If there is one thing that attracts almost as much attention as pre-testing on this blog, it is Second Life, the media darling of MMPORPGs (Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games). Second Life gets lots of media coverage for good reason—it is a very interesting harbinger of virtual worlds to come. But as more and more brands set up shop there, old problems also reappear. Anyone at Nielsen who gets fed up with debating TV ratings measurement issues should check out the debate over Tateru Nino’s traffic estimates for Second Life sites.
Reported on New World Notes, “Tateru’s Mixed Reality Headcount” attempts to track unique visits to some of the most prominent or highly publicized “mixed reality” sites. (Mixed reality sites are sites set up in Second Life by and for real companies and brands.) The traffic to ten prominent mixed reality sites is compared against that of three “native reality” sites. Sites with consistently low traffic (less than 500 visitors) are dropped from the ranking in favor of new ones.
Now, while the methodology used to monitor these sites does seek to get an accurate picture, it does suffer from one big problem. Sites are chosen for the traffic count based on the prominence of the sponsoring brand. In other words, if your off-line brand is well known, then you have a good chance of being monitored by Tateru. A lesser problem for the purposes of comparison, but one familiar to media researchers, is that headcounts do not factor in return visitors, so the reach of the sites is probably less than the total traffic numbers would suggest.
And for most mixed reality brands, that means the reach of their sites is miniscule. As Wagner James Au suggests, “With a month of Tateru reporting, a consistent theme emerges: real world marketing sites in Second Life are still struggling for significance in the world’s overall culture. At a weekly high of 6454 visitors, even the most successful corporate site now attracts but a fraction of Second Life’s total active user base of some 400,000.” Over the first month of measurement, the three benchmark native reality sites consistently topped the ranking, outdistancing the best mixed reality brand by a fair margin.
Amusingly, the low reach of these sites does not stop some people from posting a passionate defense of their work. Last week, when a new site called “The Pond” debuted for Australian telecom company Telstra and placed fourth on the list, beating IBM, Pontiac and Microsoft with 6,640 visitors, Tateru commented that the site had two things that guaranteed high levels of engagement: “paid support staff in-world through much of the day, and unmetered bandwidth.… With these two factors, you could just about level the build, transform the area into a sandbox and have it do as well.” In other words, who needs content when you have free bandwidth?
Well, some people seem to think that the content is definitely worth having. Posting a reply to Tateru, George Hayes states, “Having worked very hard to make “The Pond” a great community place for Australians, I really take offence at this comment.”
This comment sparked a lengthy debate on the pros and cons of “The Pond,” which missed the fundamental point that no matter how attractive the site might be, precious few people have visited it. Even accepting the limitations of Tateru’s traffic measurement, the reach of “The Pond in Second Life must have been less than 2 percent. Even if those people are all young, Internet-savvy, Australians (assuming that is Telstra’s target audience) then “The Pond” is going to take a while to pay back on investment in it.
I realize that the presence of many brands in Second Life has a wider PR benefit than just the number of visitors to their site. I also recognize that the experience of engaging consumers in Second Life may pay off when newer, more sophisticated virtual realities come into being. But I have to wonder whether much is really being done to learn from this experiment. If not, then reaching 6,000 people a week sounds like a very poor return on investment to me.
Telstra’s presence in Second Life may be more engaging and welcome than most (I will leave that to Second Lifers to decide), but as I commented in previous posts (October 2006 and May 2007) many Second Life inhabitants are not to keen on having real-world brands join their party. While most do not go to the extreme of bombing corporate sites, as happened to ABC Island a couple of weeks ago, and before that Reebok and American Apparel, most show their displeasure by not showing up. If you are considering an investment in a Second Life site maybe you should ask yourself what the benefit will be to visitors as well as your brand.
Are we asking too much of “new media” to judge it by traditional media metrics like reach and cost per thousand? Is engaging one person for half an hour worth more than engaging 30 for a minute? Please let me know your thoughts.
Tags: Millward Brown, Nigel Hollis, Second Life, Tateru Nino, mixed reality, Wagner James Au, The Pond, Telestra
(18 votes, average: 3.61 out of 5)
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June 16th, 2007 at 2:21 am
Just as a minor correction, ABC Island was not vandalized, as is widely reported. It was content lost temporarily to a server glitch. The site was restored relatively quickly from a backup.
June 18th, 2007 at 5:51 am
Dare I say it: are we not counting angels on the head of a pin? The last ranking show on TV generates millions more visitors than all of Second Life. This is another manifestation of the “digirati” getting caught up in the importance of the minicule.
June 18th, 2007 at 11:57 am
I think the common answer of this question “Is engaging one person for half an hour worth more than engaging 30 for a minute?” as it is asked should be No.
But, we must consider that Second Life is much more than advertising or PR activities only. We are facing a new world, a new society, where “the rules” are being established at the time this society is growing, the future is still uncertain, and the only think we know is that the virtual society as we know will be totally different. And many times bigger. 3 years later which company had a blog? How many CEOs used to write in a personal blog? And what about Myspace or Orkut?
If we forget about metrics used in “real world” for media investments by now, we’ll perceive that today we can’t assume that the investment will bring return for the brands, but if we look 10 years back, the internet was also uncertain, and big companies and brands didn’t have and didn’t want to have a website questioning the real return of this investment. The result came about 3 years later, several companies paying thousands and thousands of dollars just to buy a registered domain from a native boy in India.
I know and I agree with those that will reply me saying the media investment uses real money in real and virtual worlds. By the other hand I believe the brands that will evolve at the same time of this new society, will be those that will better transit between real and virtual worlds.
To finish this note in a very tendentious way, would you invest in Google 10 years ago?
June 18th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Thanks for the correction, Tateru, much appreciated. I must say, the reporting was relatively widespread. I originally heard about this from one of my colleagues in Mexico.
Phil and Sergio, thanks for your comments. It seems that you have rather opposing views on the subject.
Sergio, don’t get me wrong. I believe that brand should experiment with new media but I also believe that such experimentation should try to fit in with the new medium rather than simply ignoring the culture and interests of the people already there.
Would have I invested in Google ten years ago? Probably not, I was a bit of a Hotbot fan at the time and it took several recommendations for me to try Google, then I was hooked.
June 25th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Is engaging one person for half an hour worth more than engaging 30 for a minute? - depends on the outcome.
The famous quote of ‘ not sure which half of advertising actually works ‘ should be ‘ not sure which 5% works ‘.
In TV land this it’s very nature – delivering large audiences is a prerequisite
In the online world where dialogue, engagement and the very fact people ordinarily are further down the sales purchase cycle – numbers are not necessarily the measure of effectiveness ( both would of course be utopia )
The PR around having an island in Second life is not news-worthy – more Lemming if done incorrectly and as an afterthought.
Using innovative engaging marketing activity which include Second Life in the mix is more admirable.
Therefore more effort should be actually translating these fewer conversations into positive outcomes - in either a sales or increased market knowledge .