Habbo Hotel Turns 10 Years Old and the Success Story Continues!
- Starting as a Hobby, Habbo Hotel Has Transformed into the World’s Largest Teen Virtual
Community
Helsinki
, Finland, June 14, 2010 --
Habbo Hotel, the world’s largest teen
virtual community and social game, is celebrating its
10th
Anniversary and the success continues. More than three million new Habbo
characters are created each month to participate in the virtual hotel.
Habbo Hotel by the Numbers (June 2010):
-
172
million characters / avatars created
- 40 million monthly user hours, average session 42 minutes
- 15 million monthly unique visitors
-
120 million
active user-created rooms
-
Users
from over 150 countries
- 11 language versions
Click
here to watch a Habbo
10-year anniversary video interview with Co-Founder
Sampo Karjalainen and CEO
Timo Soininen.
From a Hobby to an International Phenomenon
The Habbo Hotel story began in 1999 when founders Sampo Karjalainen and Aapo Kyrölä, both in
their 20s, created an online application called “
Mobiles
Disco”. It was purely a hobby, a kind of graphical chat site for friends’ band, and it quickly
gained lots of fans in Finland and around the world. Karjalainen and Kyrölä decided to develop the
idea further and used it in an advertising campaign for a Finnish mobile operator in February 2000.
It was a simple
snowball
fight game, but it became the beginning of Habbo Hotel.
At this time, Karjalainen and Kyrölä were also thinking about
virtual payments, and
created the Habbo Hotel micropayments business model. The company,
Sulake, was founded in May 2000, and “
Hotelli
Kultakala”, the original Finnish Habbo Hotel, opened a couple of months
later.
The first international
Habbo Hotel opened in the UK in early 2001, and
over the next couple of years the company founded most of the current Habbo Hotel sites and
language versions. Over the past few years Sulake has further expanded its reach by making the
virtual hotel service and local payment methods available in new countries, which now total
32.
The Secret is…Continual Development!
Habbo Hotel is one of the oldest active teen online services in the world and it is still
growing. Habbo’s success factor has been its continuous development and commitment to make the user
experience better. The goal has always been to keep the service fresh and relevant by frequently
introducing new features and gaming elements, arranging engaging campaigns, enriching the virtual
economy and payment models and nurturing the community.
The site’s persistent efforts to stay current have always been strongly influenced by user
feedback and deep insight into teenagers’ lives, whether it’s about their values and attitudes,
purchasing behavior or brand preferences. Updated on a yearly basis, the
Global Habbo Youth Survey examines the
interests and online habits of Habbo Hotel’s vast audience and provides an enormous amount of
information on the world’s teens.
Habbo Hotel also regularly surveys and polls its users, asking about various hot topics. To
celebrate its 10-year anniversary, Habbo asked its users about the future of social online services
and internet usage in general. The
findings
reveal an array of interesting predictions from nearly 50,000 teens globally.
Future Outlook is Upbeat
Sulake, the company behind Habbo Hotel, recently
announced
the best quarterly financial results in its history. With Q1/2010 sales up 25% compared to the
same time last year, Sulake expects revenue growth to continue at the current rate and to maintain
healthy profitability. A decade of continual development and rigorous work combined with favorable
market growth is now paying off for the company.
All Habbo Hotel 10-year anniversary press images can be found
here.
For more information, contact
Sulake Press.
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