The Size of Second Life
Lots of interesting noise around the “size” of Second Life. And it’s bizzare that there is so much noise when the actual signals can be published at any time. The debate steams from the Shirky camp that believes Second Life doesn’t rate all the press it’s getting (due to the overinflated population/usage numbers) and the reaction of anyone who has a vested interest in Second Life defending its value (where value can diverge beyond the topic of size/usage).
I came across this from GigaGamez:
Linden CEO Philip Rosedale suggested retention was 10%— a percentage so low, it shocked me. (“[A]bout 10% of newly created residents are still logging into Second Life weekly, 3 months later.”) When I checked with Linden Lab last week, Philip and Marketing Director Catherine Smith reported back a slightly higher percentage, this one gauged by returning users from over the last 30 days (but not those who created an account within that period)— “12-15% and has remained steady over the last year… we know churn will be high, but the difference is a network effect and constantly changing content that people do come back to see. ”
The stats above are going to be the crux of some back of the napkin calculations I’ll throw out later (need to verify some data sources first). But there’s probably an easier quick litmus test on the hype factor — the concurrency data. How many people are online at a single time. Let’s assume the following are generally accurate (sourced from Linden’s feed once a minute) — (see graphs). Eyeballing it, it looks like 10-12k concurrent users is the average — with spikes up to 20,000 or so during peaks. If we go back to Shirky’s statements about marketers and press not asking the hard questions to parse out “cool story” versus “does it matter”, it seems to me that in terms of scale, this is a non-story. Especially when you look at this:
So this, as it turns out, is where to set the Second Life bar: of the 2,000,000+ registered accounts now, roughly 240,000-300,000 are regular users, residents in both the colloquial and literal sense. Clay is right to call for the media to stop reporting that very top number without caveat. Shirky is further correct to wonder if all the big companies recently promoting their brands in Second Life (NBC! American Apparel! Adidas and Toyota!, etc.) count as news, since it’s not clear if this is just a gimmick, or if they’re actually getting any measurable return from their promotion dollars.
But even in the Gigagamez post, Wagner James Au admits that measured on scale alone, this isn’t so newsworthy.
So here’s my take:
Second Life, in itself, is never going to reach the mass adoption or generate the impact MySpace and YouTube have. The wild assumptions on Second Life adoption and growth will never materialize without dramatic changes — incremental improvement won’t do it.
However, Second Life is worth looking at, watching, and playing in. Even if you are a marketer. I think it’s definitely a Faint Signal on the Fringe — what is happening in terms of:
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Design for user-generated content
Design for user-generated commerce
Community Design
Rights of digital content and creation
Rapid prototyping and immersive design
Government regulation of global virtual property and content
3D social application design
Etc
There are lots of newsworthy elements of Second Life… but in typical hype fashion, money, size, and sex sell.