Seraphim, the massive Second Life shopping blog, recently opened a Cuban-themed shopping sim in SL itself -- click here to visit. This virtual island is a long time coming since the web site launched in 2011, going on to become the largest user-run SL blog by far. Raking in nearly 61 million reported pageviews since then, currently on track to exceed over 12 million in just this year alone, Seraphim is, as I've noted before, more popular than many professionally run MMO news sites. (New World Notes, for instance, has only attracted a distant ~15 million views!) With pageviews like this, it's likely that well over half of Second Life's ~600,000 active user base visits Seraphim on a regular basis.
Or to make another comparison: Seraphim SL gets about as many visits as Fashionista, a top real life fashion blog.
Despite this wild popularity, Seraphim founders and co-owners Kess Crystal and Awylder1 still hold full-time jobs in real life -- in the healthcare sector, Kess tells me. "So 2020 has been particularly challenging for us," she notes, "both managing Seraphim and dealing with the ramifications of COVID... we have an amazing management team in place and we simply could not do it without them."
But if you think those millions of pageviews translate into millions of dollars in profit, you may be mistaken:
"We're often amused by the wildly optimistic assumptions we've read on social media and our reaction is often 'I WISH!'," as Kess puts it, when I ask her about Seraphim's revenue. "We are a cost heavy business in terms of payroll and the amount we have to pay for hosting such a resource heavy site is not insignificant either. As business owners, we reinvest monthly into a fund for new services, scripting, innovation and then draw a salary from the remaining profit."
Kess shares some Seraphim secrets to becoming so big, and future plans with the sim, after the break:
Pictured: Seraphim team at its Halloween party in their official new sim
How did you manage to grow the Seraphim site to become so huge?
In a word...consistency. Our event coverage contains relevant, pertinent information for shoppers and unphotoshopped, realistic and uniformed photographs of the items. Our evidence is that the market for events is still growing but with the inclusion now of mainstore releases, gifts, hunts and sales we have every aspect of Second Life retail in one place. We made Seraphim consistently useful to our readers and they reward that by coming back again and again every day.
How does the site make money -- simply through the ads or are the posts sponsored as well?
All event coverage you see in the blog feed is free of charge to the events but, we are a business and we make no bones about that. We pay every member of our team so of course we need a strong income base which is predominately advertising based. We offer a variety of advertising opportunities for all types of SL businesses and brands, ranging in both price and exposure on the site. We introduced three sponsorship options earlier this year for our three special sections, Mainstore, Sales and the Hunt and Games guide.
What are the demographics of your readers?
Everyone! We do use google analytics a lot to understand where our traffic is coming from etc but we're more interested in how long they stay on the site, how many pages they look at it and what they are looking at. We run a lot of data to understand the types of events people want to see more of and which get the most views and bring the most readers back to the site.
What motivated you to expand the brand with a full sim?
We believe that there are still people in Second Life, who maybe don't shop as often as our regular readers, or who don't know about Seraphim so we are always looking for opportunities to expand the brand to all residents. In June we launched The Outlet Infinity Event and wanted to buy a sim but Linden Lab had just put a hold on buying new regions so we rented space on a sim owned by the owner of Fancy Decor and the Vordun Museum. We had also started to work with designers on in-world product launches and have held some in world parties. Pulling that all together on one region made sense so when we were offered the opportunity to purchase a region privately we jumped at the chance.
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