Comments on: Open letter to the BBC

By: Luisa

Luisa — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:32:37 +0000

Is dead? But wait, there is new stuff out even now. More SL than ever. You can order your Enterprise Edition (SLE) and install it at home. if you live inside your office
“Because a LOT more people are going to be checking out Public SL now, including companies who prefer a cheaper solution than SLE”
that's so funny! Companies left SL, because of this because of that.
Now there is a standing offer of SL-behind-teh-firewall, and all of a sudden there is love again for – meeting space inside SecondLife, which is cheaper than running dedicated servers hosted inhouse. Go figure.

Maybe it has been a “phished site”. Surely going underwater, in regards of journalistic quality.

By: Luisa

Luisa — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:32:37 +0000

Maybe it has been a “phished site”. Surely going underwater, in regards of journalistic quality.

By: Mythridian Almodovar

Mythridian Almodovar — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:50:53 +0000

Well said, Gwyneth!

By: IYan Writer

IYan Writer — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:06:18 +0000

I think cost per user and ARPU are the best metrics for both.. but good luck getting the numbers out of both companies

By: Gwyneth Llewelyn

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:01:23 +0000

Hehe I agree, IYan The notion of “simultaneous users” might make more sense for Second Life because that's one of the metrics that Linden Lab likes (or Skype!). “Visitors” is still the most old-fashioned metric for websites. These days, “time spent per user” is more interesting to both; we know that on Second Life this is about 1 hour and 40 minutes; on eBay, it went from 1 hour 48 minutes in 1999 to 2 hours in 2008. So it's pretty equivalent (eBay is slightly leading).

By: IYan Writer

IYan Writer — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:44:37 +0000

Huh – sorry about that, I thought I cancelled the comment. That was the start of the calculations, I did indeed try to account for average visits, I got to some results and after all that I decided that the numbers don't really mean anything

Basically, I think it's apples and oranges. Like comparing M Linden and eBay CEO foot size

By: Gwyneth Llewelyn

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:59:56 +0000

… yes, or less than 1200 every second but that is not the right way to calculate things: you have to take into account the average time a visitor spends on eBay.

By: IYan Writer

IYan Writer — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:36:05 +0000

2B page views – let's say each user visits 20 pages (probably less). That's 100M users per day.

By: Gwyneth Llewelyn

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:02:35 +0000

Oh yes! They have over 2 billion page views per day, over 100 million items on sale, and storage of 4.5 Petabytes, which is massive (Second Life has more items for sale, but they don't have the same kind of listings that eBay has).

I'm trying to squeeze the number out of Google, though. eBay is far more keen to announce that Skype (their fully-owned subsidiary) has up to 20 million simultaneous users than to talk about their current number of simultaneous users... the number I had was from 2007 I believe.

By: Gwyneth Llewelyn

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:38:59 +0000

Ultimately, you're right, Paisley — news like this pop up suddenly and die quickly. However, in my daily rounds with existing clients and potential clients, they will all point me to this article and ask me if it's true if Second Life is dying, and expect me to say why the article is wrong. It happens all the time the mainstream media reports something like that.

Fortunately this time it's quite easy to debunk... but it's always frustrating. The media has much more power to destroy Second Life than to hype it up, and this is something that editors worldwide have long ago found out — thus their willingness to commission further articles on SL's "imminent death", always a bestselling article, since, oh, at least 2004.