New World Notes

I Came to Second Life Looking for Cybersex; I Stayed for Creating & Community (Comment of the Week)

Amid all the talk about Adult content in Second Life (helpfully illustrated by Nylon Pinkney), Cindy Bolero makes an important point:

This is the reality: Many, if not most new users heard about the sex, log in, and are looking for it. It's up to greeters at venues or attractions to understand that. You can be mean and ban them, or you can tell them to open the search window and/or suggest an ideal Adult place to go.

Why be helpful to these rude characters asking for sex? Because some will eventually get over that curiosity and become customers and contributors. The SL economy needs all the help it can get.

She speaks from, ahem, personal experience:

Watch One of Second Life's Biggest Fans Explaining Second Life's Own Bad Design & Branding Decisions

"I have a full-ass real life but let me tell you when I want my down time to myself, just log in, talk to my friends, do some dumb shit, play some games, blah blah blah, make my videos, that's what I want to do in my spare time."

Lexy Nexen, who's one of Second Life's best and brashest YouTubers (so subscribe already), recently posted this fun if frustrating video, explaining -- via her casually cool real life self -- a key frustration with vlogging about SL: YouTube comments full of snark which more or less boil down to "LOL you're playing Second Life to have weird sex and you have no first life". She effectively addresses the second part by mentioning many cool and worthwhile places in people in Second Life (including the late Fran Serenade), but flounders a bit with the first part.

And that frustrates me: This is yet one more time one of Second Life's biggest fans feels she has to put herself out there explaining the world's bad reputation, in a way few other online game world users have to contend with. (VRChat, by contrast has a bad -- and at least somewhat unfair -- reputation for nasty trolls and an excess of anime girls, but that's different.) And the thing is, this was and is an addressable problem:

Linden Lab Calls Report on Second Life's Adult-Rated Sims "Misleading" -- But the Real Problem is Misleading Use of the Adult Rating

Brett Linden, a member of Linden Lab's marketing team, recently sent me a message about a much-discussed post:

[I wanted] to clarify a detail about your other recent post with the headline that suggests "25% of Second Life Mass Land Now Adult-Rated for Extreme Sex & Violence." As you mention in the article, there are indeed many Adult-rated Regions in Second Life that are not overtly sexual or violent in nature despite that rating. Respectfully, we are a bit concerned that the headline wording might mislead some casual readers to believe that all Adult-rated content actually has "extreme sex & violence" when that is not the case. 

This is true. However, I would argue that the Adult rating as it is often (or even usually) used in Second Life is the thing that's misleading: It confuses many Second Life users, especially new ones, as to what they should expect in an Adult-rated sim. As longtime SLer and blogger Ciaran Laval pointed out in another post, many SLers designate their sim as Adult as a general catch-all which conveys nothing about the sim's content:

[S]ome regions flag themselves as Adult to avoid arguments about content or give themselves more flexibility, rather than being completely Adult-oriented. 

And this is precisely the problem with the Adult rating as it's generally used in Second Life. Look at this way:

Linden Lab Should Have Created a PG-Rated Showcase Continent for Second Life, Instead of an Adult-Only One (Comment of the Week)

ZEXPO 2011 photo by Ginette Pinazzo

Responding to a recent report that 1 in 4 Second Life sims are now Adult-rated, longtime SLer and blogger Emilly Orr blames this on Linden Lab's move to create an Adult-focused continent called Zindra in 2009, writing in Comments:

This entirely fails to surprise me, for what it's worth. This was EXACTLY why so many of us were begging the Lindens to make Ursula-now-Zindra a showpiece of how good PG content could be, instead of the new 'adult' continent. We knew trying to funnel everyone who wanted adult content in SL to one place wouldn't work.

But they didn't listen.

And if you think Ms. Orr is saying this because she's personally opposed to graphic content, the opposite is the case:

25% of Second Life Land Mass Now Adult-Rated for Extreme Sex & Violence

A recent report by Tyche Shepherd, a top statistician for a major multinational whose quirky hobby is tracking Second Life land ownership on Grid Survey, has a notable milestone: "Adult rated regions were up by 20 to 6000 (25.3% of the grid) while General Rated were up 7 to 2951 (12.4%)." As far as I know, this is the first time that a full quarter of Second Life's total landmass is Adult-rated. That includes private islands like the unsubtly named "Nude", which when you arrive (above), offers you the wonderful promise of something called LifeHump.

Back in 2013, Adult-rated sims represented about 17% of the world, but that percentage has been slowly creeping upward since then. "Adult", of course, does not necessarily mean the place is swamped by virtual porn or  is solely devoted to porn, just that extremely graphic sexual and violent content is allowed within it -- a feature often integrated into "dark roleplay" areas popular in Second Life that are sort of NC-17 versions of Grand Theft Auto, Game of Thrones, and Fallout (i.e. urban/crime, fantasy, and sci-fi roleplay). 

What this data point mean depends on your perspective:

SL Merchant Survey: 60% Make Most Revenue from Web-Based Marketplace

Important update to last week's survey* of SL merchants : As requested by reader "Dr. Questions", here's the breakdown of 2018 earnings from the SL Marketplace (above). As you can see, only 6% sell nothing in the SL Marketplace, while just 13% make under a fourth of their sales from the Marketplace. By contrast, a large majority of merchants (60%) make most of their income from the SL marketplace. In other words, the economy of the virtual world is mostly driven by the external Linden Lab website. At the same time, only a quarter of merchants make the vast majority (over 75%) of their revenue from the Marketplace, which suggests most merchants still need an in-world shopping presence.

To further highlight the importance of the Marketplace, look at how much traffic to Secondlife.com goes to it:

SL Merchant Survey: Seven Surprising Insights Into the Virtual Economy

Here's the results of the survey I took last week, asking Second Life-based merchants for their summary of their 2018 sales and their 2019 expectations. (103 responded.) Here's seven key takeaways:

1. Nearly half the SL merchants deal in avatars and avatar enhancements.

48% sell content related to avatars (including skins, bodies, and Bento) and avatar fashion, enhancements, and accessories. In the second largest category, 1 in 4 create and sells homes, buildings, furniture, and furnishings. (Which come to think of it, are also a kind of avatar accessory.)

2. Over 1 in 10 make a full-time income ($50,000+ year) from selling Second Life items -- 8% earn over $100,000 a year.

Another 12% make an income between $21,000 and $50,000, which also qualifies as a full-time income in many parts of the wold. Also notable that for 1 in 3, selling Second Life content is more like a beer money enterprise -- they earned less than $1000 total for 2018.

Five more takeaways below. Is there a virtual world recession? Is copybotting a top problem? Read on!

Second Life Merchants: Please Take New World Notes' Short Survey on Your 2018 Performance & Your 2019 Expectations

Displayed below! Should only take two-three minutes to complete, and the more people who do take it, the clearer picture everyone will have about the virtual world economy. Last week some readers were having trouble scrolling down to see every question, so here's a compact version with the scroll bar on the right:

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 Merchants: Please Take This Short Survey on Your Sales in 2018 & Your Forecast for 2019

As promised last year, here's a survey for SL-based merchants -- eight questions (plus one bonus) on your virtual world business in 2018, and your forecasts for 2019. PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ALL QUESTIONS:

Please share with other merchants -- and, of course, comment below to discuss your answers, and suggest how the next survey can be improved.