Gaia Online is described here by Wagner James Au, GigaOm. Jeremy Liew provides some comments and further reading.

What’s surprising are the numbers of this San Jose company: 2M UU/Mth, 1M posts/day in the Gaia’s message boards!

Designed for Teens, there are a lot of activities that users can do:
- Upload and rate artworks and content (7-10%)
- Play multiplayer mini-games (10-15%)
- Forum (30%)

There is virtual money of course, but the guys behind Gaia had a great idea: you can’t buy “Gold” with real money, but you earn Gold for your activity. The more you are involved, the more you gain. Brilliant.

Other interesting numbers:
- 300K login daily (spending an average of two hours)
- 64K average concurrency (max 85K)
- 55% are girls

Even if I’m not a Teen anymore, I’ve joined this online world and I’m giving it a try. My screen name is “giaco“: invite me! :)