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”.

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.

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?

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?

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.