Second Life Website Still Strong in Traffic, Says SimilarWeb

The official Second Life website has been gaining traffic over the last six months according to SimilarWeb, a well-designed, new-ish Internet analytics site, and is still among the most popular sites on the web, with 16.5 million visits last month. Average time on site is over 12 minutes, which I can tell you is seriously impressive. (By contrast, Battle.net, the official portal for World of Warcraft and Blizzard's other games, has a time on site average of just under 7 minutes.)

Also notable is where visitors are mainly going when they hit the Second Life site:

The SL Marketplace, last month with nearly 9 million visits and almost 20 minutes average time on site. Which again, shows truly strong engagement rates among existing SL users.

(Yes yes, no analytics site is perfect, and SimpleWeb is certainly not, but these numbers seem pretty close to other analytics I've seen.)

Hat tip: Maria Korolov, who has a fun SimpleWeb analysis of metaverse blogs here.

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Comments

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Not arguing the traffic although the times spent on them as compared to other sites may indicate that the sites are slower, harder to navigate to find what you want and more time consuming.

Sales are not down for many merchants, so lots of shopping time on the marketplace is a given, especially with search that makes things more difficult and time consuming.

Many people have also complained that the marketplace is slow.

When matched with retention of new users and other indicators, it paints the same old picture of non sticky traffic.

[Metacam Oh]

I go to it everyday to see if it's been sold to someone with a clue. :)

[Pussycat Catnap]

Time on site is a misleading statistic. Much more important is the flow of the traffic on the site and how well it translates into business.

Time on site is the least valuable stat to measure. But its easy to say in business meetings. As an analytics professional I would much rather see things like clickpaths, new user vs returning users - and their differences in activity, search terms used on site search fields as well as those used to find the site, bounce rate for various pages, and the last page people are on before they bounce off.

A long time on site can actually be very bad if the details show a confused mess of "where am I?" Its only good if it shows a pattern of going somewhere that appears to make sense for the needs of the business.

"Second Life" - pretty generic terms. I expect a site like that to pop up in search engines a LOT. And likely get a vast array of what I call bad clicks. Who runs their google adwords? Do they do proper negative keyword filtering?
If I google "a second of life" why is secondlife.com the number one result?
At least it doesn't show until page two for "second life chances" - and that is a forum post.

Is the site getting a lot of good traffic, or a lot of confused traffic, or even worse; a lot of web-bot traffic?

- These are relevant questions that they would be unlikely to reveal. But that is where you know if things are good or bad.

Oh and they DO have google adwords. Google up "second life" and you will a google ad as the first response. They also have what looks like decent good organic search - but to say more I'd need to 'peek under the hood' and if I did that I'd probably an employee under agreement not to say more.

- The picture doesn't look bad, I'm just saying you're not looking at what is actually a good metric to evaluate it.

If it was me, I'm not sure I would want a facebook result showing so high on the organic search (#4 for me today) - but LLs places more value in their facebook presence than I feel they should. Perhaps they have metrics to show high conversion rates from there - I've never seen anyone get good conversion rates out of facebook.

[Iggy]

Google Trends for "Second Life"

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=second%20life

and "Second Life Video Game"

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F02sz9d

I think the old Bugs-Bunny cartoon "Hare We Go," about Christopher Columbus comes to mind when looking at the trend in 2013:

"She's flat like a pancake!"

[Cake]

I'd rather wait for more "users in grid" and signup statistics before we really see if this is good or bad.

[LuAnn Phillips]

I realize this post is about the website, but while we are talking traffic...
Am I the only person aware that "Featured Events" on the SL log in screen has been broken the entire month of January? Clicking on the picture does not reset the user's starting location as it used to. The other categories are working fine. I have two locations featured there, and traffic has plunged. I've tried several avenues to get it fixed, with no success.

[TC]

@LuAnn the login page event and destination feature seems to be working OK in LL viewers, but broken in the latest Firestorm. You may want to report that to the Firestorm people if this is causing trouble for you.