Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK
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Second Life Visits Double in Two Months
August 09, 2006
I have been meaning to do a post on the buzzy Second Life for weeks. I recently met Cory Ondrejka, an executive at Linden Lab (the makers of Second Life) and his lovely wife at a conference recently. They opened my eyes to the endless applications of Second Life. Whilst I had visited the virtual world, I had not yet set up an avatar. I have now taken that bold leap. Alas, I am still no expert, but I do find Second Life incredibly cool and exciting.
For those of you not familiar with Second Life, it is a virtual world. If I try to describe it I will no doubt offend scores of avid fans, so I refer you to the description on Second Life's website and this cover story from Business Week in May.
The chart below illustrates the fantastic growth of Second Life, as a share of UK internet visits. Hitwise is reporting on visits to the website, not the downloaded application. In such cases, I often think of website visits as new customers, looking for information and potentially downloading the software. Share of UK visits to Second Life have more than doubled in the past two months. The site ranked 11,372 in July based on share of UK visits and ranked 485 in the Hitwise Net Communities and Chat category.
Unsurprisingly, the Second Life website received the majority of its visits from search engines in July with 45% of its visits coming from Google. MySpace was the #7 upstream site, accounting for 1.12% of UK internet visits to Second Life in July. I found this particularly interesting after reading Matthew Ingram's post challenging bands to forget MySpace and to move to Second Life .
If you feel that the social networking phenomenon snuck up on you, Second Life is worth watching. There are interesting opportunities to engage with consumers on the site, probably best exemplified by the BBC. Whether or not you remain a sceptic, you may enjoy this cartoon from bLaugh.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 10:59 AM
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Comments
Would it help that the Engadget company released a Second Life blog and advertised it at the top of every blog? That's the only place I see anything related to Second Life these days.
Posted by Don Wilson | August 9, 2006 07:10 AM
Don, Second Life's growth could well be in part due to promotion on the Engadget blog. I checked our clickstream report for July and as mentioned in the post, the majority (51%) of visits to Second Life came from search in July. 8% came from Net Communities and Chat and 1% from Blogs. However, click throughs are not the only way that online advertising can drive traffic - we have found through some research we are doing that online display advertising can also build unaided brand awareness. So, the placement on Engadget could drive searches for the brand, and so drive visits from search.
Most likely the growth comes from a variety of factors - including the BBC's activity.
I welcome other thoughts on this as well...
Posted by Heather Hopkins | August 10, 2006 03:18 AM
Heather, I agree with Marshall. Your post is about visits to the Second Life web site, not the Second Life world (which is fine, it just suggests otherwise in the headline). Visits to the web site are, in my opinion, fairly uninteresting without tangibly relating the visits to the number of client software downloads.
re: "There are interesting opportunities to engage with consumers on the site, probably best exemplified by the BBC." Here, I think you intended to reference Second Life the world, not the web site. The BBC and other corporations have brought their real-world brands into Second Life's virtual world, not the Second Life web site.
The 3D Second Life world (not the web site) is where avatars socialize and create content. The 2D web site is an informational and administration tool.
Posted by Tony Walsh | August 11, 2006 03:42 AM
To add to Tony's point about the 2D web site versus the 3D world: another factor in the growth of traffic to the web site is the fact that residents have very active forums on the 2-D website that support communication among residents of SL as well as developers (these forums will be going away soon, however). The number of SL residents in-world is reportedly growing at about 12% per month, so it stands to reason some of the web site growth is a factor of the growth within the virtual world and the information and communication exchange features on the website.
July seemed to be a very active month for SL in the media, so it's not surprising to see searches growing there. But the level of activity from the arts, entertainment and corporate arenas is also driving a curiosity about SL.
Posted by Linda Zimmer | August 13, 2006 12:16 PM
Headline a little deceptive here. Interesting post, just not as interesting as I had hoped ;)
Posted by Marshall | August 9, 2006 04:58 AM