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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| * Phat Cat's Jazzy Blue Lounge | 140 | 150 | 23,568 (down 3.30%) |
| * City of Lost Angels | 79 | 84 | 13,344 (stable) |
| * Lost Gardens of Apollo | 79 | 115 | 13,284 (down 9.71%) |
| The Pond | 78 | 37 | 13,188 (up 11.69%) |
| IBM | 47 | 44 | 7,980 (stable) |
| The L Word | 33 | 44 | 5,580 (up 15.67%) |
| Pontiac | 25 | 27 | 4,248 (down 20.27%) |
| Greenies Home | 21 | 21 | 3,588 (down 19.62%) |
| The Weather Channel | 17 | 19 | 2,976 (up 5.08%) |
| Nissan | 17 | 12 | 2,856 (stable) |
| Virtual Holland | 13 | 18 | 2,220 (stable) |
| Playboy | 12 | 8.0 | 2,100 (up 80.41%) |
| ABC Island | 9.36 | 9.14 | 1,572 (down 2.24%) |
The Pond's rising tide could make the natives all wet; Cisco Systems is back - is their success greatly exaggerated?
Telstra/Big Pond's
The Pond has come closest to shoving aside one of the top three
native sites this week, coming just 104 visits short of tying with the
Lost Gardens of Apollo. That's the best 
performance we've seen so far from a mixed-reality site. If it beats the
third-place native site next week - and it just might, then that will
be a real first.
Though it's not reflected in the visible numbers, my gut feeling based on the samples is that traffic at The Pond is about to level out, partly limited by the number of rental parcels available, and partly by the fact that crowded sims slow down, and lag can be a turn-off. The Pond can get busier, but not much busier.
Coming up - numbers behind Cisco's success story, Microsoft, Playboy and the ABC.
Cisco used to be on our charts earlier this year. At the time, they really weren't doing so well. Well, though times have changed, and our methodology changed, we didn't actually stop tracking them. They're back on the charts now.
In one sense, their numbers are bad. We're talking NBA bad. With 552 visitors for the last week, and the same for the week before, they just edge out the NBA at 492.
Cisco Systems is not a Second Life success. Not yet. On the whole, though, they're definitely headed in the right direction, and they deserve some recognition for that. Formerly the Cisco Systems site in Second Life was as exciting, engaging and interactive as... well, a Congressional Budget Office briefing. Cisco's networked virtual environments architect, Christian Renaud, seems to have the right idea at last, and the improvement in visitor numbers since March reflects that.
Renaud and his team can't afford to become complacent, however. Cisco Systems can be a success in Second Life, but building an engaged community isn't an easy task - it's something that is very easy to do badly. In one sense, Cisco is a Second Life success story - Second Life has successfully changed Cisco's ideas about how it can and should relate to its customers.
Last week I speculated that slides in Australian Broadcasting
Corporation's ABC Island would lead to it slipping from the top ten,
and Playboy returning to that spot, just below
Microsoft. 
Well,
ABC Island continued to slip a little, but that was nothing compared to
Microsoft's ongoing slide, dropping to 1,260 this time, and dropping off the top
ten entirely.
Granted, Playboy pulled an 80% gain out this time, but really they only needed a few percentage points to slip ahead of Microsoft into the top ten this week.
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.
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