Gartner sees 80 % virtual world penetration by 2011
By Adam Reuters
Tech consultancy Gartner, whose “Hype Cycle” has been used to gauge Second Life adoption, thinks that 80 percent of active Internet users will be in non-gaming virtual worlds like Second Life by the end of 2011 — a huge increase from current levels.
“By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a ’second life,’ but not necessarily in Second Life,” the company said on Wednesday in a statement released during the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in San Francisco.
According to Nielsen//NetRatings, there were about 330 million active Internet home users in March, 2007.
Gartner analysts see virtual world adoption as a mixed blessing for major companies, predicting that major revenue streams “will be limited to niche areas, which have yet to be clearly identified.”
“There is significant probability that, over time, market pressures will lead to a merging of current virtual worlds into a smaller number of open-sourced environments that support the free transfer of assets and avatars from one to another with the use of a single, universal client,” the company added.
