Tateru's Mixed Reality Headcount

Baller's City: California hiphop b-ball-- and a PhD thesis

NBA loses home court advantage to Ballers City; Pride goes before a fall as Lesbians sink below The Pond

Ballers City is a plucky, homegrown basketball-themed community with streetsmart, hardtop flavor, and right now, it's whipping the pants off the NBA's official Second Life site, performing twice as well despite the NBA's 25% rise in visitors this week.  (3,606 visits to the NBA's 1,596.)  As it turns out, it was developed for the PhD thesis of Rein Spire, the City's founder: "How to create a compelling SL place: Preconditions and Requirements for Avatar Based Innovation." Seeing as how Ballers is beating out the most renowned corporate brand in professional basketball, I'd hazard to guess his paper will get good marks.

After the fold, we'll check breasts for firmness-- how did the fantasy version of Hefner's fantasy measure up? That plus our regular rundown of the corporate top ten.

Here's how the top ten corporate sites did, compared to three top native sites:

Site (* Native reality site)	Est avg hourly visits	Est avg hourly visits (peak hrs)	Estimated total weekly visits
* Phat Cat's Jazzy Blue Lounge	183	188	30,756 (up 1%)
* City of Lost Angels	78	81	13,236 (stable)
* Lost Gardens of Apollo	78	89	13,104 (up 11% )
IBM	57	44	9,636 (up 63%)
The Pond	41	27	6,984 (down 5%)
The L Word	28	37	4,812 (down 34%)
Pontiac	26	40	4,404 (up 24%)
Playboy	18	17	3,181 (new)
Microsoft	14	23	2,460 (up 66%)
ABC Island	13	11	2,184 (down 13%)
Weather Channel	12	13	2,052 (up 11%)
Nissan	11	10	1,980 (up 20%)
NBA	9.5	14	1,596 (up 25%)

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Big Blue, also known as IBM, has shot past the competition into first place on the mixed-reality list, with traffic gains of 63%. All of IBM's public islands have been showing heavier traffic this week, with significant activity at their new virtual business sales center. IBM even managed to overtake new Resident help area The Shelter (a homegrown favorite) this week, which has had a bit of an unexplained slide in traffic. 

The L Word, SL site for Showtime's popular media property, slipped as traffic fell off at the end of their Gay Pride Month celebrations and events-- this despite boosts from their presence as a Community Registration Portal. The L Word dropped a full 34% to slightly below The Pond, which itself dipped slightly, but remains a solid performer.

Newcomer Playboy enters at 5th place, showing that some of us are interested in more than just the articles, while the other mixed-reality newcomer Comcast just isn't performing so well, but still comes in above the 500 visitors mark (though not by much.)

Below 500, we've got Coldwell Banker, Adidas, Dell, Reebok and Coca Cola. Below 1000 visitors, there's a bit of motion, but Adidas is consistently drawing more traffic than traditional rival Reebok.

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

We've changed the methodology slightly this week, based on discussions with and valuable insights from Gary Hazlitt and others. Instead of the previous three sample periods (peak concurrency, minimum concurrency and mid-evening Pacific time), we are now sampling four times per day, evenly spaced as noted below.

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 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.

 

Comments

[Rein Spire]

I have to add, that to a great part Dirty McLean is responsible for the success of Ballers City. He was not only responsible of building and scripting, but also shaped the strategy and successfully managed the sim due to his profound sl experience!

[Brace]

cool! I rember Dirty from weh back.

Still have some of his original dance move anims he gifted be too

Go B-Ballers!
:)

[Anonymous Baller]

First of all - I just noticed this article but it is important to note that Ballers City gets its traffic numbers from placing platforms up in the sky and laying out camping chairs. The numbers are as inflated as Dirty McLean's head

[Dirty McLean]

Wow, okay I might be a little late to reply here but I just found this article myself and wanted to clear some things up. First, this headcount was not based merely on traffic score. Second, the bots in the sky did not enter the scene until after this article was published. They were operated by a store owner who kept them on a separate parcel which did not advertise Ballers City in any way that could falsely inflate our traffic score (though I can't speak for his store traffic, and he has since been removed). I see how this could be misunderstood and guarantee that all traffic in Ballers City is 100% genuine. We are still going strong nearly 2 years since the publication of this article!