SimilarWeb's Top 25 Visits to SecondLife.com By Country in 2018 - Guess Which One is #1 Right Now

SimilarWeb has a new report on traffic and usage of Secondlife.com, so I reached out to the analytics company to know more. Overall, user traffic remains stable (21 million visits in December 2018, somewhat more than July 2018, with 19 million), but the biggest surprise is where the visits are coming from: The United States is not the largest visitor in recent months.

As it turns, an analyst with SimilarWeb Marketing Solutions tells me, the highest traffic in November and December is from Brazil. This is based on comparing traffic from the first half of 2018 (January - June) and the second half of the year (July- December): "The direct traffic between the two time periods increased by 21%, along with significant increases in paid search, social, and referrals. All of these combined, likely increased the brand awareness, driving users to directly seek out the site. Display ads actually saw a 49% decrease between the two time periods." In other words, Brazilian aren't primarily visiting SecondLife.com after clicking on an ad, but going there directly. So it's likely we've seen an organic growth in Brazil users in the last several months.

Now here's SimilarWeb's Top 25 visits to SecondLife.com by country for the whole of 2018, which also contains some surprises: 

1. United States (30%)
2. Brazil (15%)
3. Turkey (5%)
4. United Kingdom (5%)
5. Germany (4%)
6. Spain (3%)
7. Canada (3%)
8. France (2%)
9. Netherlands (2%)
10. Italy (2%)
11. Russia (2%)
12. India (2%)
13. Mexico (1.5%)
14. Argentina (1.5%)
15. Australia (1%)
16. Japan (1%)
17. Poland (1%)
18. Portugal (1%)
19. Chile (1%))
20. Columbia (1%)
21. Indonesia (.5%)
22. Ukraine (.5%)
23. Belgium (.5%)
24. Venezuela (.5%)
25. Peru (.5%)

I rounded to the nearest whole number for simplicity's sake. I'm amazed that Turkey is drawing more visitors than the UK, and Japan's visitors have dropped off so sharply.  (Back in 2007, top SL users by country after the US were Brazil, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France.) To be sure, web visits are not necessarily the same as actual users of the Second Life client and server grid. But given the fact that more and more SL services (including the Marketplace) have been moved to the web in recent years, it's likely web traffic is a pretty close reflection of the SL user community. And in all that time, Brazil's has remain a constant. Parabéns amigos!

Thanks to Reven Rosca for inspiration and SimilarWeb for the data.

Comments

[Stordan Tonc]

SL is at its core a platform for escapism.

Brazil has had a huge amount of political / fiscal turmoil. and with the election of a far-right government, it will get worse.

Turkey is well down the road to a dictatorship.

As much as SL wants to be a social media platform, it lacks the true trappings of one. Your activities are all under an assumed name and there is, usually, no long trail of activity to be followed. The outsider it looks and feels like a game.