Why are some RL sims empty?
Greg Verdino of MarketingProfs.com has visited the Second Life builds of Aloft, American Apparel, Toyota, Reebok and Telus, finding them all empty:
“Welcome to Second Life, marketers. This is the vibrant virtual community that the business press is trumpeting as the new, new thing? The metaverse that companies are tripping over each other to infiltrate?
Linden, we have a problem.”
Second Life, with a current peak concurrency of less than 20,000, may indeed come as a shock to big consumer-facing brands who are used to millions of visitors to their Web pages and real-world stores. And it’s not just the corporate sims — large chunks of Second Life are often lonesome places to be, as Warren Ellis has noted.
So what about Reuters? We’ve had modestly healthy traffic figures on our island since we launched a few months ago. Anecdotally, I’ve found that there are people there much more often than not, and during my office hours and for events like the Nintendo and Warner Music interviews, we’ve drawn crowds of people who are looking to discuss and debate.
But in the long term, with the well-received launch of our News HUD and home displays, we want Second Life residents to take Reuters news and data with them wherever they go. We don’t always need big traffic numbers on our island to succeed, any more than we need people to visit our real-life headquarters in Times Square or Canary Wharf.
In the next few weeks — and maybe even sooner — we’ll be rolling out some new features for the HUD and the Reuters Second Life Web site which are designed to be of further benefit to the Second Life community, as well as provide more interviews that offer the chance to interact with some high-profile executives, politicians, writers and thinkers.
Watch this space…
