Stardoll Media is celebrating its fifth birthday with a big new feather in its cap. The network of sites for young women and girls announced Thursday morning that it now serves 100 million members worldwide. To put that into perspective, Twitter recently celebrated its fifth birthday with 200 million members, and Facebook—the reigning king of social media—has 650 million members. But Stardoll Media is a group of Web properties geared exclusively toward one demographic: girls. So 100 million members is a significant milestone for the company, making it the number one teen publisher in the world, according to comScore.
Stardoll Media consists of three websites: Stardoll, the fashion and celebrity-oriented social gaming site for teens; Piczo, a site for visual blogging; and PaperDollHeaven, a paper doll themed gaming site for younger girls. The sites’ collective user base has been growing at breakneck speed, adding some one million new members each week. Registered users doubled over the last year, with users from the United States accounting for one quarter of the sites’ users. The average age of the global user base is 15, and members have created some 2.7 million clubs on Stardoll since 2006.
Stardoll celebrated the occasion with a promotion offering members 100 free StarDollars, 100 million themed items for sale (T-shirts, hoodies, tables, lamps, etc.), and 100 extra days of new annual SuperStar memberships. Not surprisingly, the promotion has led to StarDoll’s highest ever sales figures in many of its top markets worldwide.
The company has seen one success on top of another over the course of the last year. In February, it announced that it had signed a multi-year licensing agreement with toy manufacturer Mattel to launch Stardoll’s first physical product line this fall. No word on what the product line will include at this point, but it’s Mattel, and Stardoll is a virtual paper-doll world, so the product line will presumably include dolls and their outfits.
Stardoll has collaborated with Mattel in the past to work with such brands as Barbie, Fashionistas, and Monster High, which have a broad appeal to Stardoll’s target demographic of teen and pre-teen girls. The campaigns have included the creation of a fan club, exclusive dolls, and the launch of a virtual store.
Additionally, JCPenney will be unveiling a line of Stardoll-branded clothes and accessories for the back-to-school season later this year. The line will be available in 300 stores.
Stardoll has also seen success in crossing the virtual and physical divide when it teamed up with publishing giant Random House in September 2010 to produce an interactive online book, called “Mortal Kiss,” for teens in time for Halloween. The project was the first time Random House had ever created an online interactive reading experience on a social media platform. As it turns out, “Mortal Kiss” was such a huge success that Random House Children’s Books announced in January that it would publish a printed copy of the book for readers who missed the Web version, marking the first time that Stardoll stepped out of the virtual world and into the physical retail world.
