Anime-flavored virtual world Gaia Online started up "Gaia VJ," a service which lets you watch video on the Internet with friends, late last year. Fed by video repositories like YouTube, iFilm and MetaCafe, Gaia VJ allows teens to create video playlists and share them with friends in exchange for in-game currency. (You're paid to watch!) There's no surprise that when offered an all-access pass to the glories of the Web, Gaia's young users choose videos include "Cute Lesbians" and "NOOBS CAUGHT CYBERING." To be fair, clips from Mulan and The Lion King are lovingly sandwiched between "anybody can have sex" and "Yaoi gay 18 and Over ONLY please." At least this virtual world has found an effective way to retain its users.

NICK DOUGLAS — The GigaOM blog yet again cuts through the bull, this time about online social networks, with a story extolling Gaia Online. The underhyped online site for kids and teens claims 300,000 daily unique visitors spending an average of two hours a day on the site. (Hitwise says MySpacers spend about 30 minutes each.) I spent at least that during some college days (shut up); it was an addicting forum. But it's now an immersive little world — it feels like playing Paper Mario — that rewards regular users with virtual money and accessories for their avatars. (Inflation turns long-time users into millionaires, though Gaia money can't be exchanged for real cash.) Gaia used these incentives to run a promotion for the film The Last Mimzy, getting over 10% of their users to participate. Those kinds of results beat MySpace's 50-cent-per-thousand banner ads and Second Life's microeconomy to hell. Of course, Gaia doesn't have to compete with these sites, since it's sufficiently different than both (halfway between, actually). It'd be hard to kill this company. A shame for would-be buyers that this growing company seems so self-sufficient.