The L Word has picked up with a final burst of events for the last week of Gay Pride month, though still falls short of IBM in first place and Australian telecom-sponsored The Pond which remains a close second despite large gains this week, due to a Second Life spot on Australian television.
Surprisingly, sites with their own Linden-authorized registration portals for new users (The L Word, the NBA, The Pond) do not show matching traffic increases at their adjoining parent sites. Many new Residents do not complete the companys' orientations, or do not "graduate" to the parent site, usually teleporting away while experimenting with the map or search functions, and either cannot or do not have incentive to return.
After the fold, IBM battles with Final Fantasy, plus our regular rundown of the corporate top ten.
|
Site (* Native reality site) |
Est avg hourly visits |
Est avg hourly visits (peak hrs) |
Estimated total weekly visits |
|---|---|---|---|
| * Phat Cat's Jazzy Blue Lounge | 178 | 193 | 30,048 (down 2%) |
| * Lost Gardens of Apollo | 83 | 107 | 14,052 (up 7% ) |
| * City of Lost Angels | 83 | 88 | 13,992 (up 5%) |
| IBM | 59 | 60 | 9,912 (up 2%) |
| The Pond | 55 | 29 | 9,288 (up 33%) |
| The L Word | 39 | 50 | 6,684 (up 38%) |
| Pontiac | 32 | 49 | 5,532 (up 25%) |
| Weather Channel | 19 | 24 | 3,216 (up 56%) |
| Playboy | 17 | 20 | 3,000 (down 5%) |
| ABC Island | 15 | 14 | 2,652 (up 21%) |
| Microsoft | 15 | 20 | 2,640 (up 7%) |
| Nissan | 11 | 8.5 | 1,908 (stable) |
| Virtual Holland | 7.5 | 12 | 1,272 (up 73%) |
The Shelter (9,504, pictured above) rallied strongly this week, but continues to lag behind IBM, which is maintaining strong traffic numbers throughout their public areas. IBM have even edged out Final Fantasy role-playing environment, Midgar (9,336), who dipped marginally this week. It will be interesting to see if Midgar regains the lost ground and cuts back in front of IBM.
ABC Island also fared well, off the same influx of new Australian residents this week and there were strong traffic numbers across most of the top ten this week, though those below didn't fare so well.
The NBA slips out of the top ten, while Ballers City (3,612) remains stable, continuing to draw basketball enthusiasts from all over the grid. Lower down on the charts, things are relatively static with Adidas (276) and Reebok (204) fighting with Coca-Cola (180) for the bottom spot.
Visit my blog tomorrow for a much more extensive list of ranked sites (mixed and native.)
Tateru Nino counts heads every week for New World Notes. Contact her for more info.
Methodology
Mixed reality sites in this headcount are selected for their prominence, either from publicity or real world name recognition. Sites with consistent low traffic (500 or less weekly) may be dropped in future Headcounts in favor of other sites. We do not count sites with camping chairs, or visitors in the orientation sims, as there seems to be little evidence to suggest that they will become visitors to the parent site - and if they do, we catch them when we headcount the site anyway.
We collect data four times per day for each site at 2am, 8am, 2pm and 8pm (times in SLT/US Pacific) plus/minus 1 hour. For each sample we count the number of people at the site at the time. We average those samples across the week, and then assume that average to hold constant, with each visitor spending a half hour on-site. This methodology does not necessarily include one-time events that generate high traffic missed by our sampling, which we'll make note of whenever possible. Headcounts do not factor in returning visitors, so assume that the total number of unique Residents are likely to be significantly less than the estimated total visits.
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