For those of you living under a rock as far as Second Life news is concerned, there's a new media firestorm about Second Life: Resident numbers. The smoking gun starts a grass fire as journalists scramble to acquire credibility by jumping onto the bandwagon of questioning numbers. Everyone loves a good scandal.This begs the real question, though. The media circus is obfuscating a more important issue with the numbers.
Over at New World Notes, here on Second Life Insider, over at the Second Life Herald, on my own blog and on the blogs of other Second Lifers, the resident figures have been discussed again and again. What they mean and what they are, insofar as data is available. Any journalist who wanted to spend a little time with Google could pick that information up. Any business who did the same would know the real story.
So, why the firestorm? Because Clay Shirky told the mainstream media: You idiots. You didn't even check. You didn't even look at the numbers that were available, let alone checking into their provenance and definitions.
Shirky went for the journalistic throat. Now we have dozens of pieces popping up by journalists all over blaming Linden Lab. It's so deliciously easy to deflect the blame. Maybe Linden Lab has some fault here, but I've never known them to be shy about what those numbers mean. It's information that's easily available if you can drive any search engine around, even if Linden Lab doesn't shout it from the rooftops. Some of you will say "Of course Linden Lab is at fault" some of you will say "Of course they aren't". Congratulations on your ability to read minds -- Contact the James Randi Educational Foundation for your one million US dollars. We contacted Linden Lab for some clarification or a statement, but they didn't respond by the time we published -- granted, we didn't give them a whole lot of time.
Shirky calls the credibility of tech journalists into question, and it's interesting to see how many of those immediately turn around and call Linden Lab underhanded in postings of their own, looking to deflect the blame.
Yes, the word Residents has more than one meaning. It appears, however, that Linden Lab chose the word for it's philosophical meaning, rather than necessarily any marketing obfuscation. They wanted us to feel like participants. Would the words Users, People or Accounts have made things any different now? Of course not. We'd still be here, and I'd still be writing this. Because those are the words that the journalists themselves are using.
Further, one of two things happened with businesses coming into Second Life off that hype. Either they did the research and it didn't matter or they didn't do the research because they didn't care (maybe they didn't care about the numbers, and maybe they didn't care about Second Lifers. Who knows? Depends on the business. Either. Both in some cases).
Shirky seems to have been pretty much correct in his original piece. High signup rates (17,887 per day, average over the last two weeks), and low retention rates ("about 10% of newly created residents are still logging into Second Life weekly, 3 months later." -- Philip Linden). Pity that he was just guessing, at the time -- even though he didn't have to, since all these figures were already on the web and well known to Google and Yahoo search engines. Still, good instincts, that man. The tone of his next piece, however, while still primarily focused on tech journalists makes it sound like he has an axe to grind with Linden Lab.
Tech journalists all over, laugh -- nay, weep -- with relief, and clutch at the offered straw, dashing off quick pieces denouncing Linden Lab's choice of a word, or missing the target once again by claiming the unavailability of assorted information, background, and analysis that is available through standard search engines.
It's true that we don't know a lot of things. We don't know how many real people there are in Second Life. There are a lot, but we don't know how much a lot is.
Writers: How many people read your article, column or blog on the web, ladies and gentlemen? A lot? Can you pin that number down more precisely? No? I see. How about your material in print media? How many people who buy your paper and magazine read your article? That's okay, you've got a sort of general notion, and that's about the best I guess you can hope for.
Signup rates have shot up today in the wake of all of this controversy it will be interesting to see how many more signups take place today and over the next few days. How many will stay out to 90 days? Well, we'll assume the 10% figure continues to hold as well now as it did last month.
"That percentage hasn't changed much with the much higher rate of new users." -- Philip Linden.There you go. Linden Lab is the only party in this with the numbers we're really interested in, and some of those numbers -- like the readerships of our own blogs and columns, ladies and gentleman -- are going to be pretty fuzzy.
You know where to go to get them, but don't pretend you're exposing some scandal or cover up when you do, because you knew it all along. Shirky pointed the smoking gun at you, not at them. Let's just get what genuine information we can, and forget about all this face-saving nonsense.
1. Um, I hardly think a coupla blogs and SL-specific newspapers online constitute a "media firestorm," Tateru, sheesh.
I don't see the RL, mainstream media stories debunking the LL numbers other than the Guardian on the left.
Could you point to an actual mainstream media article?
Once again, anyone who wants to get past the hype on the front page with the 2 million try-mes can just go inside to the economic statistics page and see the numbers of those who buy land, i.e. paid subscriptions, and then look at the kinds of figures there are for sales of items, number of residents who make a profit and figure out that those who buy land/paid subscriptions create content that attracts some of the basic accounts -- and the smart folks really looking at 30-60 days and other indicators, i.e. how many people stay in rentals, are convinced the figure is like 100,000 or thereabouts of "real people".
Impressive as heck, given that there's no game here.
Posted at 9:46PM on Dec 27th 2006 by Prokofy Neva