Mplayer Grows and Grows

According to Mpath Interactive, its online multiplayer gaming service Mplayer received 71 million minutes of usage in February.

Mplayer was also amongst the top 15 Internet sites in terms of usage per minute in January, with 60 million minutes of usage, trailing only behind sites such as ZDnet (at 62 million minutes), Infoseek (75 million), Netscape (144 million), Microsoft (301 million), and Yahoo (384 million).

Mplayer's growth in usage went up from 38 million minutes in November 1997. Mpath attributes the growth to the addition of more than 30 games in the fourth quarter of 1997 and the encouragement of family activities. Members apparently spend 40 percent of their time on Mplayer chatting to each other rather than playing games.

"This is clearly a different kind of Internet experience than surfing from place to place, following a chain of hyperlinks" said Paul Matteucci, president and CEO of Mpath. "Mplayer.com users are soakers not surfers."

Mpath's numbers of Mplayer usage are generated internally from user logs, which were compared with PC Meter surveys of other sites to determine the Top 15 ranking.