Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Here’s an interesting footnote to the story of Bonnie Bots, the web site that collects and displays Second Life user data gleaned from in-world bots — a practice so controversial and provoking so much outrage, Linden Lab had several internal conversations and debates about it, posted a new policy statement, and even added new tools for landowners to block bots.

Hardly anyone has actually ever visited the site. And even less so since the controversy began.

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According to SimilarWeb, Bonnie Bots attracted about 26,000 visits last month, dropping from a high of 38,000 in January, when the controversy started. (The site itself launched earlier that month.)

Those are total visits across the site, however, while the average unique user generally visits more than once. As a rule of thumb (as a web dev with a major ad network once told me), divide the total visits by four to estimate unique visitors. And because Bonnie Bots has several active pages with various data, I’d be conservative and estimate five to six pages per unique visitor.

Which means last month, Bonnie Bots attracted… an estimated 4300-6500 unique visitors. So around 5,000 uniques, give or take.

That’s 5,000 people… out of 600,000 monthly active Second Life users. That’s not even 1% of the virtual world population!

All that to one side, it probably was a good idea for Linden Lab to clarify its policy that collecting SL user data may be illegal in many parts of the part, including all of the European Union.

In the rush to make these changes, however, Linden Lab may have made it difficult to use bots in other valuable, but less controversial contexts — a point made to me by Tyche Shepherd, who uses bots to gather data for her much-read Grid Survey.

Bonnie Bots’ spokesperson Skyler Pancake attributes the drop in pageviews from the last two months to removal of some tools on the site, bowing to demands from the user community (and suggestions from Linden Lab).

“We’ve had some features taken away from us,” as Pancake puts it. “Less features, less interest.” 

But even if that’s the case, it’s notable how small the controversy has always been, in terms of actual active participants.

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