Top 50 Most Popular Second Life Sims May 2011 Suggest SL Largely Used as an IMVU-Like 3D Chatroom

Courtesy Louis Platini's Metaverse Business, a Second Life analytics company that gathers publicly accessible in-world data for its clients, below is the top 50 most popular sims in Second Life for May. As with last month and every other month that I've reported such numbers, the Top 50 is overwhelmingly dominated by sexy, flirty, social spaces where the avatars mostly stand around chatting. (If they're not having virtual sex.) In other words, to a significant portion of Second Life users, Second Life mostly resembles a larger version of IMVU.

Anyway, here's the top 50, listed according their average visitor count, the unique visitor range at any given period, and the sim's rank the previous month:

I tried to visit and take a screenshot of the top sim, Village of Serenity, a clothing-optional beach hangout, but failed after several attempts, due to lag, crashing, existential dispair. However, 2nd place goes to Sexy Islands (more of the same) which is pictured above. If you want Serenity now, click here to teleport.

Ranks 26-50 after the break. Tragically, after consistently ranking in the top 50 for the last six months or so, Bukkake Bliss failed to place in May:

Comments

[Canoro Philipp]

it would be interesting to see in the next list of this year if the ranking is going to change with the new search, because people will get different results for what they want.

[QueenKellee Kuu]

It does not necessarily follow that the avatars that visit the top 50 spaces in Second Life represents a "significant portion of Second Life users" unless you show how the actual total daily traffic numbers and direclty correlate that to actual concurrency numbers.

[Senban Babii]

From my own blog a few days ago Hamlet. For once we agree on something! This could be the start of a beautiful friendship <3

http://whenitchanged.blogspot.com/2011/06/conformity.html

"As someone said on a recent comment on New World Notes, we can gaze in awe at the breathtaking builds and sims that have taken months to create. But we visit and then go back to our infohubs and clubs, built from basic prims and bought straight out of standard catalogues. I'd argue that's because ultimately Second Life is a social experience rather than a creative one. People might visit the cool sims but they live in the basic ones. That's probably why the cool sims are constantly struggling to survive, desperate to pay tier or be deleted and maybe that's why the content creators are migrating to cheaper grids?"

[Scarp Godenot]

The most popular events in America are Athletic Contests. Therefore most of America spends most of their time at them.

Sort of bad reasoning, no?

The outliers of density do not prove an assertion of that being the most common activity. They are just that: outliers.

More reasonable would be to take a sampling of median density sims to see what common activity consists of.

[Rob Knop]

I'm with Scarp.

Also, even if sitting around chatting in a graphical chatroom is what most people spend most of their time doing, that doesn't mean that that is what SL is for. Truthfully, I probably spend more time sitting around chatting (either in text or voice) in SL than I do anything else in particular. However, the reason I'm in SL at all is to do things that are unique to virtual worlds. That is, building and sharing the creations, or putting on virtual world theater productions (with my theater group.

Given that I'm in SL anyway, I may also spend a fair amount of time sitting around talking to other people in SL in a way that doesn't really require a virtual world. However, even though a statistical analysis of my time might conclude that that is what I mostly use SL for, it's not at all what I see SL as being for, nor is it why I'm there in the first place.

(One might also conclude that the reason people go to Disneyland is to stand in line... an activity that could be just as easily and far more cheaply accomplished somewhere else.)

[Galatea Gynoid]

It should be noted that there are a lot of other activities people might do more in SL, if the platform supported them better, like when sim-crossings didn't cause boats or planes to go out of control for half a minute. SL used to be a lot more fun as a gaming platform, back when I first got involved. I keep hoping someday it will again, but there's been so much regression, it'll be hard to make up all the lost ground.

[Mouski]

It seems like an obvious correlation to say "Where are the most avatars gathering?" and hear back "At social places."

In that regard, I'm not sure what kind of results you were expecting, other than to see people socialising (ala IMVU, apparently) in these busy, socially-driven places. Seems like a comparison that wasn't necessary.

Building, collaborating, scripting and what-not may be lightly-social activities, but there's no way you're going to want a traffic average of over 35 for a sandbox.

Traffic isn't going to be a helpful statistic in gauging the primary functions of SL. Just what people are doing socially.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

You seem to be making the false assumption that crowded sims equals 'popular'.

For example if you go to the Blake Sea you will always find a few people sailing, flying or exploring. Generally they are not looking for other people to hang out with so those places seem fairly empty, and they like that!

Social avatars go to social places - so the most busy sims will always be the most social ones.

[Aliasi Stonebender]

I'll have to chime in with the chorus: Yeah, people being social in social places socially. In other news, water is wet, etc.

I greatly VALUE the artsy sims... but comparing the traffic value is silly; I don't spend all day hanging out in them.

[Hamlet Au]

... by contrast, with these popular sims, they're crowded for most of the 24 hour cycle. I'd compare it to New York City versus the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is a popular destination, but typically, people only visit for a few hours every few years. Whereas NYC and the other big US cities are popular all the time. The beautiful Second Life sims are more like the Grand Canyon. Which isn't usually a great deal for the sim owner -- the Grand Canyon is kept open with federal funding, but the sim owner is supposed to figure out how to cover her own costs from light and sporadic traffic while also creating and hosting a landmark SL location.

[Jo yardley]

Wow, I've never even heard or visited any of these sims.
I guess what I find interesting, is not average.

[Lisisme Dubrovna]

I own and built the Grand Canyon sims. I pay for them out of my salary which is increasingly hard to justify when the tier I pay is $510.00 usd per month and that could go a long way towards helping certain of my real life family members. I get NO federal funding nor does LL help out with any discount or financial assistance. The Grand Canyon sims are among the most beautiful and loved in Second Life and I get over 100,000 unique visitors per year and about 20,000 avatar hours per day. I ask for donations and some people give them but donations account for only 1/5 of what I have to take out of pocket to give to LL every month. I'd love to know how I can make enough money offering beauty and romance to stay open, beside resorting to offering naked girl scouts chained to rocks for say 200 L per hour use BECAUSE THAT is what 95% of the SL residents want!