Europe’s hottest online game site from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

At the offices of Accel Part­ners a week ago today dur­ing the Trav­el­ing Geeks trip to Lon­don, sev­eral of us came away espe­cially impressed by Michael Acton Smith, founder and CEO of Mind Candy, the UK-based com­pany that makes Moshimonsters.com.

Moshi Mon­sters has become Europe’s hottest online game site (or, if you pre­fer, social net­work­ing site) for the 7– to 11-year-old bracket. The site, which went live a bit over a year ago, has grown by word of mouth to 3 mil­lion play­ers, and it’s just now reach­ing crit­i­cal mass. After a mar­ket­ing push, it added another 1 mil­lion mem­bers in June and likely more than a mil­lion in July, with one third of play­ers in the US, a third in the UK and a third elsewhere.

Kids can adopt, dress up and take care of a mon­ster of their choice. Unlike Club Pen­guin, where you cre­ate an avatar, wan­der around a 3D space and chat, Moshi Mon­sters “is more akin to a child-friendly social net­work,” Smith says. “The beauty about mon­sters is that every­one seems to love them. The guys like the scary zom­bie, Abom­inable Snow­man type mon­sters, the girls like the cute ones with bows.”

Some 70 per­cent of the site’s play­ers are girls. Tra­di­tion­ally girls like to look after dolls or nur­ture lit­tle crea­tures, and other games and toys — Tam­agotchi, Fur­bys and Neopets — have skewed more female, Smith says.

Related

• Renee Blodgett’s inter­view with Michael Acton Smith

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.