On the occasion of the International Toy Fair, Stardoll, the online fashion game for teenagers, announced a multi-year licensing agreement with Mattel that will materialize into the first product line coming out in the autumn of 2011. Mattias Miksche, CEO of Stardoll Network says that Stardoll “knew that our users love the immersive online experience on Stardoll.com, but we are thrilled to learn that we’ve built a brand that carries from the online to the offline retail world.”

At the moment, Stardoll has more than 92 million registered users hence Mattel’s interest in signing the deal with Stardoll. On one hand, Mattel sees in it another outlet for marketing, on a digital level, which is far cheaper than traditional advertising; on the other hand, Stardoll will be able to use Mattel brands for advertising purposes, and an integral part of their game. Both Mattel and Stardoll will benefit from collecting all kinds of brand-related data from end users.

The virtual world is attracting more and more users, proof of that being weeworld.com, currently having 40 million users that express themselves through customized accounts. Providers or such games do everything to improve the social gaming experience, thus adding large quantities of rich, interactive and dynamic contents such as animations, graphics, and video. More content translates into more time spent for pages to load, requiring expert assistance as such provided by Akamai with its Rich Media Accelerator services. The situation is the same for Zynga’s social games, the most popular social games thanks to Facebook. The strong cloud system behind Zynga is owned by Puppet Labs.

Virtual goods are turning in huge revenues for brands as revealed by an eMarketer report describing the popularity of branded items in social game and virtual world WeeWorld. According to the report, Snoop Dogg-branded items have sales 2.5 times greater than the bestselling items of comparable price without branding. It’s all about the psychology of consumption and humans’ desires to “collect and be noticed for our activities”.