AdAge Gets It Wrong (and Right)
I understand its tough being a journalist. You have to sell headlines, and “Second Life Losing Lock on Virtual Site Marketing” sells better than “Virtual World Space Broadens Appeal: New Sites Prospering”.
The second would be a more accurate title for Andrew Hampp’s recent Advertising Age article which states that the “giant in the space seems outdated” while telling the details of Zwinky, Stardoll and Doppelganger’s recent music industry campaigns. Hampp’s argument that Second Life is losing appeal is just flat out wrong however and I was frankly shocked by the lack of fact-checking. He argues that “mass immigration to the shores of Second Life had stabilized, with the application averaging 132,000 downloads a month from November 2006 to May 2007″. Huh? There have been single days within that range where there have been that many downloads, I’d guess. Here’s a chart I compiled just now of the Second Life growth figures (pain in the butt btw, had to go back through a years worth of date-stamped presentations).
He then goes on to make a variety of other illogical statements such as “Zwinky, for example, garnered nearly 3.6 million unique visits in May alone, while SecondLife.com accumulated just under 4 million unique visits in the span of an entire year, according to ComScore”. Huh? First, this is a ridiculous comparison because the whole world of Zwinky is browser based, whereas users only visit Secondlife.com to download the application. If you were to compare usage hours (which should be the defacto standard for comparing virtual worlds), Second Life with >20 million (vs. 3 million a year ago) is the equivalent of a top ten Comscore site. But leaving that aside, if Hampff is to be believed, then some 2 million users over the last year managed to download Second Life without ever visiting Secondlife.com (it’s a miracle). Never mind the people who visit but don’t download or go to the blog or buy currency, etc.
There are a variety of other bizarre things in the article, such as his ridicule of hype-based Second Life marketing campaigns that claimed to be the “First This That or the Other” in Second Life followed almost immediately with a discription of “the first avatar concert” as a testament to Zwinky’s drawing power. C’mon. . . . These have been happening for a long time (Suzanne Vega, Ben Folds, Chamillionaire, etc. ) and they’ll continue to happen.
Let me be really clear here. The headline should have read “Virtual World Space Broadens Appeal: New Sites Prospering”. That’s true and it’s why we’ve announced our recent partnership with Gaia Online and will be announcing more over the next few months. These new worlds are great and they offer our clients a diversity of formats, programming choices and demographics.
As the industry matures, there will be plenty of opportunities and rivalries emerging. I would implore platform providers to sell themselves on their own strengths and merits rather than trying to tear Second Life or anyone else down. I hear this all the time and it’s silly and small-minded.
And to our friends in the press — we know you have to sell stories, but if you’re going to go negative, check your facts.
July 11th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
What I find funny are the stories written by so-called experts, throwing around terms and name dropping new applications in the attempt to write an ‘informed’ story. It’s funny because clearly most of them have never even joined Second Life or bothered to investigate it thoroughly.
July 11th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
[...] One of the buzzes in the media world happens to be this thing called Second Life. It’s generating as much popularity as the “world wide web” phrase of the 90’s. Increasingly media outlets focus on the negativeor “scandalous” nature of Second Life and get things wrong. There are not many media outlets doing a good job in exploring what something like Second Life has to offer. Two things happened this week that made me realize that current media doesn’t quite get Second Life much in the same way they did not understand the Internet when it first arrived. First was this blog post by Ruben over at Millions of Us who discussed the plain wrong facts in comparing Second Life to other services like Zwinky and Stardoll (first why would you even compare Second Life to these services, comparing Second Life to Kaneva, Nintendo Mii’s or even Sony Home is a lot more appropriate). Second was this weeks Sherman Lagoon comic, where the cast enter into the virtual world of Second Life (check out yesterday’s and today’s comic!). Leads me to believe that if Second Life was on the decline, why is it getting so much press? 07.11.2007 12.59.pm | You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. | Tags: Journal | read article [...]
July 11th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
congrats on the continued virtual immersion reuben. your link to 3dpointD.com’s post of the gaia/mou press release was interesting. might want to post something on your homepage’s Current News too though. oh, you did: http://millionsofus.com/blog/archives/249 (20jun07). kudos one and all. keep building community.
July 12th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Intrigued by Zwinky ads I did a little research and found that it didn’t fare very well when accompanied by “malware” in a Google search. Wonder why that wasn’t in the report….
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=zwinky+malware&btnG=Google+Search
July 22nd, 2007 at 4:59 am
I think zwinktopia is actually pretty fun. I signed up one evening and was hooked for 6 hours! I recommend it to anyone with time to kill.
July 25th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Wired magazine just published an article entitled “How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life.” It’s posted at http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-08/ff_sheep?currentPage=1
I would love to hear the reaction to this story. Are the Old Schoolers simply not getting it, or are we all getting taken for a ride?
Two points in the article seem to stick:
1) SL seems deserted; and
2) This is because the software is outdated — and because the servers can only handle up to 70 avatars at a time.
I am new to SL and very interested in the format and the possibilities. But these are serious limiations! I would love an expert’s response here.
July 25th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Ed,
I have been in SL a while, built and scripted more than a few things, and have about 3,000 hours inworld, so I guess I’m an expert. Based on this I offer up my observations:
First, the context here is about commercial use of SL, not the social networking aspect. The vast majority of people in SL are there for the latter, not the former, so any population information applied to commercial use should be deeply discounted. Anecdotal data and my research instincts tell me that less than 10% of the population, and likely less than 5%, are viable customers.
SL is an excellent tool for certain situations. Small group situations where the aspect of 3D adds value is the current sweet spot. Collaborative workgroup settings where it’s beneficial to interact with a 3D model, share slide/video-based information, and chat/talk with the other members of the group in real-time are perfect applications of SL.
To Ruben’s point, SL is not the only technology available. There are many alternatives, both public and private, for virtual environments. This said, SL is the current 800-pound gorilla unless your market is children.
SL is not yet a ‘market place’ due to the population issues noted above as well as the wrong-headed approach of many companies, hence the deserted locations. People do not come to SL to shop for RL things yet. They might do so one day when companies who’s products benefit from a 3D representation establish an integrated approach that connects their RL, web, and SL marketing efforts.
SL technology, while architected poorly, is far from outdated. In fact, it is revolutionary. So much so it challenges the processing power of many client systems. The performance issues, such as limiting avatars and lag time, are related to the computational burden of passing large amounts of data between the server and the client. As it was with the Internet in the early ’90s, advances in computational, interface, and communications technology will diminish this issue over the next few years.
So, if a company has a product where a virtual world (VW) setting adds value, they should establish a pilot program in SL to get some experience working in a VW. It’s early, but the experience gained will be invaluable as technology matures and acceptance of VW use in commercial settings reaches critical mass.
July 25th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Ed B:
Second Life is 10 times the size of Manhattan and inhabited by 45000 people simultaneously. Hence many places are sparsely populated, with users clustering in groups according to their interests and social bonds. With respect to the 70 avatars per 16 acre “region” supported by one server, the common misconception is that this limitation is the fault of the Second Life technology. In fact, a lot of it has to do with the inability of the user’s computers to draw more than that many complex avatars simultaneously.
At the end of the day, I think that this debate is much ado about nothing. Here’s the bottom line. Users spent 22 million hours in Second Life last month. The average session is something like 2 hours. This speaks to an experience that’s just different than lots of things to which it is often benchmarked. Today, our clients don’t reach a mass audience in Second Life (they tend to average 10K - 100K visitors). Instead, they connect with a small but very passionate base of users in a very profound way Those users then form a community and tend to blog about their experience, where a much larger audience is reached.
At the end of the day, this is very early in a long-term trend. That trend involves people using the net to connect in a more real and personal way with other people and companies. Second Life is just a part of this movement — so is Gaia Online, Stardoll.com, Zwinktopia, as well as Digg.com and a broad variety of web 2.0 sites that we all take for granted.
Over the next year, we’ll see the social networks becoming more “avatarized” and the virtual worlds becoming more “socially networked”. And the commentary, both positive and negative, is healthy. What really matters are users’ preferences and the adoption rates in these environments clearly indicate that people like connecting directly with other people in immersive and humanlike ways. Is that really so surprising?