Linden Lab just started publishing new ads on YouTube for Second Life, one of which you watch here. ("It represents one variation of many that are being tested", the company tells me.) Screengrabs of it throughout this post.
It's part of a new and aggressive marketing campaign for Second Life — basically the first one in nearly 4 years.
To get more context and strategy, read my latest interview with Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager and CTO Philip Rosedale below!
Inside Project Zero: Brad Oberwager & Philip Rosedale on Marketing & Designing a New User Second Life Experience
Part of a 3 part series on my Patreon; read Part 1 here; read Part 2 here
Project Zero is not simply a cloud streaming option for existing SL users. It's tightly integrated into an aggressive marketing plan with a growing budget, and a completely revised first-time experience that discards the "Welcome Island" model that's basically existed since 2003.
In my recent conversation with Linden Lab heads Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale, we explore their vision for growing the user base with Project Zero — and why the company is re-starting external marketing of SL for "the first time in four years".
Yes, you read that right. In the nearly four years since Oberwager took over leadership of Linden Lab, the company hasn't much marketed Second Life:
BRAD OBERWAGER: [Y]ou know the adage, “I know half my marketing is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” When I came in, I asked [Linden staff], and they didn't know. Turns out it was 100% wasted.
So since I couldn't figure it out, I turned off all the marketing and it didn't have an impact on revenue or any of the financials, other than we weren't spending the money on marketing.
But it stopped, obviously, it stopped bringing people in. It's just that the marketing wasn't bringing people in that were converting into dollars. So we kept it [off] until we had an ROI we could prove out.
And it took us a lot longer. I figured it was going to be six months to turn marketing back on. It went a lot longer.
Now, with Project Zero and with different partnerships we have now, the ROI makes sense for money in the marketing. So starting small, $1,000 a day, it's going to go up fast.
So today [late December 2024] was the first day that we've spent a dollar on marketing in three years, nine months. And this is going to be great for all the creators, all the communities. We're going to start driving people back in only where we know where we're driving them, and we have different partnerships with different community bases, to start sending people not to just where we want them, but we're testing sending them to other places. We're going to test with Project Zero.
So come midway through the first quarter [of 2025], we should be on a much higher run rate for marketing than we've ever had before. It makes good sense for everybody. We're going to drive more revenue to the creators. The way our whole model is set up, we do well when other people do well; we are not able to monetize if other people in our world are not doing well. We don't really sell anything directly to anybody other than land, and even that, you only buy land from us if you're getting the benefit of it…
Next: Redoing the old first-time user experience, and partnering with MadPea games.
(more…)
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 