Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Originally published on my Patreon

“Second Life’s reach was [once] like the Beatles,” Philip Rosedale mentioned last week during a media/influencer call, referring to their comparative rankings on Google Trends. 

That seemed like an exaggeration when he said it, but if you look this up, you'll see that it’s quite the case — see above.

In August 2007, Second Life (“Online game”) was indeed not too far away in ranking on Google Trends from the Beatles (“Rock band”). 

Yes: At its peak of media attention, our little virtual world inspired nearly as much interest as a legendary music group that’s known and generally liked by roughly every human adult across Europe, North America, and much of the wider world.  

“Guess how much we paid for that?” Philip asked the group of SLers on the Zoom call.

I covered this apex in Second Life’s peak of human interest in my book, and saw the answer first hand.

Very little was being spent by Linden Lab on marketing Second Life back then, actually. There were a few small ad campaigns on some game sites, the very indirect promotion of my embedded reporting blog posts as a part-time Linden contractor, and other modest marketing efforts.

Despite that scant spend, staff at Linden Lab were begging its own marketing/PR department to stop promoting the virtual world at all. Because by then, the sheer deluge of new user signs-ups by the millions was causing performance and scaling issues:  

Major press coverage of Second Life, often by tech reporters who were fans of Snow Crash themselves, began to take on gathering momentum into 2006, culminating in a feature story on the cover of BusinessWeek. Which only catapulted into even further coverage. Strikingly, most of this overwhelmingly positive media attention was organic, generated by reporters and media outlets themselves. 

"It was kind of terrifying,” Catherine Smith, head of Linden Lab communications back then, recalls now. “I remember [a Linden Lab engineer] saying to me one time, 'Can you just please make the PR stop? And I'm like, ‘Sorry, that train has left the station. I'm not pitching this anymore. They're all coming to us.’" 

As Philip explains now: “You couldn't buy that reach. There was collective human interest that drove that. We can't hit the replay button on that with marketing dollars because we didn't do that before… traditional marketing approaches are ineffective." In terms of equivalent eyeballs reached via magazine cover articles, news broadcast segments, TV appearances on The Office and much more, the earned media Second Life attracted back then would easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars now.

His point was in a response to an SLer question that often comes up within the Second Life user community: Where are the marketing campaigns to bring in new users? 

In response, Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager said there is a new marketing campaign starting slowly now:

"Everything we're making [in SL], we're putting it back in. I'm going to start putting that money into marketing dollars. Our product is relevant, it's not for everybody, but there's an imperative that Second Life continues and it's extremely valuable that people come." Second Life ads are starting to "dribble out" now as they test out different approaches and targets, but expect that to pick up in January and February. 

It’s good that this marketing is cautious, because until the mobile app is ready for new users, Second Life faces the same challenges it had when it was about as famous as the Beatles: A daunting user interface, poor performance on non-gaming machines, and overwhelming confusion around the immediate new user question, “How is this fun?”

Fortunately, quite a lot has changed since 2007. Because if you go on Google Trends and compare Roblox (“Online game”) to the Beatles (“Rock band”), you get this:

Yes: The largest virtual world platform (which actually launched in 2006) generates vastly more interest than the most famous music group in history. And as the many tens of millions of kids playing Roblox now grow up and look for a virtual world that’s more open, more edgy, more for grown ups, the time to market Second Life will be ideal.

If, that is, the Second Life mobile app can become as immediately fun as Roblox currently is. 

I believe that’s possible. All you need, after all, is love. (And a very good game designer.)

But more on that another day.