Estimated visits to Seraphimsl.com via analytics site Similar Web
While Second Life might be smaller than many other virtual worlds, do not underestimate how passionate and engaged its core userbase is. As an example of that, consider SeraphimSL, one of many hundreds of user-run sites and blogs advertising SL fashions and housewares. (And Seraphim is probably the very largest, at least in the English-fluent Internet.)
According to SimilarWeb, Seraphim rakes in over half a million pageviews a month. As I was telling someone else in the SL business recently, that's more than enough eyeballs to make a six figure income in real dollars, via advertising.
In terms of unique eyeballs every month, 500K+ probably translates to roughly 100,000 actual people. (Way back in the day, unsurprisingly, metaverse expert Gwyneth Llewellyn estimated 100,000 as the approximate number of SL's most engaged community members.)
The number is pretty impressive even when you pull outside the userbase of Second Life: Seraphim's page views are larger than many news sites about virtual worlds/MMOs, like this one. It's even about as large or on par with some fairly well known tech news sites and blogs.
What's this mean?
It could just be a neat factoid for your day. But I actually think it points to a far larger opportunity, to build on the existing community in such a way that the shopping experience is better integrated with cultural and social events, and even extends beyond SL into other virtual world/transmedia experiences. For instance, an alternate reality game or scavenger hunt that's spread out across many SL shopping sites and blogs.
The creative possibilities are endless -- and better yet, do not strictly depend on whether an SL user is actually logged into SL (or for that matter, any other virtual world) at any specific given time.
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