3pointD.com

A new report from Trendwatching.com on branding in virtual worlds has been getting some notice on various blogs lately. While the article doesn’t break terribly new ground, it rounds things up fairly nicely, and probably reaches an audience that hadn’t heard much about this stuff before.

Some figures cited in the piece:

• Research and consulting firm Yankee Group expects “in-game” advertising to reach $732 million by 2010. This figure was about $56 million in 2005, and $34 million in 2004. I’m not clear on whether this includes marketing projects in places like ActiveWorlds and Second Life.

• More than 100 million people worldwide log on every month to play interactive computer games.

• According to TrendCentral, 60 percent of “trendsetters” (however these are defined) and 33 percent of mainstream 14-34 year-olds have a social networking page.