How well did RL corporate sites engage SL's community? Tateru counts heads...
Site |
Est avg hourly visits |
Est avg hourly visits (peak hrs) |
Estimated total weekly visits |
---|---|---|---|
The Pond | 69 | 43 | 11,724 (stable) |
IBM | 42 | 42 | 7,152 (stable) |
The L Word | 29 | 36 | 4,944 (up 19.77%) |
Greenies Home | 27 | 38 | 4,644 (up 8.10%) |
Pontiac | 23 | 21 | 3,948 (up 2.17%) |
Playboy | 17 | 33 | 2,988 (up 19.71%) |
The Weather Channel | 17 | 22 | 2,940 (up 4.70%) |
Nissan | 15 | 12 | 2,604 (up 7.43%) |
Virtual Holland | 12 | 8.86 | 2,028 (up 3.05%) |
ABC Island | 10 | 10 | 1,752 (up 7.35%) |
Playboy continues to get a rise; Sun sets
Playboy's hedonistic and relaxing atmosphere, staff and events are
apparently bringing around more repeat visitors. I'm seeing familiar names and
faces there more frequently as I travel around. After some time of looking very
much like a long-tail phenomenon, Playboy's long-game strategy seems to be
paying off in visitors and repeat visitors. Playboy's site is up nearly 20% this
week with nearly 3,000 estimated visits.
Many of Second Life's most popular places are relaxing, staffed, social
spaces that bind strongly to a theme. Playboy's certainly got all that going for
it. The biggest problem the bunny brand seems to have is overcoming its own
popular brand perception.
Coming up - The battle for tenth place: Sun, Microsoft and Australian Broadcasting; Will the NBA have the balls for the new season?
Sun Microsystems took a bit of a plunge this week, though it is too early to call it a trend. ABC Island gained more ground again, but Sun's momentum faltered losing 11.5% in the battle for the attention of Second Life Residents. On the whole, however, Sun has been gaining ground for the last couple of months, so I fully expect to see them position themselves more firmly in the top ten in coming weeks. That means someone has to go.
The nearest competitors are ABC Island, and Microsoft who is snapping at Sun's heels. Microsoft themselves are up a full 21% this week (1,476 visits) - but their visit numbers have been up and down a bit recently. If they follow true to the trend, we'll see a dip from Microsoft again next week.
In a sense, Microsoft represents tail-end-Charlie for our rankings. Their next nearest competitor is AOL Pointe, with just a bit over a third of the number of visits, at 564. That's a pretty big gap to overcome, and the corporate presences down there just aren't putting the hard yards in to provide the sort of engagement that Second Life Residents expect. Like the early days of the Web, when corporations slapped any old thing on a web-server just so they could say they were there, this seems to be more of the same.
The
exception would be STA Travel. By our measurements, STA is up
21% to 552 visits, but while they rank low on our charts they are doing far
better than you might think.
NBA is right down there among the also-rans. They gained a little this week, though trending quite flat with relative Resident disinterest. NBA is up 18.75% to 456 visits. The NBA 2007/2008 season is starting in November, with the pre-season games already in progress. Will NBA take advantage of the new season to score with their virtual property, or will they drop the ball?
Visit my blog tomorrow for the complete list of ranked mixed-reality sites (native sites, you'll see later in the week).
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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