Brian Shuster over at Red Light Center proudly showed me this chart today, noting that traffic at RLC (an adults-only virtual world) has surpassed traffic at Second Life (I’m unclear if this includes both adult and teen grids, or just adults) for the time being:
That’s a link to the dynamic chart, so by the time you read this, who knows what’s going to be at the top?
Interesting though - supports my assertion that people go into virtual worlds for the relationships (it’s teh sex!) and that the Virtual Worlds Conference next month (yay!) should not be so hesitant to include a panel about romance (or even teh sex!) and how to build tools that facilitate (teh sex!) such activities. It makes business sense, because that’s a major reason people come in and stick around. And it’s not pornography, and it doesn’t make virtual worlds developers pornographers, if that’s the fear — it’s sex.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Peregrine // Sep 18, 2007 at 4:28 pm
You can get yourself into some interesting debates about the accuracy of traffic statistics if you’re not careful. I haven’t paid much attention to Alexa for a while, but a year or so ago, opinions about it were all over the map.
Is this counting actual grid traffic, or just web site traffic? I didn’t know that Alexa could follow grid traffic. I was under the impression that it relied on people who voluntarily installed a plug-in to their browser. But maybe that’s changed since the last I heard.
2 regina lynn // Sep 18, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Hence the “today?” and “maybe?” and “i don’t know” qualifiers … LOL
3 Grey // Sep 18, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Yeah, I’m almost 100% certain Alexa doesn’t (can’t?) track Grid traffic, and only tracks web traffic of people with the toolbars installed. They use big math that makes my head hurt, I’m sure, but I’d say that this info is almost certainly only about the SL and RLC websites themselves.
That aside, I’ve been a gamer forever (heh heh) and played in virtual worlds as far back as meridian 59 — spend most of my online time in them, in fact — and I’ll agree with you Regina, it’s almost always about relationships, even when most of the people there don’t realize it.
I watched friends grumble and groan about this or that horrible/broken/bugged/unplayable/etc part or parts of the game, yet they still logged in daily and in fact were paying to do so. All to hang with people they had become friends with online. And yes, sometimes those friends were of the romantic kind :p
It usually obvious in a world where the social aspect is front and center (like Second Life) but in more “game” oriented worlds people often don’t even realize that it’s really all about the people.
And yes, even in game worlds, it can quite often be about the sex, too!
Grey
4 Peregrine // Sep 19, 2007 at 6:26 am
It’s theoretically possible that Alexa could track grid traffic, if SecondLife, RLC, and others asked them to make a special server-side agent to do it. It would be more accurate that way, since the server would count actual log-ins, instead of relying on users to install software on their end. Whether that’s the case or not, is anyone’s guess.
5 Grey // Sep 19, 2007 at 10:09 am
True, I hadn’t thought of that –
But also I don’t see it happening since the only person I think that serves is Alexa (though I could be wrong :p)
I’ve yet to see *any* virtual world willing to let anyone else track their users. It lets them spin the numbers however they wish, and downplay reduced activity by reporting on subscribers instead.