Meez, a web-based virtual world/online community, is drawing the best engagement rates of any virtual world in the US, according to ComScore’s June 2010 figures. The traffic measuring service reports that Meez users visit the site an impressive 203 minutes per month on average, just a few minutes behind YouTube, and sixth place in engagement overall. (Casual game site Pogo and Facebook hold the top two positions with 377 and 263 minutes, respectively.) According to Meez CEO John Cahill, there’s a correspondence between those high engagement rates and users spending on virtual items for their Meez characters:
“[T]he longer someone spends on our site the more they are likely so spend on virtual goods, and the more they invest in their community,” as Cahill puts it. “For our core users, Meez is their social entertainment destination and social network and, like other social games, they tend to spend to increase their status in the community.”

Consequently, the company sells hundreds of thousands of dollars in virtual goods every month to its millions of users. (Comscore reports that Meez attracts 1.9 million monthly unique visitors, though Cahill claims their internal weblog counts 3 million total uniques.)

Cahill attributes the high engagement numbers to the wide array of activities in Meez, the top five being
games, community socializing, watching videos, shopping for virtual goods, and sharing music/content. Some users spend a lot of time customizing their avatars with the 7000+ items available to choose from, he adds.

It’s this variety of activities that is the secret to Meez’s success, Cahill tells me, and offers a lesson to social game developers struggling to grow engagement rates and virtual item sales among their own players. His advice: “Make the site a destination with a number of activities [users] can participate in, and allow users to self-segment themselves (free/ads, VIP/subscription/ virtual items-based model.) Keep content relevant to the target audience.”