Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play
Presleigh Montemayor often gets home after a long day and spends some time with her family. Then she logs onto the Internet, leaving the real world and joining a virtual one. But the digital utopia of Second Life is not for her.
Context & Ripple Effects
A month after TechCrunch reported that Europeans now outnumber Americans three to one inside Second Life, the New York Times profiles where the youngest users actually spend their screen time: not the open-ended adult world, but branded doll sites built around toys and dress-up. The piece follows Presleigh Montemayor, who comes home, logs on, and joins a virtual world — just not Linden Lab's.
It extends an arc the BBC flagged back in 2005 when it asked analysts to picture online gaming's value beyond hardcore players. The confirmed pattern here is that doll sites are keeping girls home and online in the afternoons, carving out a youth segment the headline virtual worlds were never designed for.
First-order effects
- Second Life's growth story, built on adult early adopters, now has a documented blind spot: tween girls are choosing toy-branded virtual worlds over it entirely.
Second-order effects
- Toy makers operating these doll sites become de facto gatekeepers of children's online leisure time, a position previously held by game publishers and portal operators — and any marketer chasing young consumers has to buy into those closed worlds rather than general-purpose ones.
Third-order effects
- If the split holds, virtual worlds fragment along demographic lines — youth-branded destinations on one side, adult open platforms on the other — rather than converging on a single universal metaverse.
The trend: Virtual worlds are splintering into demographically segmented branded destinations, with toy-linked sites capturing young users that adult-oriented platforms cannot reach.