Attention, shoppers: Men outspend women 9 to 1 on mobile virtual goods

Given the stereotype of how much women love shopping, you’d expect them to be the biggest spenders online. And women are indeed fueling purchases at sites such as Gilt Groupe. But when it comes to purchases of virtual goods in mobile social games, men outspend women by 9 to 1, according to a survey by MocoSpace.

The data comes from a study of 1,500 social gamers on Boston-based MocoSpace‘s mobile entertainment platform. The company analyzed anonymous user behavior to see how the sexes behave when it comes to games. It found that 53 percent of MocaSpace mobile social gamers are male and 47 percent are female. Men spend slightly more time playing the games, averaging 21 minutes a day compared to 19 minutes for women.

But 69 percent of the males buy virtual goods and only 31 percent of females do. On top of that, those male gamers are responsible for 90 percent of virtual goods that are purchased inside the games. It shows that men really do love to shop, at least when it comes to gaming. Games on MocoSpace include Games on the MocoSpace Games platform include Street Wars, Stage Hero, and Happy Farm. Overall, there are 17 million members on MocoSpace’s platform.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.