VRChat Site User Demographics: 430,000 Uniques, Mostly Male and Over 25

SimilarWeb, my go-to resource for online/mobile data, just kindly shared with me some pretty interesting behind-the-paywall demographic on VRChat's site. (The company has not publicly released much concrete, industry standard user data numbers, beyond saying 30% of daily users are logged in via a head-mounted VR display.)

Here's SimilarWeb's age and gender demographics for the site:

• Gender Distribution
• Male: 81.5%
• Female: 18.5%
• Age Distribution
• 18 - 24: 42.8%
• 25 - 34: 32.1%
• 35 - 44: 12.1%
• 45 - 54: 6.6%
• 55 - 64: 3.8%
• 66+: 2.6%

The gender breakdown, alas, is not a surprise -- as embedded reporter Syrmor says, "VRChat is really disproportionately male".

The VRChat site age breakdown, however, is fairly notable: A strong majority (about 58%) are over 25, while 1 in 4 are 35 or older. That runs counter to the general assumption that VRChat users are mostly teens and early 20s.

In terms of unique users, VRChat site visits over time give us a pretty good guess at active unique users of VRChat:

Total page views to the site over the past 12 months, SimilarWeb tells me, are about 8,447,000 -- and over the last 12 months (i.e. after VRChat went viral in December 2017) , there have been 430,128 unique users.

To be sure, unique VRChat site users are not the same thing as unique VRChat client users, but it's safe to assume active VRChat users are the most frequent visitors of the site, which includes a user log-in page. So until we get specifics from VRChat the company, it's a good guess that VRChat's active virtual world users are somewhere in the low to mid-six figures.

Finally here's SimilarWeb's VRChat site breakdown by country -- no surprise that the largest cohort is the US, but perhaps surprisingly, a strong majority are from elsewhere:

Top ten users by country:

• United States: 33.8%
• United Kingdom: 6.2%
• Russia: 5.8%
• Germany: 5.8%
• Canada: 4.4%
• Australia: 4.3%
• Brazil: 4.1%
• Japan: 3.6%
• Netherlands: 2.8%
• Sweden: 2.4%
• Other: 26.8%

More data when I have it! In any case, what's clear is VRChat has become a medium-sized virtual world, not much smaller in terms of usage and active user numbers than Second Life (though both trail Roblox by quite a lot) -- and much, much larger than other next gen social VR-facing virtual worlds.

Comments

[Adeon Writer]

Curious how this data is obtained; at no point did VRChat ask for my age or gender and they offered no method to payment or any sort of personally identifying information.

[Trilo Byte]

Your headline, while technically accurate, is wildly misleading (you've got to combine all the other much smaller demographics to get only a slight majority. 18-24 is by far the largest demo, and more accurately the userbase is mostly under 35. That age and gender breakdown suggests that it has more in common with trollish gamer communities than established or developing virtual worlds. VRChat's admitted statistic of 30% of daily users logging in with HMD's is the funniest part. When it comes down to it, even 70% of VR's most popular social space can't be bothered to use it in VR.

[Orca Flotta]

See that? What do we see here?

1) Hamlet can't calculate.

2) Girls, contrary to Second Life, are marginalized in VR applications.

3) If the VRChat figures are correct, LL and Sansar are d00med. Hear me? D00med!!!

Explainification for ...

1) 42.8% is a greater percentage than 32.1%.

2) As we all know is SL a female-heavy platform since it only needs humble graphics power and has a heayv bias on social interaction and events. It's perfect for a quick login and chat with your bishies and a bit of shoppig/dancing. And VR applications are expensive, and clunky and complicated and making us dizzy. We don't like that shit.

3) I admit VR technology has its purpose and usage scenarios, but in more scientific, technical and medical environments, not necessarily in gameplay. So something like Sansar only has appeal as a novelty and will quickly get old and be replaced by the next new shiny.

Oh ... and if I may add ...

4) I passed the big five-oh quite a while ago, so I make only 6.6% of VR users anyway. And that includes men, so the percentage of ladies in my age group will probably be in the promille figures. :/ See, we are the bitches that rule. We have all the youthful existential angst behind us, are settled in our ways and have disposable currency. And we spend enough of it in SL. Only we're not the least bit interested in spending it for stupid little toys like an Octopus Riff.

[Orca Flotta]

"The VRChat site age breakdown, however, is fairly notable"

No, it's not. The mentioned teens and early 20s don't have the money to spend on useless toys, the over 35 y/olds are too clever and cool to do so.

[Gender is a Myth]

55yr old Trans-Helicopter Here,
I was a woman then i choose to be a man, but now i identify intellectually as an attack helicopter but sexually identify as a purple cat, so why are others like as i being excluded from the statistics?

There are millions of different types of genders, why are they being excluded outside the artificial narrative of only a male/female gender that really does not exist.

I had no idea until this point how Anti-LGBTQXYZ Community that VRChat appears to be.

[sirhc desantis]

I know you are a fan Ser Au but not sure I would trust your source there as far as I could throw a JCB. Anyone remember Stylish? https://tinyurl.com/y9qx4cog
Now I may be wrong but a quick visit to their site yielded 12 insta-cookies (including a loyal-user one haha) but a quick browse with DB4S did not throw up one with the data 'old techno paranoid fart' so wondering how I can best skew the... err I mean just how accurate it could be?

Remember kids - browse safely and with shields up.....