News hit the Internet this week that our favorite social play phenomenon, Habbo has reached a milestone of 100 million registered characters. Several places in the blogosphere have also pointed out the weaknesses of that figure, such as the fact that yes, most of those characters are "alts", abandoned accounts, or otherwise not very meaningful. I'd be the last person to argue against that particular point.

Still, it's a figure that has some comparison basis. MySpace didn't have 100 million registrations when News Corp acquired it, reaching that milestone a year later, and MySpace regs are arguably just as likely to be abandoned as virtual world avatars.

Overall though, we don't really put much weight to that metric compared to many others. The 20 million new registrations made in the last six months is pretty nice, but nicer still is 1.5 million logins per day and over a million hours per day spent in Habbo by users. Those are hard to discredit, never mind whether you think that free-to-play is less sticky than subscribed games or not. I tend to give more attention to that than to the 9.4 million unique monthly visitors, because ubiquitous as the UB/UV measurement style is, it, too is horribly inaccurate due to all kinds of errors from cookie washing to shared computers.

If you're interested in hearing about how we measure Habbo and decide what to do based on what we learn from those measurements, you might want to consider attending Leipzig GCDC this August, where I'll give an updated and more in-depth version of the talk the slides of which are in my earlier posting.