as kids reach their teens it’s not bad news for all; some games, like Runescape and Lord of the Rings Online attract more users as kids get older.
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Amongst all the cat pictures and Gangnam Style tributes there’s a wealth of social gaming knowledge on the internet. For over two years we’ve been collating the best social gaming articles and publishing them in our This Week in Social Games (TWISG) newsletter. Read by over 1,000 subscribers.

With the year coming to an end it’s time to highlight the best of the best – the ten most insightful articles based on the percentage of clicks by our readers. From finding out what’s in Zynga’s ‘secret sauce’ to how to get your first 1,000 players, plus a handful of articles on making money by giving stuff away from free, it’s all here.

If that’s not enough, you can also read part one of this blog from back in June and get the twenty best social gaming features of 2012.

If you’re not signed up to TWISG yet, you can do that by clicking here.

So let’s begin with….

1. The secret sauce of social games

Reading this article from The Verge is the perfect way for anyone new to social games to become an instant expert! Featuring contributions from Zynga, Kixeye and Storm8 it looks at everything, such copycats, in-game spending, Whales, trends in game design and much, much more. Even if you think you already know it all, you will still find something new.
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Last year we posted our social gaming glossary – a list of 13 terms and eight benchmarks that everyone working in online games should know. Now we’re adding context to this list by uncovering the key metrics from the biggest games on mobile and online. Want to know the Average Revenue Per User for Habbo? What about GREE’s Customer Acquisition Cost? Then read on.

Average Revenue per Paying User (ARPPU)

Definition: Average Revenue Per Paying User, usually measured each month. In other words, how much money does the average customer spend (most of your players will never spend any money, ARPPU only includes those who spend money). It can be calculated as total monthly revenue divided by total monthly paying users.

Benchmarks:

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During a recent look back over our projects we found this piece looking at the demand for toys based on kid’s virtual worlds like Moshi Monsters, Bin Weevils and Club Penguin.

We conducted this study as toys based on kid’s virtual worlds are huge! You only have to look at look at the best selling toys during Christmas 2011 to see that. But how big are they and what could be the next big game-to-toy licence?
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Children’s virtual worlds – like Moshi Monsters and Club Penguin – aren’t just popular online; they’re also proving a big hit as toys with new research showing over half of UK children own a toy based on a virtual world with some as  popular as Dr Who.

Dubit’s research department recently studied the popularity of toys based on online worlds, looking at Disney’s Club Penguin, Mind Candy’s Moshi Monsters, as well as Build-a-BearVille, Poptropica and Webkinz.

The study of 500 kids showed that an amazing 55 per cent of children owned a toy from at least one of these games. The most popular was Disney’s Club Penguin, with 32 per cent of children owning a branded toy from the online world. Club Penguin, which has 150 million registered users (globally) launched in 2005 and has spawned a series of books and video games. Each toy is connected to the virtual world as they’re packaged with a code that allows items to be unlocked in the virtual world.
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100% of the top 20 virtual worlds have some form of chat, achievements, and virtual currency. Nearly half (45%) have pets, over 4/5′s have user home rooms, but only 18% integrate with social networks.

How do we know this? We meticulously studied and catalogued every single feature in each of the top 20 virtual worlds, including Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters, Chimpoo, Poptropica, Barbie Girls, WeeWorld, Build-A-Bearville, Bin Weevils, and Hello Kitty Online. If you’re thinking this sounds boring and tedious, you’d be right! But the good news is we’ve shared the results, so you don’t need to.

We collected all this data to help us, and the folks building on our virtual world platform make better design decisions. Designing games for children is really hard! I’m pretty sure everyone reading this is way past their “kid-time” (like bed time, but past the time you stopped being a kid). So if we’re not kids any more, how do we know what kids find fun? What do children want? Should your players have a pet to care for? How important is chat? What about forums? Should there be a story?
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