Second Life Website Data from SimilarWeb Shows Surprising Results - Much Younger, Male, Mobile Than Typically Assumed

Click to expand -- data courtesy SimilarWeb

We know that Second Life's active userbase has been about 500-600,000 for over 10 years, but visits to the official website SecondLife.com tell a different, more interesting story. Courtesy top web/mobile analytics company SimilarWeb, take a look at these charts. Some key takeaways:

• Visits to SecondLife.com from the United peaked in July 2016 at about 8 million/month
• Monthly US visits to SecondLife.com have been trending down since 2016, from around 6-5 million/mo since 2017 to now
• Current US unique visitors: 770,000, from 6.9 million total visits
• 1 in 3 of US visits to SecondLife.com are via mobile

First question that jumps out: Why the spike in July 2016? The only major US/SL news item I can find from the archives is an SL-based fundraiser for victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orland, Florida.

Followed by: Why has Linden Lab refused to create (or just go ahead and buy) a smartphone version of Second Life when 1 in 3 of its own website visitors are on mobile?

Now let's look at Similarweb's demographic data from the USA, because that's also surprising:

Click to expand -- data courtesy SimilarWeb

This data challenges (or complicates) two commonly held beliefs: That Second Life has an older userbase and that it is much more gender balanced. I believe that's still true of the most active, engaged part of the userbase, but SimilarWeb's data suggests there's much more general interest from the young and (by inference) young men. But because SL usage hasn't grown, Linden Lab is failing to retain these potential users who show up at the company's door.

Finally, let's compare these stats with SecondLife.com's total website visits over the last couple years: 

Click to expand -- data courtesy SimilarWeb

Highlights here:

• Total visits between 15 million and 20 million a month -- with a spike to 25 million in December 2017
• Current total monthly uniques of 4 million -- i.e. only 17% of global visits are from the US (700,000)

So another mystery: What caused the spike between November 2017 and January 2018? It could have been Leslie Jamison's widely-read Atlantic Monthly story about Second Life.

Much to discuss and analyze -- thanks to SimilarWeb for the data!

UPDATE: Delete a reference to the 2016 election, as I misread the date range of a growth spike.

Comments

[Oobleck]

This is really interesting, Wagner. I think the curiosity aspect has been and is always there, especially given all the hype lately with VR. But what we have always known is that retention is the issue. A steep learning curve seems to be the stumbling block of getting these new users through the door and actually investing the time and money to learn the platform. It seems so simple. If a real effort was made by LL to provide actual services and landing point assistance (tours, workshops, and live tutorials/concierge services). While I see this exist to an extent it's clearly not enough. The new user island (whatever it's called) is often empty other than noobs and I recall back in the day that the only way I stuck was that someone I met actually helped me in real time. Interestingly enough I always felt that this is something LL could actually do with real people that are, perhaps, at an offshore style "call center" which could have an actual paid (with minimal costs) group of "trainers" who would be avatars positioned to help and answer questions in-world. The bean counters of course know better than I if this would effective. What is the lifespan cost and reward of retention per avatar? If working better to retain them is this a viable strategy? Finally, given the demographic of these 20-something men being a surprising amount of those looking at SL we can assume for sure that, despite LL and other's hope of changing the "sex" centric idea of SL, that it will not only never change - but might actually grow. One would think.

[Iki Akiri]

I would suspect that maybe people are logging into secondlife.com on their phones to check who's online; if it's worth logging in etc.
In my case I do check the second life website for example; around event times to see how those are going and keep an eye on when to cash out - which I also do on my phone when I'm out and about.
There could be a bunch of different reasons but the information is really quite interesting.