What should we make of the market study from Virtual Worlds Management that $1 billion has been invested in virtual worlds over the past 12 months? Without adding hype, let’s just say it’s an important benchmark – especially for marketers. Second Life is the most widely recognized virtual world brand and has been monitored as an indicator for the publics demand for virtual world consumption. While it has received mostly positive press from both the establishment and blogosphere, Second Life has recently come under new scrutiny. Last week The Yankee Group issued a press release reporting that “the growth rate of Second Life users has slowed since its peak in October 2006, while user engagement (as measured by average time spent per user) has leveled off at just 12 minutes per month.” The report goes on to compare this “engagement” metric with those of the latest media darlings MySpace and Facebook “which are seeing steady increases in both the number of users and the intensity of user engagement. Facebook’s average time spent per user, for example, increased 24% over 6 months to 186 minutes per month, equating to 15-times more engagement per user than Second Life.” Not wanting to go quietly into the night, Second Life issued a spirited criticism of The Yankee Group’s release in a blog post titled “Second Grade Math”.
“We respect Yankee Group as an analyst firm in good standing in its field. But their press release this week cited a figure that we just can’t figure out: they claim that the average time spent per user of Second Life is just 12 minutes per month.
Just this past August, users of Second Life spent over 23 million hours in Second Life. During that month, there were just over 974,000 user logins to Second Life – that’s an average of 23.6 hours per user!”
So who’s numbers are accurate? Who knows? But more importantly who cares? Second Life is a red herring. What marketers should understand is that virtual world/metaverse usage IS growing and trending towards mainstream due to its adoption by kids and teens.
According to eMarketer, “some 24% of the 34.3 million US child and teen internet users will visit virtual worlds once a month in 2007, according to eMarketer, which expects that 34% will do so in 2008, and 53% by 2011. In absolute numbers, that’s 8.2 million kids and teens expected to visit virtual worlds this year, 12.0 million in 2008, 20 million in 2011.”
Increasingly, our kids first exposure to the net will be of the virtual avatar variety. Sites like Barbie Girls, Habbo, Club Penguin and Whyville will reshape experiential expectations and force us to completely blow-up our understanding of usability. Amazon.com – boring, YouTube – give me a break, ESPN.com – are you kidding me! The generations nurtured on mixed reality will not tolerate the flat experiences that we engage with today. Virtual is becoming real. Real fast.
Tags: Barbie Girls, brand, Club Penguin, engagement, Facebook, Habbo, hyperlife, marketing, metaverse, myspace, Second Life, social networking, vibe, virtual worlds, Whyville
