I recently got a Pro account to SimilarWeb, one of the best (or least worst) web analytics firms, and almost immediately came across this surprising data point above: Traffic to Second Life's website is significantly larger than than to IMVU's site, with about 6.5 million visits last month versus 5 million, respectively. (SimilarWeb counts both from PC and mobile visits.)
This is notable, because the narrative until very recently is IMVU had far outstripped Second Life. Both launched at roughly the same time, but after releasing a mobile app and making mobile central to the experience, IMVU leapfrogged by 2020 to having 7 million monthly active users.
However, that's fairly drastically changed since 2024:
While preparing my metaverse leader platform chart last year, a spokesperson for IMVU told me monthly active users had fallen to around 4-5 million MAU. (I'm told that number is now closer to 4 million MAU.)
So there's been a pretty sharp dropoff! To be sure, Second Life's MAU is still much smaller, at around roughly 500K, but as we see above, web traffic remains solid.
As to the why of IMVU's slippage, I'm working on a report with an expert on that very topic. More soon.
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