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
* Phat Cat's Jazzy Blue Lounge	136	152	22,896 (down 2.85%)
* Lost Gardens of Apollo	86	96	14,496 (up 9.12%)
* City of Lost Angels	80	84	13,584 (stable)
The Pond	73	42	12,300 (down 6.73%)
IBM	41	37	6,888 (down 13.68%)
Pontiac	33	50	5,688 (up 33.90%)
The L Word	30	42	5,196 (down 6.88%)
Greenies Home	25	34	4,212 (up 17.39%)
The Weather Channel	20	19	3,408 (up 14.52%)
Virtual Holland	15	16	2,544 (up 14.59%)
Nissan	15	12	2,532 (down 11.34%)
Playboy	11	5.71	2,004 (down 4.57%)
ABC Island	9.0	6.86	1,512 (down 3.82%)

Pond peaked; Pontiac perking; Phatland phading.

Last week I predicted that Telstra/Big Pond's The Pond had likely peaked under the current conditions and would level out. And it has. The site is definitely showing signs of leveling, rebounding almost 7% from the previous figures. It seems likely that we'll see a new baseline establish itself at approximately double the site's original traffic, in the vicinity of 12,000-12,500. One to watch.

Also worth watching is IBM, a distant second on a gentle decline, while General Motors' Pontiac has jumped almost 34%, replacing Showtime's The L Word in third place. Why, exactly, is IBM sliding - particularly when they are in an expansion phase with the recent addition of a number of new islands? Are  bon-vivants bored with Big Blue?

Coming up - Phatland and Sun Microsystems - jazz music with a dash of drama above a rising Sun.

Feted Phatland founders, Dilbert Delwig and Charity Colville sold Phatland to new management (Alix Abruzzo) early in August for an undisclosed amount. Apparently since then, the pair that built and formed the core of the Phatland community have been banned from the sim [via Second Sex].

It is difficult, if not impossible, to tease apart who is at fault exactly - it all being very much acrimony of the he-said/she-said variety, each side accusing the other of harassment and misdealings. Though the financial part of the deal, at least, appears to be solid, on a personal level, things seem to have gone very wrong indeed.

The word is that all parties still want to see Phatland succeed, but it is clear that the traffic at Phatland has been on a slide since then, slow, but steady. While there isn't a clear causal link between the drama and the decline, it would be unusual indeed to consider the change of management and subsequent acrimony to not be a factor.

Sun Microsystems took a 126% jump last time, bringing it to 624 weekly visits, and has this week jumped again another 140%, bringing it up to 11th place with 15,00 weekly visits - a scorching two week rise, putting it only 12 weekly visits behind Australian Broadcasting Corporation's declining ABC Island - and quite possibly into the top ten next week, even on a relatively small gain. There isn't a whole lot of competition for traffic at that level, except for Microsoft (1,368).

At the bottom, we have the usual suspects, jumping about as fairly small numerical changes become large percentage shifts. Our usual list of last-place-getters are fighting over the bottom rung, mostly, apparently by sitting on their hands and not doing anything that might potentially interest Residents. We look forward to one or more of them attempting to engage residents in any active, long-term way.

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

[Charity Colville]

"While there isn't a clear causal link between the drama and the decline, it would be unusual indeed to consider the change of management and subsequent acrimony to not be a factor."

Any "acrimony" that exists is not even known by 90% of the patrons who visit Phat Cat's daily. The decline traffic is 100% due to a change in management styles, or lack therof. While Phat Cat's was once managed and the sim monitored for performance 24 hours a day, 7 days a week...that it no longer the case. We attempetd to assist and correct this problem and were told very rudely that our help was not neccessary.

Charity Colville
Co Creator/Founder of Phat Cat's