Thousands of SL Groups on Flickr! (Way More Than WoW)

Here's a handy list of Flickr groups related to Second Life, listed on the official wiki. That's roughly 700 groups, but if you do a group search on Flickr itself, you come up with 2,235. (To be sure, some of those listed are false positives, but on a quick survey, most are clearly SL-related.) By comparison, a search for Flickr groups with "Warcraft" in the description (as in "World of") brings up just 329 groups. So roughly seven times the number. This is yet another example of Second Life's pervasiveness on Web 2.0 systems outside the world itself, and why in-world usage numbers only tell part of SL's story. About 750,000 returning users log into Second Life on a monthly basis, but how many more are also engaged in SL-centric activity on other online sites and systems? The numbers are enormous. Last August, for instance, the CEO of Japan's largest Second Life web/blog portal told me they got 15 million page views a month. Just on that one site alone.

Comments

[Metacam Oh]

15 million page views a month? Sounds like.... well you know... BS, that's half a million a day, from a Second Life community, I bet the SL homepage doesn't even get that much, and then narrow that down to just the Japanese.

[Hamlet Au]

I was a bit skeptical myself, Metacam, but I checked the site's Alexa ranking, it's in the top 25K of all websites, so 15M is quite plausible:

http://alexa.com/siteinfo/slmame.com

(And Alexa doesn't track non-English sites very well.)

[Nexus Burbclave]

This actually makes a lot of sense to me. A larger selection of backdrops to set your photos in, a larger range of avatar customization and a larger number of subcultures with a vested interest in having their own showcases are all probably contributing factors.

[thaumata strangelove]

Haha... I started that list on the wiki! It's pretty outdated, though. Unless someone has done it up recently, I'm sure it's missing hundreds of them. I couldn't keep up with it and figured if people wanted to use the list, the community would have to work together to keep it updated (which is what wikis are for.)

I don't doubt your figures at all. I recently stepped down as moderator for the big SL group on flickr, but it had almost 10,000 members when I did. The Flickr kids are totally prolific and have micro-groups for everything from shoes to hair to odd places to travel to contest announcements.