Offerpal Media to help IMVU cash in on its virtual chat rooms

June 9, 2009 | Dean Takahashi | Comments |

Offerpal Media is going to help IMVU, a 3-D virtual chat room company, cash in on its 35 million registered users as part of a partnership being announced today.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based IMVU lets users create avatars, or virtual characters, and then decorate their rooms with virtual objects. Some people pay real money for those objects. But there are others who might be more active if they could earn currency in some other way.

Enter Offerpal, which monetizes content through a “managed offer platform.” Offerpal has a network of advertisers who make special offers to users. The advertisers can reward users with points to spend in their virtual spaces if the users fill out forms, sign up for free trials, or take online surveys. Offerpal has to tread a careful line. It can’t be terribly intrusive toward users, nor can it make offers to users who have no interest in what’s being offered. (That is, you can’t offer a credit card to someone under 18 etc.).

Offerpal has more than 2,500 advertising offers that it can target to IMVU’s 5 million unique visitors a month. So far, Offerpal has more than 50 million users in its network and it helps its publishing partners make an average of $75 per 1,000 active daily users.

IMVU was founded in 2004 and has a digital goods catalog of two million times. It raised $10 million in funding in January, while Offerpal raised $15 million in venture capital in February.

Next Story: WebWars introduces “layered reality games” on the web
Previous Story: Smithsonian taps virtual world technology to take us to Blue Mars

Bookmark and Share

Tags: ,

Photo of Dean Takahashi

About the Author, Dean Takahashi

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Imvu is a really good chatting tool.
  • longtimeuser
    I think IMVU should concentrate on enhancing their product to better function before attacking their User base with unwanted advertising. When registering at IMVU's site, you are promised no advertising when you buy your name for life. This appears to me that IMVU plans on renegotiating yet another promise.