Linden Lab just started publishing new ads on YouTube for Second Life, one of which you watch here. ("It represents one variation of many that are being tested", the company tells me.) Screengrabs of it throughout this post.
It's part of a new and aggressive marketing campaign for Second Life -- basically the first one in nearly 4 years.
To get more context and strategy, read my latest interview with Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager and CTO Philip Rosedale below!
Inside Project Zero: Brad Oberwager & Philip Rosedale on Marketing & Designing a New User Second Life Experience
Part of a 3 part series on my Patreon; read Part 1 here; read Part 2 here
Project Zero is not simply a cloud streaming option for existing SL users. It's tightly integrated into an aggressive marketing plan with a growing budget, and a completely revised first-time experience that discards the "Welcome Island" model that's basically existed since 2003.
In my recent conversation with Linden Lab heads Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale, we explore their vision for growing the user base with Project Zero -- and why the company is re-starting external marketing of SL for "the first time in four years".
Yes, you read that right. In the nearly four years since Oberwager took over leadership of Linden Lab, the company hasn't much marketed Second Life:
BRAD OBERWAGER: [Y]ou know the adage, “I know half my marketing is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” When I came in, I asked [Linden staff], and they didn't know. Turns out it was 100% wasted.
So since I couldn't figure it out, I turned off all the marketing and it didn't have an impact on revenue or any of the financials, other than we weren't spending the money on marketing.
But it stopped, obviously, it stopped bringing people in. It's just that the marketing wasn't bringing people in that were converting into dollars. So we kept it [off] until we had an ROI we could prove out.
And it took us a lot longer. I figured it was going to be six months to turn marketing back on. It went a lot longer.
Now, with Project Zero and with different partnerships we have now, the ROI makes sense for money in the marketing. So starting small, $1,000 a day, it's going to go up fast.
So today [late December 2024] was the first day that we've spent a dollar on marketing in three years, nine months. And this is going to be great for all the creators, all the communities. We're going to start driving people back in only where we know where we're driving them, and we have different partnerships with different community bases, to start sending people not to just where we want them, but we're testing sending them to other places. We're going to test with Project Zero.
So come midway through the first quarter [of 2025], we should be on a much higher run rate for marketing than we've ever had before. It makes good sense for everybody. We're going to drive more revenue to the creators. The way our whole model is set up, we do well when other people do well; we are not able to monetize if other people in our world are not doing well. We don't really sell anything directly to anybody other than land, and even that, you only buy land from us if you're getting the benefit of it…
Next: Redoing the old first-time user experience, and partnering with MadPea games.
Breaking the Old First-Time User Experience
Philip Rosedale: Like Brad was saying, we'll be able to experiment really aggressively in the first quarter on things like completely changing the welcome experience, because our hope is that we can try now -- this is another thing we've been thinking about -- how all the historical welcome experiences, and in fact, all the ones we have today are they're presumptive of a pattern that we're going to try BREAKING. We're going to try not doing this anymore.
The [original] idea is that you get acclimated and learn to use the software in a three dimensional area that is meant to be a sort of a training ground for the software, right? Like you can remember going all the way back to that first welcome isle that I wrote, pretty much the same one that Firestorm uses today. If you come in through the Firestorm area, it's basically the same thing as what we had in 2004.
So our [new] thinking is that if we completely redo the UI, we can do the tool tips in-app, in-browser, tutorials that one much more traditionally sees with games. We can do rewards for learning parts of the UI, that kind of stuff. And then we can shift to a model like Brad was saying, where we just let people onboard anywhere in the world…
One of the things we think we're kind of doing wrong is that, [a new user] might have heard that Second Life is a cool place to go to listen to live music or something. But you're presented with an experience for the first hour or so, which is maybe you wandering around a weird little garden doing a bunch of orienting experiences, right?
But in doing that, you're looking at like a visual treatment that may not be one, not representative of Second Life, and it may not be even vaguely related to what you're looking for.
So what we want to try instead is to say, “Look, are you a computer programmer? You want a sandbox… Listen to live music? We’ll put you in a live music venue right now.”
And then, because we've got this new UI [in Project Zero], we should just hold ourselves to the standard that you don't need to go through a welcome area to get to that experience. We're just going to load you in and say, “Hey, do this. This is this, and get started, you know..”
Wagner James Au: So you’ll have an experiential or thematic menu of, you know, “I want to build”, “I want to go to parties”.
PR: Yep. That’s one of the first things we want to try as we're thinking about as we start changing the UI. How do we start people in? We're thinking, OK, we know what the five or six top destination experiences that people actually want to have, and they're a pretty different mindset.
“Build a house” is another one that you touched on earlier, right? Like, “I want to build a home for myself.” Okay, cool, we'll put you into one of those neighborhoods. You'll be standing on a street, you know, trying to buy houses. Or if you want to go to a party, we'll put you in a party.
That's the kind of stuff we think we can now do [with Project Zero], but it's all about the cycle time. Brad sent me this great article from a friend about all the different ways of analyzing failure in software companies. And it was a reiteration of the thing that [Marc] Andreessen said before, which is: you want to fund a company based not on how smart you think it is, but on how many shots on goal it's going to get before it dies. And you want that number to be like five, and if that number is one, you just don't invest because nobody's that smart.
So I think part of the problem with our welcome area experiments, for example, is that our cycle climb is so slow, because of all the considerations and the way the software is designed, and it's just so brutally slow… Brad and I are just extremely hardcore internally about saying: we have to get to regular software startups’ cycle time on this stuff, which is days between adjustments.
WJA: I think even just being able to jump instantly into a sandbox, which for the Minecraft generation, I think they get to be, “Oh, I can do all kinds of way more cool shit than I can do Minecraft, and it's super high res, and, you know, there's a group in [the sandbox] already futzing around making cool shit.” And, you know, that seems immediately compelling.
PR: Yep, that feels like one of the five or six options that we want to give people.
Why Linden Lab Partnered With MadPea Games
BO: One of the things that a lot of people do is they play games in Roblox. Roblox considers themselves a metaverse like ours, a lot of the [user base] plays games. Are you familiar with [SL game developer] MadPea?
WJA: Yeah.
BO: So MadPea has a lot of experiences, a lot of games. Our Christmas gift to all the residents, and, I mean, everyone -- MadPea has an unlimited subscription. So we bought it for everybody… we're giving six months worth of MadPea to any resident who wants it. And it's not one of those gimmicks where you sign up, you get six months for free, and then at the end of the six months [you got to pay for more]. It's not that, it's wide open to everyone.
And at the end of six months, we'll evaluate. We may keep it like that. And because we have this partnership [with MadPea], why not try to send 20% of our people that we're marketing to, to a MadPea designed welcome area? Let them try to figure out how to do it.
So part of the deal is, [MadPea is] gonna build a welcome area. We're gonna send a bunch of [new] people there. My guess is they outperform us… Certain ads, they'll get the right people that work well with [MadPea games], and then we'll put more money into that, and then those people are going to want to get dressed. They'll buy stuff from creators. That's my hope.
PR: And like Brad says, we're talking to these big [SL] content providers. So [MadPea] is an example of a game on a HUD right. Both as a way of like Brad just said, let’s just streamline getting [new] people into those experiences, the ones that want it.
And then we're looking at their technology and saying, Okay, how do we make this actually accessible to a normal person? Because in the case of MadPea, their HUDs are pretty good… We gotta make [the SL tools] something that a modern developer would actually be willing to tinker with, which we are not at right now.
Next: We explore one specific dev tool causing controversy: AI in Second Life. Join my Patreon to read it first!
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Really exciting to see these ads start going out! My only critique on the one linked here is that the voiceover doesn't sound inviting. It sounds maybe AI-generated, and a bit stern - Doesn't convey a fun vibe, rather it sounds like they want me to join the Army. A more warm, welcoming voice would be better. Maybe other versions of the ad have different voices? I've also never heard an SL resident say "Second LIFE", putting the emphasis on the second word like that.
Posted by: OMGWTF Barbecue | Wednesday, January 29, 2025 at 04:53 PM
This looks like they spent five minutes using a random AI generator to make it. On top of that using the phrase 'tribe' like that is cultural appropriation. Most social media companies avoid using it for this reason. https://www.vegandesign.org/blog/thewordtribe
As far as Madpea goes I'm not sure partnering with a company that (over)charges a premium for creative content is the way to go. You're not going to appeal to creative types by going with a company that advocates for the gatekeeping of created content. Second Life was built on a communal sense of shared creativity. That means while we may pay for content people create creators should be encouraged to share their efforts and help people make more things. Instead, Linden Lab would see SL turn into Roblox at home, with things like luxury products and loot boxes/gachas being the order of the day.
There are plenty of people in SL they could have gone to that could have come up with something better, and much more meaningful. This is what happens when you have rich CEO's who lack empathy in charge of approving ads that are meant to appeal to actual human emotions like empathy, and a sense of community.
Posted by: Zidders Roofurry | Thursday, January 30, 2025 at 12:46 PM
I have been playing for over 18 years!
Posted by: Judy | Thursday, January 30, 2025 at 05:30 PM
As a regular user of both SL (17 years) and VRChat (6 years), one of the big things that keeps me in SL and frustrates me with VRC is how much easier it is the change up my avis look and wardrobe in SL than VRC. I also feel, strangely, that the continents are a big selling point. Many AAA games boast about how big their maps are, how you can endlessly explore every corner of their maps. VRC has some biggish worlds, but nothing like SL's continents and Blake Sea. Only in SL can you buy a luxury yacht and sail for hours on end, stopping at different port and explore the surrounds, or jump in a car of your choice and drive around an extensive road network. From another perspective, there appears to be a growing number of people looking for AI companions. I have made one for myself so that I have "intelligent" company when I travel around SL (not all of us are good at the socialising thing). Maybe making the creation of AI companions (actual avatars not animesh which can't be rezzed) easier and highlighting this as a feature of SL (as against Replika or Kindred) might draw these users in?
Posted by: Kaylee West | Thursday, January 30, 2025 at 06:41 PM
Great that SL is marketing. Great that they are promoting games. 2 things I've always complained about. What I'd like to also see, is free land for games. Developing a game is hard enough, and then in SL, you have to pay for expensive land. LL should have a program where people/groups can apply for free land to develop a game. The land doesn't always need to be free, because once the game is done, it should make some profits and able to pay for the land. Getting there is impossible though with current land fees.
If LL is going to redo the UI, then it needs to incorporate all these new features that avatar creators have. User created HUDs are done extremely poorly,and all of them are laggy. Moving much of this into the UI will vastly decrease lag. It will also help creators to have a more universal way to adjust your avatar, instead of every creator having their own way that everyone needs to learn. The avatar system in SL has always been good, but LL hasn't been upgraded it since it was first implemented.
Posted by: Medhue | Friday, January 31, 2025 at 07:57 AM