Thisis50's Chris "Broadway" Romero to Speak at Virtual Worlds 2008

The announcement for Virtual Worlds 2008, happening in New York in early April, mentions that a speaker from G-Unit Records will participate.

Turns out that speaker is Chris "Broadway" Romero and he's clearly participating due to the creation of Thisis50, 50 Cent's social network powered by Ning.

I just joined Thisis50 so I could check out the stats that were available and it says I'm the 100,686th member which matches up with the number of members per page and the number of pages displaying members.  That's pretty good though one has to wonder if requiring registration to view the site beyond the homepage pushes that number up or down.

Generally I do think it's a doofus move to require registration to check out the pages of a social network, since you miss out on all sorts of casual search engine driven traffic, but with a phenomenon like 50 Cent and free registration there are reasons it might work.

One big reason is that the traffic is more focused and there's a lot more demographic info immediately available which makes marketers and advertisers happy.  Given that 50 Cent can regularly promote the network as he does all his other stuff, he can continue to benefit from the traffic spikes that come from such attention, while building a longterm base of fans.

Are 100,000+ members good given the size of 50's fanbase which is presumably much, much larger?

Related ProHipHop Coverage:
50 Cent/MTV Reality Show to Find "Street-Smart Business Mogul"
Web Crew at ThisIs50.com Stealing Blog Posts