The Problem With Marketing Second Life. And the Solution Soon Before Us.

Originally published on my Patreon

“Second Life’s reach was [once] like the Beatles,” Philip Rosedale mentioned last week during a media/influencer call, referring to their comparative rankings on Google Trends. 

That seemed like an exaggeration when he said it, but if you look this up, you'll see that it’s quite the case -- see above.

In August 2007, Second Life (“Online game”) was indeed not too far away in ranking on Google Trends from the Beatles (“Rock band”). 

Yes: At its peak of media attention, our little virtual world inspired nearly as much interest as a legendary music group that’s known and generally liked by roughly every human adult across Europe, North America, and much of the wider world.  

“Guess how much we paid for that?” Philip asked the group of SLers on the Zoom call.

I covered this apex in Second Life’s peak of human interest in my book, and saw the answer first hand.

Very little was being spent by Linden Lab on marketing Second Life back then, actually. There were a few small ad campaigns on some game sites, the very indirect promotion of my embedded reporting blog posts as a part-time Linden contractor, and other modest marketing efforts.

Despite that scant spend, staff at Linden Lab were begging its own marketing/PR department to stop promoting the virtual world at all. Because by then, the sheer deluge of new user signs-ups by the millions was causing performance and scaling issues:  

Major press coverage of Second Life, often by tech reporters who were fans of Snow Crash themselves, began to take on gathering momentum into 2006, culminating in a feature story on the cover of BusinessWeek. Which only catapulted into even further coverage. Strikingly, most of this overwhelmingly positive media attention was organic, generated by reporters and media outlets themselves. 

"It was kind of terrifying,” Catherine Smith, head of Linden Lab communications back then, recalls now. “I remember [a Linden Lab engineer] saying to me one time, 'Can you just please make the PR stop? And I'm like, ‘Sorry, that train has left the station. I'm not pitching this anymore. They're all coming to us.’" 

As Philip explains now: “You couldn't buy that reach. There was collective human interest that drove that. We can't hit the replay button on that with marketing dollars because we didn't do that before... traditional marketing approaches are ineffective." In terms of equivalent eyeballs reached via magazine cover articles, news broadcast segments, TV appearances on The Office and much more, the earned media Second Life attracted back then would easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars now.

His point was in a response to an SLer question that often comes up within the Second Life user community: Where are the marketing campaigns to bring in new users? 

In response, Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager said there is a new marketing campaign starting slowly now:

"Everything we're making [in SL], we're putting it back in. I'm going to start putting that money into marketing dollars. Our product is relevant, it's not for everybody, but there's an imperative that Second Life continues and it's extremely valuable that people come." Second Life ads are starting to "dribble out" now as they test out different approaches and targets, but expect that to pick up in January and February. 

It’s good that this marketing is cautious, because until the mobile app is ready for new users, Second Life faces the same challenges it had when it was about as famous as the Beatles: A daunting user interface, poor performance on non-gaming machines, and overwhelming confusion around the immediate new user question, “How is this fun?”

Fortunately, quite a lot has changed since 2007. Because if you go on Google Trends and compare Roblox (“Online game”) to the Beatles (“Rock band”), you get this:

Yes: The largest virtual world platform (which actually launched in 2006) generates vastly more interest than the most famous music group in history. And as the many tens of millions of kids playing Roblox now grow up and look for a virtual world that’s more open, more edgy, more for grown ups, the time to market Second Life will be ideal.

If, that is, the Second Life mobile app can become as immediately fun as Roblox currently is. 

I believe that’s possible. All you need, after all, is love. (And a very good game designer.)

But more on that another day. 

Comments

[Haridsam]

Interesting piece, and thank you. One thing I'd like to mention is that I wonder if the complexity of SL's UI isn't sometimes overstated as a reason for the low retention rate of new users. Anyone who'd ever tried to come to grips with EVE Online will likely agree the EVE UI is equally, if not more overwhelming, yet I never see it cited as an issue or obstacle to new users joining the platform. But, though the UI is insanely complex, everything, even your starter ship, LOOKS great from the get-go. Perhaps if SL's starter avis were better-looking and each at least given small random differences (height, eye color, etc?) from its siblings rather than cookie-cutter templated, and given a gait/walking AO that isn't utterly laughable, people might be a little more patient with giving SL a chance? Just a couple of thoughts. :)

[Keaton]

If you want users, you list on Steam. It's as simple as that. They should have done in 17 years ago. But "It's not a game" is a hill to die on, I guess. Even though tools like Blender and Substance Painter are there.

[Janice Seraph]

"Anyone who'd ever tried to come to grips with EVE Online will likely agree the EVE UI is equally, if not more overwhelming, yet I never see it cited as an issue or obstacle to new users joining the platform... the UI is insanely complex, everything, even your starter ship, LOOKS great from the get-go"

Nah. The problem is that nobody literate outside of some generic music venue will interact with a starter av. Certainly not in the BDSM/Kink world. People who have paid $250 on their avs in the past couple years see that as a sign of being a "serious player" and the vast majority of noobs with new avs are extraordinarily ennervating people with one thing on their mind.

One element is to recognize that the element of an "adult" Roblox is correct. Most people in SL are there for some element of adult play. Maybe they're very vanilla people who are just looking for a little romance and flirtation. Maybe they're looking for romance with someone they don't live with. Maybe they're looking for kink and BDSM. But they're *looking.* And about 99.99% of those people who can type and present themselves well learn to recognize and *avoid* starter avs.

The solution is to partner with the Major mesh makers on easy entrance paths and more uniform HUDs and help. While also making it clear that SL, like...well frankly any other "free to play" game...try winning at Tank Wars if you haven't put money into it...requires putting some money up front.

Make it easy...encourage starter packs, better guides, hell even subsidize them.

I watched a VERY experienced SLer spend an evening setting up a VERY experienced online gamer and MMORPG player to play in an RP sim here. I can tell you if he wasn't her poly partner, and coming here to be *with her* he absolutely would not have bothered.

If all the effort that goes into inventing new gimcracks nobody cares about, or that are about luring creators to the world (let's face it, "we don't have enough shit to buy" is something that nobody in SL said EVER), went into trying to work with and prize the existing creators, make them feel valued and supported and most of all urge them onto industry/trade standards...

...we might have a few new players.