Tateru's Mixed Reality Headcount

How well did real world corporate sites engage the community?  Tateru Nino counts the heads...

Site (* Native reality site)	Est avg hourly visits	Est avg hourly visits (peak hrs)	Estimated total weekly visits (from 356,007 Residents in-world over last 7 days, according to the Lindens)
* Phat Cat's Jazzy Blue Lounge	159	176	26,868 (down 1%)
* City of Lost Angels	84	91	14,172 (up 3%)
* New Citizens Incorporated	76	87	12,804 (down 7%)
IBM	48	45	8,196 (up 1%)
The Pond	39	17	6,672 (down 7%)
Pontiac	34	34	5,820 (down 4%)
The L Word	31	40	5,208 (up 1%)
Greenies Home	29	34	4,896 (up 36%)
The Weather Channel	17	23	2,988 (down 5%)
Nissan	17	12	2,928 (down 10%)
Microsoft	16	24	2,736 (up 6%)
Virtual Holland	12	22	2,172 (up 2%)
ABC Island	11	12	1,920 (stable)

The people at Greenies Home have raised the population limit on the region, and the crowds have certainly come. Greenies Home is up 36% on the previous week - though there was some talk of closing the site temporarily for some refitting. I'm hoping that means yummy new content!

Playboy (1,368) has got the feel of a long-tail curve about it at the moment. After a surge of visiting interest, the traffic has tapered off. The in-world manager, MSGiro Grosso, tells me that neither he nor Playboy (formerly an NWN advertiser) is concerned about the present low traffic levels and are concentrating on community building over time. They plan to take the long view with a minimum one-year plan.  The traffic isn't fantastic, but it's hardly embarrassing either.

While Playboy doesn't make the top ten, it is stable above the 1,000 visits mark, and manages to field staff from 12-20 hours per day, seven days per week from what I have seen. What remains to be seen, however, is whether Playboy can lift that long tail. We'll certainly all be watching to see if it does.

Methodology, notes and the unfortunates with sub-one-thousand visits, after the fold.

The attack which has crippled the Second Life grid for over a day has interfered with the collection of data. In the cases where I was unable to collect data, I have used the corresponding figure from the previous week. That's only three sample periods, so it should not skew the data too badly.

The percentage gains and losses of our unfortunates below the 1,000 visit mark should be taken in perspective. At those traffic levels even small absolute changes in weekly visits amount to large looking percentage shifts. By contrast a one or two percent shift on the top ranking sites can be more than a 100% shift in our unfortunates.

Down the bottom we have Coldwell Banker (588), STA Travel (516), Useful Technology (516), the NBA (468), Dell (204), Sun Microsystems (192), Adidas (168), Ratepoint (156), Comcast (120) and Reebok (108).

Some of these sites have various events that pull visitors outside our sampling period (eg: Useful Technology and Ratepoint) but our samples show that they aren't holding the steady background traffic of successful sites at the present time. That doesn't mean they can't or won't.

Other sites like STA Travel have a fair bit of activity in their orientation site, but not a lot in their main site. That may be a sign that the overall sights and experiences of Second Life are overshadowing their own - or it may simply be too early yet for the sites to have built up the sort of community loyalty that they need to keep people engaged in larger numbers.

Experiences derived from most native sites indicate that without lucking on to a golden combination of short- and long-term appeal, building traffic takes both time, dedication and adaptability - and those three qualities together in a single site is rare in our mixed-reality roundup.

Visit my blog tomorrow for the complete list of ranked sites (mixed and native.)

Tateru Nino is a Second Life consultant and widely-read blogger who counts heads every week for New World Notes.  Contact her for more info on her mixed reality reports.

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.

Comments

[Hackshaven Harford]

I thought your readers might be interested in one of several companies specializing in Second Life metrics analysis. This one in particular takes a default one minute data sample vs. the current four times a day.
http://www.mayarealities.com/