Social Gamers Rule: The Top Twenty Groups of Second Life

Courtesy Metaverse Business analytics, SL's largest group: FlashBacks

What are the most popular activities in Second Life?  To judge by SL's largest groups, they lean heavily toward ballroom and club dancing in romantic locations, free L$ giveaways, and Romance-language socializing.  What you're looking at above, for example, is the SL listing for "FlashBacks - Club Lounge", which currently boasts 41,023 members, making it the largest existing group in Second Life.  Founded by Ecom Giant, it's for announcements and info around the club of the same name.  It's also highly monetized for potential advertisers, with ad rates and demographics listed in the actual group profile.  (Interestingly, Giant reports that 78% of group members are women between 18-35.)  Assuming those 41K members are all active SL users, that means nearly 1 in 10 of Second Life's 500K monthly active users belong to FlashBacks.

This info comes courtesy of Louis Platini's Metaverse Business, an SL-oriented company that gathers publicly accessible in-world data with bots for its clients.  After discussing their visitor stats for real world business islands, I asked company CEO Louis Platini about Second Life group activity, and he sent his bots tither to collect info.  Top twenty results after the break, with the top ten from 2008 for comparison's sake.  At the moment, four of the top twenty are linked to services which give away free Linden Dollars, six are based around romantic dance clubs, and seven are aimed at people who speak Spanish, German, French, or Italian. 

Data as of February 27, according to Metaverse Business:

1. FlashBacks - Club Lounge: Club notices for nightclub - 41023 members
2. DANCE ISLAND: Club described as "non profit" with 56 live DJs - 27493 members
3. Money Machine Island VIP: Free L$ group - 18732 members
4. Henmations Customer Group: Support group for Henmations animations - 17384 members
5. MoneyTree Madness: Free L$ group - 15085 members
6. Help People Fans: SL support group - 14909 members
7. Sweethearts Jazz: Group notices for romantic club - 14561 members
8. Mc Money .....*Get Free Lindens*: Free L$ giveaway group - 14100
9. secondlifespain.com: Spanish language-affiliated group - 13577 members
10. La Isla: Spanish language social group - 12261 members
11. "The Rock":  Live rock club - 12096 members
12. CLOUD NINE VIP: Jazz ballroom dancing group - 11656 members
13. NEW BERLIN_Streetlife: German language social group - 11461
14. France ****: French language social group - 11416 members
15. Fashion Consolidated: Fashionista group - 10779 members
16. Spanish Orientation: Spanish language support group - 10729 members
17. Money Island VIP: Free L$ group - 10257 members
18. Phat Cat's RomantiCats: Romantic jazz club - 10169 members
19. Tonino Vera: Italian language social group - 10117 members
20. France pittoresque: French language social group - 10028 members

For comparison's sake, here are the top ten groups from July 08, also courtesy Metaverse Business data:

1. FlashBacks - Club Lounge, 18415 members
2. MoneyTree Madness, 15206 members
3. DANCE ISLAND, 13458 members
4. Money Machine Island VIP, 13200 members
5. La Isla, 12828 members
6. MoneyTree Madness, 11962 members
7. hippiepay, 11041 members
8. France ****', 10673 members
9. Gossip Girl Fans, 10465 members
10. Torino Vera, 10422 members

Many of the same groups and social focus remain the same now, but eight months later, many have almost doubled in size.  Curiously, one of the top groups in July 08 was affiliated with a real world marketing effort: Gossip Girl Fans, a group associated with the official SL presence for the popular TV show of the same name.

Comments

[Marianne McCann]

It strikes me that many of these groups look to be the sort that hand out memberships at welcome areas and other new user locations. As such, I wonder how many people on these groups are (a) members who tried SL and left, or (b) users who got the group their first day and never was active in same.

[Erin James]

Looking at the Last Logged In column shows that most users haven´t logged in for month.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

I am not entirely sure that I would trust self-produced figures by a group that has advertising rates posted in its description. 30% "business owners"?

[Temporal Mitra]

I'm happy to see that three of the top 20 largest groups are owned by members of our subscribers customer base for the MAGIC Automated Group Invitation System. Our Customers use MAGIC to invite their clients and customers anywhere in their sales process, without being intrusive or spamming. The MAGIC system is currently doing over 130,000 targeted invitations per week, triggered by purchases from vendors, initiations of rental agreements, touch signs and purchases on XStreet, and it's great to get some validation that it is helping our customers establish their SL brands, and do targeted marketing to their customers.

[Doubledown Tandino]

Sorry to say the population of a group is as legit and relevant as land traffic numbers.

Sending out autospam group inviters on a regular basis with multiple avatars and multiple scripts... that's how the groups get packed. Those groups just boast a quantity of avatars they at one point got to join their group. Those are the same avatars that don't use SL anymore... the newbs, the nickle-n-dime hunter, and the just plain stupid are the people that join those superspam groups. 90% of the avatars in the groups aren't active users anyway.

hate to rain on the group parade, but autoadding avatar names into a group over long periods of time will have a massive nonfunctioning group of mostly spammers and people that dont log on anymore.

[Chuck Baggett]

I've been in SL for over five years now and don't recall ever hearing of the Flashback group.

This might just show that I need to pay more attention.

[Nexii Malthus]

Ah, the groups of the dead/undead.