In several recent talks, I’ve opened with a story about the De Witt sketch. It’s a depiction, in 1596, of the stage of London’s Swan Theatre. It is, for all intents and purposes, the only image that theatre historians have that shows the interior of an Elizabethan theatre. It’s the best picture we have of the stages that Shakespeare acted upon and for which he wrote.
The man who drew the sketch was Johannes De Witt, a Dutch visitor to London who recorded his observations in his journals. In fact, De Witt’s original sketch is lost. The ‘De Witt’ sketch is actually a copy by fellow Dutchman, Arendt van Buchell.
Then I show photos of the Globe Theatre (here’s a big panorama of the interior), a present-day replica that sits on the Thames river, very close to its original location. For theatre and history buffs it’s a real pleasure to stand inside this space, which is reknowned for its historical accuracy. In fact, if theatre historians discover new information about the Globe, they modify the building to match .
Then in my talk I jump to images of the New Globe Theatre in Second Life. It’s a model of a proposed actual theatre on Governor’s Island in New York. It doesn’t look much like the original or the replica, but I like the connection of the past to the future, and of the actual to the virtual. I then make some connections to De Witt’s sketch as user-generated content, his journal as a blog and Arendt’s copy as a copyright violation. And things roll on from there.
That’s a long-winded introduction to say that somebody recently emailed me with a link to an actual, apparently accurate replica of the Globe Theatre. This appears to be a sort of showcase piece for a Second Life architect named Ina Centaur. It’s a pretty impressive accomplishment, and will make for a smoother metaphor in future talks.
Reuters Second Life News Center recently reported that, for the first time, there had been 50,000 concurrent users inside the game. That’s a notable milestone, but it’s not really what interested me.
The most interesting charts are the first two. The one on the left shows the dramatic increase in registrations over the past, with the total more than doubling to about 9.3 million. However, the chart on the right shows the number of ‘active residents’ (I think that’s users who have logged in in the last month). It’s pretty much flat. Assuming these charts are accurate, those new users are remarkably, uh, unsticky.
I recently read three cutting critiques of marketing and advertising in Second Life. The first is by Rebecca Lieb (found via Adam):
Inhabitants of virtual worlds don’t have real-world needs. To get very far in Second Life, you do need money (in the form of Linden dollars) to buy goods, services, and property. No small quantity of the virtual currency is spent on goods and services related to virtual sex. Way-far-out-there virtual sex, and no small number of sex businesses (one of which recently changed hands for $50,000) often seem like the primary purpose of Second Life. As ClickZ columnist Ian Schafer told the “Los Angeles Times,” “One of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia.”
Ms. Lieb refers to an LA Timesarticle, discussing some of the abandoned marketing projects littering the virtual world:
But the sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty. During a recent in-world visit, Best Buy Co.’s Geek Squad Island was devoid of visitors and the virtual staff that was supposed to be online.
The schedule of events on Sun Microsystems Inc.’s site was blank, and the green landscape of Dell Island was deserted. Signs posted on the window of the empty American Apparel store said it had closed up shop.
The site’s NBA channel, launched in February, has already garnered some 14,000 subscribers; users have posted more than 60,000 NBA videos, which have been viewed 23 million times. But over at Second Life, where an elaborate NBA island went up in May, the action has been a bit slower. “I think we’ve had 1,200 visitors,” Stern reports. “People tell us that’s very, very good. But I can’t say we have very precise expectations. We just want to be there.”
The article later suggests that such a project might have cost $500,000. So that’s, what, about $416 per visitor? Sweet. There’s so much to like in this article–Rose rightfully pokes some holes in Joseph Jaffe’s spin on empty corporate installations.
A couple of other surprising facts from Rose’s article:
“Linden Lab’s servers can handle a maximum of only 70 avatars at a time.” I gather this refers to each island, or region inside the game.
“A company can stage an in-world speaking event for as little as $10,000″. This is in the context of the cleverly-named Electric Sheep Company, a prominent, uh, virtual world presence builder. I think that’s a bit misleading, as you can run an event for a fraction of that cost if you do it yourself.
“Only about 1 million [users[ had logged on in the previous 30 days (the standard measure of Internet traffic), and barely a third of that total had bothered to drop by in the previous week. Most of those who did were from Europe or Asia, leaving a little more than 100,000 Americans per week to be targeted by US marketers.”
If you’re an American Express card holder, they want you to vote on the project so that it can obtain funding.
There are a slough of creative social change projects in Second Life. Another one I learned about at Northern Voice last year was a project to sell virtual yaks to buy animals for actual Tibetan families. The virtual yak gave virtual milk. What was cooler, though, was that they hadn’t done any walking animation for the yak, so it was more of a HoverYak™.
I forget where I first read about it, but Stanford recently hosted the first Virtual Good Summit. My initial reaction to this news went something like “How farcical yet fascinating!”
The Virtual Goods Summit is a one day conference focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. Once restricted to the world of online gaming, virtual goods and currencies are beginning to influence the development of social networks, community sites, and many other new and exciting markets.
Why not? I haven’t actually bought stuff in Facebook or World of Warcraft but it’s probably only a matter of time. After all, Capulet regularly buys bits from services like Blinksale, Campaign Monitor and Harvest. The Facebook gift flower or ninja is as much a service as online time tracking, isn’t it?
The Chinese farmers value their time much less than American players. This isn’t a moral statement, it’s just one of economic fact. While it might take both players 60 hours to progress a character up to level 40, the opportunity cost for the American player could be $900 (60 hours * $15/hr,) whereas the opportunity cost for the Chinese player could be $30 (60 hours * $.50/hr). The American player is willing to pay up to $900 for a level 40 character, creating profit opportunities for the Chinese player.
Joey Seiler took remarkably legible notes from a bunch of the sessions, which I’ve enjoyed reading. The best way to find them all is probably via this Google search.
As regular readers know, I’m highly skeptical about companies marketing in Second Life today. It’s too early, I’m not sure they’re particularly welcome and, in most cases, I don’t see the return on investment.
That won’t always be the case, and I believe the MySpaces and FaceBooks of the future will look something like Second Life. Today, however, I would point my clients elsewhere.
Wagner James Au has written an interesting piece on GigaOm, reporting on a marketing survey (PDF). I’ll immediately disregard the survey, because they only talked to 200 avatars (which might, you know, mean 150 humans for all we know) and there’s no discussion of methodology in the document.
However, Au does go on to make some comments on marketing in Second Life, which are worth repeating:
The standard means of travel in SL is point-to-point teleportation, near-instantaneous transit from one x,y,z location to another. (Though it gets more press, Superman-esque flying is mostly used in short, localized bursts to get around obstacles.) P2P teleporting renders billboards and most other location-based advertising useless, and in any case, most SL marketers buy and develop on private virtual islands, where they can fully control the branding experience.
There’s also some really interesting discussion in the comments associated with this post, in particular this one:
There is a limit to the benficial effect of the ‘Flash Crowd’ aka the ‘green dot effect’ which is exactly that described by Larry Niven in his 1973 story of the same name - the sim gets laggy at fairly low levels and eventually the tp system stops working. Even if a company gets the Beatles to reform with Jimi Hendrix on guitar to publicise an event in sl, a vanishingly small amount of users would actually be able to attend. Companies need to go back to long, slow campaigns rather than a massive spend on shock and awe tactics. AOL Pointe in sl seems to have grasped that idea, for example.
I think most companies go into Second Life out of corporate hubris. It looks like a fun project for the employees, and it’s apparently what all the cool kids are doing. I’d love to see some more research or analyst reports on the bottom line.
