Are Marketers Abandoning Second Life? 252
Vary writes "The LA Times is running a story today saying that marketers are pulling out of Second Life, primarily because — surprise, surprise — the 'more than 8 million residents' figure on the game's Web site is grossly inflated. Also, as it turns out, the virtual world's regular visitors — at most 40,000 of them online at any time — are not only disinterested in in-world marketing, but actively hostile to it, staging attacks on corporate presences such as the Reebok and American Apparel stores. The companies aren't giving up on virtual worlds altogether, though, but moving on to games like There, Gaia Online and Entropia Universe. The article also contains some commentary from a marketing executive who conducted an informal survey of the game and discovered that 'One of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia.' What company wouldn't want to be in on that action?"
Second Life? (Score:2, Informative)
Stay away from SL Sex (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What exactly is SL, There, et al? (Score:3, Informative)
And... what was the point originally, anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
Being underage, I loaded up the teen edition, logged in, and got started.
Or not.
For one thing, the load times are terrible. Because pretty much all the content is user-created, it must be loaded when you enter the area. Rather than have users wait for six hours at the load screen, the world loads and renders around you. This effect looks terrible. First the mesh of an object comes in - slowly and jerkily - and then remains gray until its texture loads.
After the area has rendered around me, I try to make my way around, stuttering with lag. It turns out the best way to get around in second life is to fly. So I try it, fly high up, only to see - surprise! - more buildings slowly coming into view.
I tried to give it a chance - I really did - but after about five minutes of graphical glitches and lag, I left the game and uninstalled it. I think I'm just fine with my first life, thanks.
LAT repeats 4 out of 5 common myths about SL (Score:5, Informative)
http://gigaom.com/2007/07/12/debunking-5-business
- [S]ome reporters glance at the front page's "Online Now" stat- currently around 40-48,000 at peak times- and assume that's a more accurate tally of total active users... A better reference is posted monthly by the company's demographer on their blog, and includes an industry standard of unique monthly active users. As of June, that number was closer to 500,000.
- While it's true that "homegrown" content generates far more enthusiasm, traffic to the top real world promotional sites [in SL] are actually competitive with other forms of Internet advertising. During June, about 400,000 Residents logged in each week. In a typical seven day span that month, according to my Second Life blog's demographer, the five most popular locales generated anywhere from roughly 1200 to 10,000 visits. (The top ten earned over total 40,000 visits.) Therefore, each of the top five sites garnered a
- Much as a conflict between idealists and exploitative capitalists in the metaverse would be an exciting story, that hasn't observably happened to mass effect since 2004, when the world was vastly smaller.
- In terms of land mass, Linden Lab reports that just 18% of the world has been designated to have "Mature" content; explicit sexual activity is relegated to a subset of that percentage.
Full links and background at the GigaOM article [gigaom.com]
.Re:And... what was the point originally, anyway? (Score:2, Informative)
They really need a warning: "this will look like crap and be slow at first". It uses quite a bit of client-side caching, so although it takes a while to load at first, that delay falls rapidly afterward. Given how many people use the same popular textures, chances are good once you've been running for a while that you'll have 90% of the textures in a new region the first time you visit it. Unfortunately, you gave up just as it was probably getting ready to pay off.
Re:This is surprising? (Score:1, Informative)
Exactly. A huge problem with some of these stores is that they apparently hired the least imaginative jackasses available to designs their SL presences. Most (all?) of them try to make exact replicas of their brick-and-mortar stores even when that makes no sense in SL. For example, the "standard", efficient store layout in Second Life is a big warehouse with pictures of clothing all over the walls that you can click on to purchase. The real life stores try to get fancy with many floors and staircases (which are a complete pain in the ass to navigate) and they have clothes hanging on virtual racks exactly like they would in RL. This makes it impossible to actually find what you want without manually clicking on each and every piece of clothing. Finally, it seems like half the new wannabe companies never test their products. If they sell a pinstripe dress in RL, they'll take a picture of it and convert that texture into a SL dress. Half the time the result looks like crap and you get moire patterns and ugly seams. On the other hand, successful SL-native shops build their clothes in Photoshop or GIMP and tweak, tweak tweak until it looks good online.
It's difficult to maneuver, you can't see things easily, and the products are junk. Of course no one is buying. It's like the bad old days of Web 0.2 whenever traditional stores were trying to exactly reproduce their real life experience. It's a different medium, people - don't treat it like the old one and expect people to love it.
Re:Defacing virtual commercial presenses? (Score:3, Informative)
This is taken from an article about a dispute over virtual land, that is being settled in real life Federal court. This is no different than people protecting propety values by passing ordinaces against "eyesores" a common enough occurance in small wealthy towns.
This article is BS marketing by Millions of Us. (Score:3, Informative)
And I love the concurrent logins "dropped 2.5%" crap. Gee it's an Internet thing. Pretty much everything on the Internet has traffic drops of 2%-10% every summer. I'd like to see a follow up on this showing the the 2.5% increase come September.
Damn it, I hate crap like this.