Does Second Life Deserve a Second Look?
Two years ago, everyone was buzzing about Second Life, the online virtual reality community that looks like a game but feels like an experiment in alternative realities. While it initially attracted the role-playing fantasy crowd, everyone started to notice when companies like IBM established a presence in Second Life. For some it offered a more immersive type of web conference. For others it was a way to get away with playing a game while pretending to work.
Second Life now appears to be on the back burner for all but the most dedicated fans in the USA with virtually zero growth in traffic over the past 18 months as attention has shifted to Facebook and Twitter. Internationally, however, there has been a noticeable increase in traffic following a surge in mid-November 2008 that came to be known as the Copybot Controversy. In the aftermath, Second Life realized an increase of about 25% in European and other international markets.
The trouble with Second Life is that it is simply too complex to be instantly addictive to a massive number of people. Unlike Twitter, where the barrier to entry is toe-stubblingly low, Second Life requires a substantial commitment of time to learn how to do the simplest things like walk in a straight line. One wrong keystroke and you’re suddenly, albeit harmlessly, flying into space. More than half of the people who give Second Life a shot don’t get serious with it. On the other hand, just 3% of their members account for half of the visits to the site. It’s the addictive nature of social interplay that accounts for a huge amount of time spent by a very small number of people.
But to pass Second Life off as a trivial pursuit to completely miss the mark. Second Lifers are showing us a very crude view into the future, much the way HTML in 1992 gave us a crude preface to today’s web. Merge Google Earth with Second Life and Amazon.com and jump forward another decade or two in raw processing power and you will start to see that a completely immersive virtual reality is indeed possible with full support for retail commerce. The kinks will get ironed out, and when keyboards are replaced with accelerometer-embedded jumpsuits, we’ll be able to interact with the virtual world in ways that are presently difficult to imagine without smirking.
For now, it’s better to leave Second Life to the role players who get their kicks out of creating avatars and mingling with virtual characters. The audience is too small for an extensive marketing program, reaching about 45,000 US visitors each day and a little more than 100,000 daily visitors worldwide. That’s equivalent to the circulation of a small to medium-sized daily newspaper. Building a marketing platform inside Second Life is costly and time consuming. There are countless better ways to spend a marketing budget.
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8 Responses to “Does Second Life Deserve a Second Look?”
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April 15th, 2009 @ 9:10 am
Once again all people consider with virtual worlds is marketing. Did the author even visit the whole grid? The author refers to SecondLife as a “site” as if its the same as Twitter or other sites. Real data and collaboration is happening in virtual worlds. Those who point out marketability are missing a major part of what Second Life and other virtual worlds are about.
April 15th, 2009 @ 9:28 am
Interesting piece, though your numbers are *significantly off.* See Gigaom today: http://tinyurl.com/d4h5mo
I squeeze two full lives into the same 24 hours and have both positive and negative feelings about both. I do agree that the classic ad buy in Second Wife is a complete waste of money, but there are opportunities that have a much, much broader and deeper reach with global customers. You just need to be immersed enough to know how and where. Time will change that.
April 15th, 2009 @ 9:28 am
Lulz, just caught my typo. THE BEST.
April 15th, 2009 @ 10:13 am
Kyle, I’m sure that you hate being lumped into a broad category as much as I do. I think Second Life is terrific, and I don’t undervalue it as a place for connecting with people and building a model of our online future. I see Second Life as a natural progression from the online communities that started on places like the Science Fiction RoundTables on GEnie back in the day.
To your point, I haven’t explored the entire grid. I’m looking from the perspective of a guy who works at an advertising agency and is asked by clients if we should talk about a Second Life campaign. I usually advise against it. Second Life can work for some products. It works for brands who want to be ubiquitous in both real and virtual worlds. But I believe it’s a little bang for big bucks.
I think it would be a terrific learning experience to launch a campaign in Second Life. Since you’re clearly more experienced in the SF world than I, perhaps you can answer this. Are brands really welcome in Second Life, and if I wanted to create a Brand Awareness event, how would you suggest going about it?
April 15th, 2009 @ 10:34 am
Bettina, thank you for pointing out that chart, and for taking the time to comment. I don’t think my numbers are off at all. We’re looking at two very different statistics, daily versus monthly, but they do both show the same thing–globally, there has been about a 25% growth in Second Life over the past 18 months.
However, what the chart you pointed to doesn’t show is that virtually all of the growth has been outside the USA. This isn’t necessarily bad, it simply shows a shift in interest.
Marketing campaigns are traditionally geocentric. Second Life has around a 60/40 split between International and USA members, with that gap increasing. This raises an interesting question: How does one deliver the same value message to all cultures simultaneously while accounting for the widely varying cultural differences? And in a larger view, will immersive environments like Second Life lead to more homogeny and diminish cultural differences?
April 16th, 2009 @ 9:06 am
From the POV of marketing, probably your analysis is correct. Marketing people never understood SL and its residents anyway, which is why in-world businesses have traditionally been more successful than off-world brands. There’s potential there, but it takes time and immersion to realise.
Numbers wise, though, I’m seeing a lot more people in-world, often pushing 100,000 concurrent users, and most of the new people I run into are in fact from the US, so that’s a bit odd compared to your numbers.
My personal view is that the real benefits of VWs in general and SL in particular are for virtual conferencing (induction time for new users is apparently down to 30mins for an attendee and 60m mins for a presenter/exhibitor) and educational applications. Linden Labs is committed to making learning the ropes easier, and we’ll see how that goes.
SL should continue to do well, and remain profitable – at least they have a business model and profitability unlike Twitter or FaceBook – unless LL shoot themselves in the feet again like the did with the OpenSpace debacle.
That being said, SL is indeed the Mosaic of virtual worlds. In five years we’ll be taking VW tech for granted and remembering the old days of SL like we do early web browsers today. And it will all be much much better. It’s up to LL whether or not they stay ahead of the curve.
I am confident that we have virtual worlds in our future. The people who take the time to understand and use them now will be the people who are out in front when it’s fully mainstream. Remember the web and remember the Hype Cycle. We are in the Slope of Enlightenment currently.
April 16th, 2009 @ 10:42 am
Elrik, I really appreciate your thoughtful and insightful comment. Like you, I see today’s virtual worlds as a natural progression toward something significantly more profound that reaches every one of us, much the way the web does today. I may not be as optimistic as you about the timeframe, but a few years here or there shouldn’t matter.
I cannot say why our numbers might be different. One possibility is that you say most of the new people are from US, but perhaps you mean most of the new users are English-speaking? Most International members enter through the English language portals. There are popular portals for German, Japanese, French, and Korean languages, but their traffic doesn’t account for the huge number of international visitors who outnumber USA visitors by more than 2:1.
The struggle for off-world brands, or what the rest of us tend to think of as “real world” brands is in building a practical bridge that allows selling real products in a virtual world. It can be done, but the operative word here is practical. There is no true advantage, except in special instances, to shopping with an avatar. One instance that comes to mind would be if my avatar was registered with Starbucks and when I went to pay for my coffee, I learned that my in-world friend picked it up for me with an in-world purchased gift card. That would be a pleasant experience.
I suppose this comes back to the point I am hearing in every one of the comments. For those who have invested themselves in Second Life, there are rich opportunities with potential today for the right niche, and potential down the road for everyone. For marketers, the important question is more fundamentally a business perspective. At what point does the in-world market grow large enough to justify building a commercial platform for my brand? My answer is “after the pioneers have taken all of the arrows”.
September 1st, 2009 @ 5:37 pm
[...] Does Second Life Deserve a Second Look? | Tim Piazza’s BzzMatters Blog http://www.bzzmatters.com/2009/04/does-second-life-deserve-a-second-look – view page – cached Two years ago, everyone was buzzing about Second Life, the online virtual reality community that looks like a game but feels like an experiment in — From the page [...]