The ‘virtual fashion game’ Miss Bimbo has picked up a lot of press - Google News UK was the second ranked site receiving up traffic from the search term ‘miss bimbo’ last week. The website allows users to create a virtual "bimbo" and compete against other players to earn “bimbo dollars” by making her as attractive and famous as possible. The controversy surrounds the activities the characters participate in, which range from partying and purchasing new clothes, to breast enlargement and weight loss using diet pills. The latter activity sparked so much outrage that the site has now removed the functionality from the game.

So how popular is the site? Pretty popular: last week ‘miss bimbo’ was the fastest moving search term across all categories in the UK. As you can see from the chart below, the website’s popularity increased hugely following all of the attention, although it has since fallen off somewhat. Perhaps more surprisingly, many of these visitors must be playing the game. We were expecting the average visit time to be low, but last week it was 19 minutes and 22 seconds, implying that site is attracting more the than just the curious.

Much of the negative press coverage has focussed on the assumption that young girls and teens playing the game will be influenced by the content. In order to test this hypothesis, we looked into who is visiting the site. For the 4 weeks ending 29 March 2008, 58.8% of visitors were female, representing a swing of 7.03% to women. Looking at our Experian Mosaic lifestyle data, we can see that the two most over-represented groups visiting the site were Municipal Dependency (Families on lower incomes who often live in large council estates where there is little owner-occupation) and Ties of Community (People living in close-knit inner city and manufacturing town communities, responsible workers with unsophisticated tastes). Both of these groups are more likely than the average to have one or two dependent children.

The clickstream data also points in a similar direction. The third most popular site sending traffic to Miss Bimbo is Bebo, the social networking site that skews towards younger users. Indeed, social networks are an important source of visitors to the site, accounting for 15.16% of all upstream traffic last week.

Robin Goad

Robin Goad is Research Director, Hitwise UK. This piece was originally published on Hitwise analyst blog here.

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