Meez Nation Starts Virtual Blood Drive with Red Cross, Releases Engagement Numbers

Meez Nation is announcing a new campaign with the Red Cross, where Meez players will be able to virtually "give blood" at Red Cross stations within the virtual world. The Red Cross virtual blood-bank trucks will move through the virtual world and attempt to interact with Meez' 13 million users. Once a user has given blood, they receive a virtual t-shirt gift and get more information about "why, how and where to give blood in the real world". Charity initiatives have been a large part of social games in the past, with games like (Lil) Green Patch revolving around constantly raising funds for saving areas of the rain forest, saving approximately 13,600,000 square feet (1.26 km2) of rainforest per quarter. Meez Nation also released some interesting statistics about their user demographics and engagement. Along with Farmville's recent success with their $1.5 million raised for Haiti and now this news, we can see that social games are making strides to raise money for charity. Right when the social platform was made available on Facebook in 2007, several applications jumped out of the gates to raise money for charity, the biggest one being Causes, which still has 24,000,000 monthly active users, and according to their site: "the community has grown by over 90 million people and over $16 million has been donated through the application". By enabling users to make small microtransactions for good causes, the companies raise their profile, do a good service and continue to engage users. Meez' campaign doesn't seem to involve monetary transactions, but spreads awareness of an important cause and rewards players with a virtual gift. We'll get results of the campaign as soon as we can. Along with this announcement, Meez has released some information about their key statistics and engagement. According to ComScore, Meez Nation has grown dramatically to enter the top four sites on the web for engagement, with more time spent per visit than YouTube or Facebook according to Meez and comScore. This has a lot to do with the easy browser based nature of the site, where you pick a room, click it, and you are automatically interacting with others right from your browser. 90% of the Meez Nation userbase is located in the US, and the majority demographic is teenagers. Meez shared some key statistics about their users with us as well: the average minutes per visitor is 173.5 and the average minutes per visit is 29.7. One of the challenges that virtual worlds like Meez Nation faces is the competition from the plethora of social games on Facebook. The more time that players spend using games on sites like that, the less time they have for Meez. Looking at their Alexa chart, we can see that they're not bucking the difficult downward trend for social gaming sites. That said, Meez leverages Facebook Connect in an intelligent way, allowing you to sync with your Facebook Account and invite your friends very easily. Still, looking at our recent article about the difficulties for other social networks and gaming companies, only time will tell how Meez will turn around the difficult proposition of battling against the huge Facebook social game market.

Social Pro Daily

Meez Nation Starts Virtual Blood Drive with Red Cross, Releases Engagement Numbers

Neil Vidyarthi

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