New World Notes

As Linden Lab Launches Its 1st Major Ad Campaign for Second Life in Years, Read My Interview With Philip Rosedale & Brad Oberwager on Marketing & Designing a Whole New User SL Experience

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.

 

New on My Patreon: Brad Oberwager & Philip Rosedale on Marketing & Designing a New User Second Life Experience for Project Zero

Now on my Patreon:

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. 

Join my Patreon for free to be first to read it all here.

Inside Project Zero: Philip Rosedale on Completely Re-Making the UI -- and Re-Engaging Millions of Former Users (Part 2)

Read part 1 here

While Philip Rosedale returned to developing Second Life full-time a few months ago, Linden Lab was playing with cloud streaming the virtual world well before then:

"[T]he team had already experimented a bit with this technology a couple years ago," as he told me recently. "They started playing with it a while back. So it was something that we were just able to identify as a logical next mission… the mobile app, and then this.”

Hence the streaming project's internal name, Project Zero, a way of indicating that this a foundationally new approach to experiencing the virtual world.

“Meaning," as put its it, "zero download, zero login, zero crashing, zero UI... a way to greatly amplify the number of people that are desirous of using Second Life already and basically can't."

The current version of Project Zero -- which you can still try for free here, in increments of 10 minutes -- is still just the standard viewer, streamed to a web browser. But in the near future, Philip tells me, the UI will greatly change, and may even include some game hooks, as the company seeks to re-engage some of the 60 million people who've created an SL account over the years, but for various reasons, have strayed from the community:

Now on My Patreon: Philip Rosedale on Completely Re-Making Project Zero's UI

Now on my Patreon is part 2 of an in-depth chat I recently had with Philip Rosedale on Project Zero, the company's code name for streaming Second Life on a browser. (Which you can still try for free here, in increments of 10 minutes,) In this section, we get into his strategy on completely re-imagining the UI of Second Life -- and the very hardest aspects they'll eventually get to!

Join free to read it all here, and consider subscribing for extra benefits.

Second Life Streaming Launches to Select New Users This Week -- And More from My Latest Interview with Philip Rosedale

Now on my Patreon is the start of an in-depth interview I did with Philip Rosedale on Project Zero, the company's code name for streaming Second Life on a browser. 

One point he mentions (that I initially missed coming back from the holidays in early January): Starting this week, they're letting a select number of new sign-ups try out Project Zero, to see if that helps retention.

"Basically, their first session will be just completely over the browser," as Philip told me last month. I'll follow up on that soon, but for this week, here's part one of my Q&A with Philip on Project Zero's overall strategy -- including price considerations, why they're launching it now, and much more. 

Join my Patreon for free to read first here.

BREAKING: Linden Lab Test Launches Browser-Based Streaming for Second Life -- And You Can Try it Now!

Above: At my office in Waterhead via Project Zero

Starting now -- and starting 2025 with guns blazing -- you can try out browser-based streaming of Second Life, enabling you to experience the virtual world with maximum graphics settings displayed on a web browser, even on low-end PCs/laptops -- go here to access it for up to 10 minutes.

I just tried it out, and it's pretty impressive, even in this early test phase. Teleporting to sims is quicksilver fast, taking less than a second. Right now, you access it through Linden Lab's existing default browser, but in future iterations, the streaming user interface will completely change. (More on that below.)

This streaming project, internally dubbed “Project Zero”, has been in development even before Philip Rosedale rejoined Linden as CTO in late 2024, is hands-on proof that the company is not completely pinning the future of Second Life to the new mobile app. Project Zero is shaping up to be the way new users will first experience the virtual world, seamlessly and beautifully, whether or not their machine can manage SL's full 3D graphics.

A Surprising Solution to Post-PBR Problems

Project Zero also an answer to a problem Oberwager acknowledged during another briefing last year: Second Life’s recent upgrade to PBR graphics caused a drop in log-ins among the existing user base, as people with lower end machine had trouble displaying physically based rendering.

“We have come up with an incredible fix that will have an amazing impact on all current and future residents," he told me last month. I initially thought he was referring to bug fixes, but no: It’s a whole new way of experiencing Second Life, and when it’s officially rolled out, will come with a modern upgrade to the UI, re-built from the ground up.

I should say a new old way: Linden Lab originally tested out browser-based streaming of Second Life in 2010, then again in 2015, from well-funded startup OnLive. (Disclosure: I helped OnLive launch that project on the marketing side.) It worked pretty well, but broadband and computing costs were too expensive back then to make it scalable. Since then, however, those prices have come substantially down, driven in part by the recent boom in large language model AI programs like ChatGPT.

2025, Linden Lab believes, is the year Second Life streaming is finally ready to deploy with Project Zero. 

In internal testing, Philip Rosedale told me on a recent briefing, they’re getting zero latency. It doesn’t even necessarily require super high-end broadband. “If you can watch Netflix [on your machine],” as he put it, “you can do this.”

Another key difference from the 2010 and 2015 deployments: 

Why Linden Lab Struggles to Communicate to the Second Life Community at Large (Comment of the Week)

Above: The default viewer's log-in announcement message... if you can click it in time

While last Tuesday's main post was mostly about Linden Lab's upcoming features to the SL mobile app, it also noted why Linden Lab is now making such announcements through group video calls:

I was on the Zoom call with dozens (hundreds?) of fellow bloggers, YouTubers, and assorted SL influencers calling in from around the globe. Which led to one of them asking a question that came up after the last Zoom call: Why not just announce everything on the website, rather than do group calls like this?

Oberwager (who has a gravelly voice eerily resembling California governor Gavin Newsom) acknowledged that the company hasn't been great at communicating with the community in the past -- and also noted that official announcements posted on the site aren't seen by many SLers overall.

So rather than just post on the site, the Linden Lab team decided it's better that they also reach out to as many community media figures as possible. 

Prompting author Hari Sutherland to observe:

Balkanization and fragmentation of communication channels (as well as communities within SL) is a core problem, and getting worse...many residents (likely a majority) never visit the SL forum, if they even know it exists; maybe they use the SL site occasionally to check account data, but how many pull down the Community submenu?

 

Discord has replaced IM for many, and now we have Primfeed as well; oh, and Reddit.

 

I can't imagine that you can get news to even 20% of residents with a single platform. So how do you get announcements and important info out? I'm guessing push announcements on the mobile app may be one way.  

 

Welcome to yet another challenge to growing the Second Life user base beyond marketing:

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:

Second Life Has a Nooby Insta-Boot Problem. Would a VRChat-Style Trust System Fix It?

At right: A bestselling SL security system (on the Marketplace here) 

Last week's media event with Linden Lab was mainly about the Second Life mobile app officially launching, and the company's strategy to bring back lapsed SLers with it, and grow the overall user base. But before those details were announced, another challenge to growing the Second Life user base came up:

• To entice new users, they need to see great content and communities in Second Life.   
• But many of the best Second Life hangouts and locations have orbiters banning new users (to prevent trolling, non-members, etc), i.e. typically accounts under 30 days old.
• So not only can new users not access these areas, they're unceremoniously booted for even trying. 

"My experience is having to explain this to new residents that get sent back to the welcome hub, completely clueless as to why, what they did, or the punishment being so harsh," as longtime blogger/event manager Sasy Scarborough explains. "Some have even thought it will mean they are banned for life, that is also a really bad outcome... one guy I was helping at the hub the other day left and got ejected from three places in a row within minutes."  

Sasy brought this up during the media event, but it's really an ongoing paradox of metaverse platforms: User-generated content is what makes them so powerful and unique, but that doesn't necessarily mean specific users want to make their content available to anyone who shows up. 

"More people are joining Second Life now with money to spend, because they have come from YouTube etc, and know where they are guided to go, to only be ejected from those locations." Of course, location owners are well within their right to ban anyone for any reason, even if that ultimately hurts overall user growth. "If a person with no real connection in-world is repeatedly ejected from experiences, they will be frustrated, and could just log out permanently."  

On the Zoom call, Linden Lab CTO Philip Rosedale acknowledged the problem, but also pointed out how difficult it is to solve on the software/UX side. Saying: "If someone has a precise and complete change order to address the problem, we could address that."  In other words, it's a complex fix with no easy solution that'll satisfy everyone.

I do see one solution which turns the 30 day/nooby limit into an aspirational goal: Implement a system similar to that of VRChat's trust ranking system. I.E:

BREAKING: Second Life Mobile Finally Free to Play By All. Linden Lab Execs Explain Their Goals & Strategies With This Long-Awaited Milestone for the Virtual World.

Originally published on my Patreon

At long last, Second Life’s mobile app is now free for everyone to download here, and boasts new/improved features including direct and group messaging. (Watch the new trailer above.)

"Almost 2 years of work and millions of dollars of support just became available to everyone in Second Life,” as Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager announced today during a Zoom conference with SL bloggers. “The biggest milestone is, 'When does this open up to everybody'? That just happened yesterday. It's been a top project for this company." 

As he discussed with me last month, the mobile app has been a core focus since he bought the company in 2021. In fact, when he took over Linden Lab, "I shut down most of the external marketing and drove that into making SL better. That's what's starting to change." 

The mobile app was built with the intention of creating an amazing experience for current Second Life users, and an equal aim of bringing back the many tens of thousands of lapsed users who’ve given up over the years. “Being tethered to a desktop is not how we live anymore,” as he puts it.  

In market research, Brad notes, when Linden Lab asked lapsed SLers, “Why are you no longer coming to Second Life?", the primary answer they got back was, 'It doesn't have mobile”. 

So the company’s first goal with the mobile app is luring back those former or flagging SL users. For the short term, at least, "It's not for people who read about Second Life in a magazine”, and consider trying it out on a whim.  

Newly-appointed Linden Lab CTO Philip Rosedale, also on the Zoom, expanded on that, echoing what he said in our recent interview, about moving away from his “messianic” predictions from the early 2000s.

“The world is not as yet and may never allow everyone to be an avatar in a world like SL,” said Philip. “We're very respectful of that distinction.” So the goal with mobile is not to turn Second Life into a simpler mass market experience like Fortnite. “We're not trying to design the mobile client to replace the desktop."

NEXT: SL App Roll-Out Strategy, Its New Rainbow Colored Icon, and Overcoming Poor App Store Ratings