New World Notes

Surprising SimilarWeb Stats: 1 in 4 Visits to SecondLife.com Are Mobile; More Visits from YouTube, Than Facebook

SimilarWeb's report on traffic and usage of Secondlife.com includes some surprising stats on top of the visits by country I posted last week. While most of the traffic (66%) is direct and Second Life is a PC/Mac-only client, a large chunk of the visitors are on mobile -- take a look at the deep dive data at right, generously shared with me by SimilarWeb Marketing Solutions: Roughly 1 in 4 visits are via mobile, running between low 20s to low 30s by percentage and country -- with the largest audience by far, from the United States, visiting via mobile 1 out of 3 times.

This is a major reason that Second Life usage has been stagnant: Since the account creation and installation process is so desktop-focused, some 25% of potential new users are likely to see their efforts confused or frustrated right off the bat. It also contributes to the attrition of established users unable to easily access their account via iPhone and Android -- the lack of an app just becomes another reason to switch attention to other, easier to access interactive experiences. (It's all the more reason it's stunning that Linden Lab is only now creating an iOS "companion app" for Second Life -- roughly 12 years after the iPhone launched.)

For SL merchants and other content creators, this data stresses the need to have a mobile strategy, at least in terms of having a web page optimized for iOS/Android users.

Another surprising SimilarWeb datapoint is traffic via social media. While Facebook tends to dominate traffic to other media sites, with Twitter a close second, SecondLife.com social traffic a quite different:

SimilarWeb's Top 25 Visits to SecondLife.com By Country in 2018 - Guess Which One is #1 Right Now

SimilarWeb has a new report on traffic and usage of Secondlife.com, so I reached out to the analytics company to know more. Overall, user traffic remains stable (21 million visits in December 2018, somewhat more than July 2018, with 19 million), but the biggest surprise is where the visits are coming from: The United States is not the largest visitor in recent months.

As it turns, an analyst with SimilarWeb Marketing Solutions tells me, the highest traffic in November and December is from Brazil. This is based on comparing traffic from the first half of 2018 (January - June) and the second half of the year (July- December): "The direct traffic between the two time periods increased by 21%, along with significant increases in paid search, social, and referrals. All of these combined, likely increased the brand awareness, driving users to directly seek out the site. Display ads actually saw a 49% decrease between the two time periods." In other words, Brazilian aren't primarily visiting SecondLife.com after clicking on an ad, but going there directly. So it's likely we've seen an organic growth in Brazil users in the last several months.

Now here's SimilarWeb's Top 25 visits to SecondLife.com by country for the whole of 2018, which also contains some surprises: 

Second Life Website Data from SimilarWeb Shows Surprising Results - Much Younger, Male, Mobile Than Typically Assumed

Click to expand -- data courtesy SimilarWeb

We know that Second Life's active userbase has been about 500-600,000 for over 10 years, but visits to the official website SecondLife.com tell a different, more interesting story. Courtesy top web/mobile analytics company SimilarWeb, take a look at these charts. Some key takeaways:

• Visits to SecondLife.com from the United peaked in July 2016 at about 8 million/month
• Monthly US visits to SecondLife.com have been trending down since 2016, from around 6-5 million/mo since 2017 to now
• Current US unique visitors: 770,000, from 6.9 million total visits
• 1 in 3 of US visits to SecondLife.com are via mobile

First question that jumps out: Why the spike in July 2016? The only major US/SL news item I can find from the archives is an SL-based fundraiser for victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orland, Florida.

Followed by: Why has Linden Lab refused to create (or just go ahead and buy) a smartphone version of Second Life when 1 in 3 of its own website visitors are on mobile?

Now let's look at Similarweb's demographic data from the USA, because that's also surprising:

Is Second Life Not Growing Because Its Most Dedicated Users Keep Dying Off? (Comments of the Week)

Pictured at right: SL demographics as reported by Linden Lab in 2008

Why does Second Life keep getting hundreds of thousands of new user sign-ups, while it's monthly userbase refuses to grow? Longtime SLer David Cartier makes a point I hadn't quite considered:

I've been seeing a fairly large number of new accounts, lately, where the driver clearly doesn't have a fricking clue what they are doing, so we are seeing at least SOME new people. I've also known quite a lot of people who've simply died over the years. That has to be affecting the numbers just as much as getting tired of receiving the friendly - and yet dreaded - "Wow you're really OLD!!!" IMs. Given the generally older user base I'm guessing that is going to trend upwards in the future.

That is true. The last time Linden Lab reported SL user demographics in 2008, 15% of the population were over 45, and 23% were between 35-44 in age. (See chart above.) Ten years later, any of those users who are still in Second Life are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, even 70s and 80s. And the reality is, a small but significant percentage are, sadly, going to pass away every year. (Including pioneers like Lumiere Noir.)

Chic Aeon makes a related point from her perspective, starting out in Second Life over a decade ago as a student at an Ivy League school:

Most Second Life Users Self-Identify as Roleplayers & Other MMO Game Types -- Very Few as Educators

Canary Beck has a very interesting survey of over 3000 Second Life users (one the biggest data samples I've ever seen), asking them to describe their main activities in SL, and whether they recommend Second Life to others. Respondents could choose three categories, and by far, the largest preferences were Roleplayers, Socializers, and Explorers. These are very familiar and core types of activities in most other MMOs, while other top preferences like Decorator, Fashionista, Creator, and Photographer are very much consonant with activities in sandbox-type games like The Sims franchise and Minecraft.

Just as notably, "Educator" was among the very least designated categories. Taken together, this should finally put to bed a long-running controversy among the SL user community and Linden Lab itself: "Is Second Life a game?" As I've argued before, most people who use Second Life use it for game-like activities or explicitly play it as a game, and this survey data seems consistent with that. 

So why do so many SLers insist Second Life isn't a game? More key, why does Linden Lab keep insisting that, even saying so on national television? Canary's survey provides a strong hint of that too:

Watch This: The Size of Second Life Even Now

Luca Grabacr made this pretty great machinima infographic illustrating the size of Second Life as it exists today:

All the data seems fairly up to date, but I haven't seen it presented as dramatically as here. Why no, I didn't now it would take 23,175 days to walk across the entirety of Second Life's land mass (if all the sims were laid end to end) -- so that would make SL's total length like 772 miles? (Assuming you walked 30 miles a day.) Checking with Luca on her sources now.* Also love Luca's mention of the first Linden-made object in Second Life:

Survey: Women in Second Life Less Private About Their RL Than Men - and Harassed Much More

"Adam harassing Eve", scene from the upcoming SL movie Paradise Lost

Canary Beck queries the Second Life user community on a variety of topics 

Second Life users often raise concerns about maintaining a separation between their avatar and their real life identity, but an extensive survey of SLers paints a more complex picture. Only a minority of users surveyed take proactive measures to keep their SL and RL separate. And remarkably, while women are much likelier to be harassed or stalked in Second Life (a common trend for online communities), they are also less reticent about sharing some of their real life details in SL.

Here’s some of the key findings from this survey:

• Only 1 in 4 Second Life users take active steps to protect their real life privacy

• Women report being harassed and stalked far more than men do in Second Life: 60% versus 44%.

• Nearly twice as many men 36% reported not being harassed or stalked - only 16% of women reported the same.

• Young women (between 18-29) are far more likely to be harassed/stalked than any other demographic.

• For both genders, Second Life-based stalking/harassment has led to phone calls (5% of the time) and even real life confrontations (2% of the time).

Below is a summary report of my Second Life / Real Life identity and privacy survey from August, with nearly 800 respondents completing the online survey.* I’ll publish a full report and commentary on these findings on www.canarybeck.com next week. 

Second Life User Demographics & Personality: Older, More Gender-Balanced & Focused on Design Than Other MMOs

Here's the Second Life-related results* of that survey of gaming personalities I mentioned last month, a kind of Myers-Briggs test for gamers created by Quantic Foundry, a game behavior analytics consultancy co-founded by my colleague Nick Yee. Nick was kind enough to share the data for all the respondents who listed "Second Life" among their favorites, and here's the fascinating results:

(Click image to embiggen)

Most striking is how much older (on average) and more female the SLers are, compared to other games/MMOs, which typically skew toward the 20s/early 30s and much more male. This might be an aytpical sample*, because according to Linden Lab's last publicly reported demographic data (in 2008), 40% of SLers were in their 20s.

Also striking:

Top 50 Most Active Second Life Sims for July 2015

Courtesy Louis Platini's Metaverse Business, a Second Life/OpenSim analytics company that gathers publicly accessible in-world data for its clients, here's the top 50 most active Second Life sims, listed by their average avatar visitor count at any given period, visitor range, and previous position last month (July in this case):

As is usually the case, most of these sims have been about this popular for years. (Note the considerable overlap in this January 2013 chart), with the possible exception of "woops" and "DSB".

Top 26-50 after the break:

Did Second Life's Dr. Phil Appearance Help User Growth?

UPDATE, 7/24: Linden Lab's Peter Gray tells me, "We saw a modest bump in new registrations on the day it aired."

Second Life was featured on a Dr. Phil episode on game addiction last Tuesday, so I was curious what kind of effect it's had on new user growth. After all, the show draws about 5 million viewers on broadcast TV alone, and likely some millions more online.

Looking at publicly available Second Life usage numbers, however, I'm not seeing any evidence of new growth. Reviewing the last two weeks of concurrent users in Second Life, for example, there's no noticeable spike in usage after the show. (See image above.) That's unlike other media appearances in the past. When Second Life was featured in an episode of CSI, for example, new user sign-ups went through the fricking roof. And as like the CSI case, Linden Lab worked hand-in-hand with the producers of the show to present Second Life in a positive, exciting light -- in this case, creating a Dr. Phil avatar and even getting Linden Lab consultant Bernhard Drax (Draxtor Depres) and others to assemble great footage and locations to feature in the show. 

To be sure, there might be some spurt in sign-ups I'm not seeing on these charts, and I've asked Linden Lab about this. Assuming this was a media opportunity miss, however, what happened?