No wonder if you recall where Skype users came from at its early days. Did it ever become popular in the US?

> If Web 2.0 is a bubble of hype, then surely Linden Lab’s Second Life is the shiniest bubble of them all

Now I totally agree with you!!

> If Web 2.0 is a bubble of hype, then surely Linden Lab’s Second Life is the shiniest bubble of them all

>>Now I totally agree with you!!

I agree man,that’s so true!

“shiniest bubble” - very good

Very Arrington-esque

I think that the investment is worthwhile. if you work out how news sources cover a story of a big company going into 2nd life its most likely a cheap PR trick.

This article doesn’t add anything to the discussion about Second Life. Why is European users of Second Life outpacing US users a sign that Second Life is a bubble about to burst? That doesn’t make any sense.

It’s been widely reported that Second Life’s “resident” number (just over 6 million) is not a particularly useful metric, and people like Clay Shirky have effectively taken it apart (http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/12/12/second_life_what_are_the_real_numbers.php). If you’re going to report on this, it helps to know your material and not just rehash the same old story that was told months ago.

Besides, the core of your argument is that for businesses it doesn’t make sense to have a Second Life presence at this point. What does that have to do with the American / European ratio? Or with the success of Second Life as a platform? The content that keeps some (small) fraction of users returning isn’t coming from big companies. But then, that’s true of lots of the web, too, which is your bread and butter these days. User designed content has historically bootstrapped most of the social services on the web before companies decided to get corporate presences (see YouTube, MySpace, etc). This seems to me to be the natural process of how these services develop.

I’m not saying that Second Life is the future-of-the-internet, or that it’s without flaws. But your point here is spurious. The international ratio and investment rates aren’t really evidence either way that Second Life is working or not.

@Drew,

I believe he is saying there are not enough US eyeballs to be valuable to US based advertising - but then I don’t know how much virtual SL ads cost. Perhaps it would be better to have some numbers to support the argument.

I have tried 2nd life twice, and just can’t bring myself to spend much time there as the graphics and navigation are so pathetic.

Now, a 2nd life running on Wii with effective use of that cool controller and some nice graphics, that sounds interesting.

I wonder how they gather this data. Especially in the view of the fact that SL uses special client and not browser based.

Lev,

Every time the user logs in it must be verified by the server.

@Lev & bengolore,

Actually, these numbers are based on comScore which gets information from a panel of people so it’s not computer logs here.

http://www.comscore.com/method/method.asp

Actually, there are a few flaws in the comScore data. I’ve asked them for clarification but so far no words yet.

First, as Jerome pointed out, comScore data are projections based on panelists. While the enumeration are done monthly in the US, UK, and Canada, it is done on a less regular basis in other countries (what they consider tier 2 and tier 3 countries). For example, the enumeration is performed once a year in India and HK, which leads to bad data the longer it has been since the last enumeration.

Second, up until the March data, comScore was not tracking the application. Instead, they were just tracking the server that serves the page “www.secondlife.com”. If you look at the press release/data closely, they compared the March data to the Jan data, but since the app was not tracked in Jan, the comparison is faulty.

“Companies from IBM, CNet, Reuters, American Apparel, Coldwell Banker and many more have established their presence in the metaverse, but a new study of Second Life finds that the expenditure may be wasted.”

I don’t know anything about American Apparel or Coldwell Banker but I’d be amazed if the other companies you mention are interested in selling only to Americans. So what are you saying? Germans don’t buy things? The French are particularly resistant to advertising?

Its not about the people there. The companies probably dont really care.
Its about the media attention and the nice hip image you get by opening up office in secondlife

I’m still struggling to sort out how comScore is determining their SecondLife data. Unless they are monitoring all the packets coming out of their members PC’s to determine when people are logging in, I’m not sure how they’d get any sort of meaningful data.

SecondLife publishes a good amount of user login and economic transaction data at:

http://www.secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php

They self-report 1,046,500 logins in the last 30 days and while self reported numbers should always be taken with a grain of salt, the statistical criticisms from Clay Shirky and others haven’t disagreed with these numbers: just their interpretation.

This number is undoubtedly higher than the number of actual people (in the same way that if you erase your cookies and visit a website you’re counted as another visitor), but I really can’t see it being off by a factor of 5.

@Jerome,

That’s fine, but as pointed out by #13, it’s kind of ridiculous to argue that US companies only want to advertise to US consumers. Most big brands are international. And besides, maybe it doesn’t make sense to advertise to Americans in SL, but wouldn’t the European population be a reason to advertise to Europeans? Either way, the premise is fundamentally flawed.

Is this Valleywag or TC? I cant remember after reading this post. If anything this is just once again proving that europeans are smarter than us yanks. Viva la metaverse

There’s quite a bit of SL related business activity going on in Japan, from marketing firms developing in-game advertising solutions and property speculators to people selling custom made items for avatars. That said, I agree that the platform is still clumsy but will be until the average home user has a truly butt-kicking system sitting there.

Here in Brazil it was really funny: after a 10-minute piece about Second Life in brazilian´s most popular network (TV Globo) everybody went crazy to establish a presence in the shinny bubble (if you allow me to borrow the expression).

Two weeks ago I was visiting some clients in Sao Paulo and everyone of them mentioned they want it to be there. I was shocked (and a little amused) to see so many experienced people naively believing in such an absurd piece from a popular network…

99% of all statistics are true.

European online businesses are almost as easy to make money from as American ones. Plus, with the current Euro-Dollar exchange rate, I’d rather get paid in Euros anyway.

Since when is TC syndicating articles from ValleyWag?

In order to write something interesting about Second Life you should have something about the whole virtual world space… Do you think the whole concept is bunk?

Second Life is at a very early stage… the critiques you mention are valid, but how about suggesting some solutions or making a broader comparison…

I think the investment of companies in second life is futile. Take a look at the neighborhood where IBM is located, then you will understand.

Great post. 2nd Life may not add up for the US business market quite yet - but is certainly worth the time assuming you have the chance to sit down and play with the technology.

Alot of people and businesses are jumping on the SecondLife Bandwagon. I read an article about emergency services using it for training

Play2train

The main benefit of setting up shop in Second Life is the resulting real-world media attention, which easily dwarfs the in-world attention by several orders of magnitude. For the time being, Second Life is 5% innovation and 95% hype… but maybe something useful will come out of it in the future.

No one has pointed out that Europe has higher-bandwidth broadband and better connectivity to said broadband. Any bandwidth-intensive service will have more European users than American. I’m hardly surprised at this.

I don’t like it!

I’ve never been a big fan of the business benefits of Second Life. I think it could eventually work its way into a workable product.

That is cool

american apparel has a store three blocks from me in notting hill, london. most of these companies are international, not sure why it’s relevent only to US market

Paul
maybe American Apparel isn’t the best example, but certainly the majority of companies opening up in Second Life are American firms with an American focus, I probably could have researched and listed a lot more of them, but wanted to keep it brief.

Thx Duncan - very interesting analysis.

I am amazed (but then again not really) at the direction of discussion here. Mike, maybe it is time again to make some statistics available about how much of TC readers come from outside of the US?

It is the fact to understand that even if you just think you do have an US based audience it is worth the time to look at the market outside.

Linden Lab has understood this and fosters local “liasons” - and it will be worth their money.

I do not see the numbers they projects, especially due to the amount of ‘guessing’ included, but Linden themselves provide numbers on their active users - a simple look at them will provide oyu with interesting numbers for Europe (that is if you understand which country does belong to Europe of course …)

Nicole
Mike didn’t write the post, I did.

In terms of there being value in non-US based users and readers certainly isn’t lost on me as I type this response from my home office on a Sunday afternoon in the South West corner of Western Australia, so no need to preach to me.

The point I made, and still make (and I’d note I’ve been a registered user at SL for over 2 years) is that the value in the flood of American companies into SL trying to target American users doesn’t add up when clearly the bulk of SL’s active user base is non US based, and indeed the number of active US users isn’t particularly high.

Is there some great scope for European firms to join SL? yes, but we aren’t seeing a flood of those currently, although I would have thought that without actually writing it that a natural conclusion from the post was that SL is hot in Europe.

I’m guessing there are several things going on here:

1) SL is growing. Maybe not at the rate of the hype, but it is growing none-the-less. There’s value to being a first-mover in new technologies.

2) Raw numbers are not often as important as the demographics. I’ve read some profiles on SL users that would make your head spin. Lots of people may not watch golf on television but that doesn’t keep companies from buying up tons of ad space. The same thing is going on with SL. These are folks with a good deal of discretionary income: young, hip, rich…

I don’t know - I thought this presented some interesting things to think about. But, the companies mentioned are global brands, aren’t they? I mean, American Apparel, Reuters, etc. are, I know for certain and I would think that having a direct reach into other countries would be as ideal for them as having it here - maybe given this, their moves felt strategic.

I think it’s narrow and niave to think that everything has to target the U.S. Sure, if you don’t sell in Europe, it’ll matter, but global brands would be wise to take advantage of niche communities and platforms to reach people in other places.

It’s very obvious that Europe is becoming a hot bed for tech - in innovation, start ups and usage. I think if you can play there, you should.

I think you will find that Reuters is not an American xompany. In fact it was founded in London by Paul Julius Reuter, a German. Sorry, but the whole premise of this article is flawed.

@ Phillip, really? I had no idea and have worked in media for 10 years!

*ducks*

would it even be possible that this geographic spread makes it *more* attractive to marketers? I think we’ve established that many of the companies involved are global brands and there’s been the suggestions that SL’s users are technology-forward early adopters and designers.

As word-of-mouth marketing via new media becomes an increasingly important component of global business, might it not be the case that Second Life increasingly has exactly the right worldwide audience for these brands?

(hold aside the fact that many of these companies are not executing particularly interesting or sustainable in-world programs and that Second Life is still a very niche product. Also that i’m fully biased from having worked at Linden Lab several years ago.)

While I agree that Second Life, thus far, is the shiniest bubble of them all, the idea that a predominately foreign user base makes Second Life a “waste” for brands is completely asinine. In an age where brands are increasingly global and 95% of the world’s population - and thus 95% of the world’s potential consumer base - resides outside of the United States, you could make a strong argument that reaching foreign consumers is more important than reaching American consumers for many brands. Companies who ignore the international markets do so at their own peril.

I have no idea whether campaigns within Second Life can be effective for marketers and whether Second Life, as a business, has long-term potential, but I wouldn’t dismiss a service because its users are predominately located outside of the United States. In fact, services that don’t successfully find ways to serve international users are, at the very least, leaving money on the table.

@ Drama, I haven’t noticed you posting lately but am so glad you’re back.

btw, the other factor here is that SL is currently straining at max concurrency levels meaning that QoS goes down. This has a secondary effect of artificially suppressing demand within time zones since only so many people can get on at their local peak times. The carrying capacity of the world seem temporarily fixed at 40-45k concurrency plateau. If you remove these issues you’re likely to see more US users.

I am quite sure it is good for companies to get involved in second life. It isn’t just about advertising in there, but all the publicity they get because they advertise that way. In Finlans we had this company Wapit. It was making content to wap phones and when it wanted new workers it put advertising in Donald Duck, because they thought that nerds read comics. It get huge popularity and lot of media make a story about that, because it was so unusual way to trying to get new workers. So it really was worth of every penny they use to advertise in Donald Duck.

Yes but the point is, if you ask a lot of these companies, or marketing firms that specialise in virtual worlds, it is a learning curve. Sure, there are hundreds of bandwagon firms offering nothing at all to SL. Sooner or later though, this time of platform will be the norm. It mightn’t be called ‘Second Life’, but a 3d web interface will be totally necessary for firms to utulise. Barely anyone had a website in 1995, now look at them all…. It is a matter of companies, politicians and charities one the one hand enjoying the media attention, and on the other learning so that when they need the experience, they already have it covered. http://www.the-avastar.com

Has anybody seen (or heard about) the new “Home” for Plasytation 3?
http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/pu.....es;title;1
Make your own speculations!

I’d like to point out this:
- Reuters is the German News Service;
- The Americans (in general, there are exceptions) think that “the sun turns around US and not the earth” and all has to do with them to make it good. Let me tell you guys that Europe exists, as the rest of the world, and some of your companies have already understand thar.