Gaia Online
An anime-styled forum where your dressed-up chibi avatar appeared next to every post, and where browsing, posting and playing games earned the gold to dress it. In 2007 its members were making more than a million posts a day.
Gaia Online was founded on February 18, 2003, by Derek Liu, Long Vo and Josh Gainsbrugh, under the name go-gaia. It began as a list of anime links, grew a small community, and turned into a forum site. The name changed to GaiaOnline.com in 2004, and its owner, Gaia Interactive, was based in San Jose, California.
Every member, or Gaian, got a chibi-style avatar that appeared beside each forum post. Browsing the site, posting and playing games earned Gaia Gold, which bought clothes and accessories from shops run by non-player characters, and members traded and auctioned items with each other in a marketplace. Features kept getting added around the forums. In Gaia Towns, avatars walked around catching bugs and shaking trees. There were houses to furnish and aquariums to stock, an Avatar Arena where members voted on each other's outfits starting in 2006, virtual Scion cars through a 2007 partnership, and in November 2008 a browser MMORPG called zOMG! The site also took real money. Starting in June 2003, after users petitioned for a way to donate, $2.50 bought a sealed envelope that later opened into a choice of limited-edition items.
In 2007, Gaians were making over a million posts a day and 7 million unique visitors came each month. The site won a Webware 100 award that year, and Time included it on its list of the 50 best websites of 2008. "As the 'real world' gets worse, virtual worlds get better," chief executive Craig Sherman told Forbes.com in 2008. The site's own economy went the other way. Its owners later sold items that generated gold automatically, the supply turned into hyperinflation, and the userbase declined. Later owners replaced gold with a new currency, Platinum, pegged at one Platinum to 10 million gold. The site is still online.
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