Corey Bridges and the Future of VW’s
Virtual World News has a nice, new feature titled My Turn, which is a platform for anyone with a strong opinion about the VW industry to sound off. Today, it was Corey Bridges, VP of Marketing at Multiverse saying we should all hold tight, just because Linden Lab and Second Life are getting kicked in the teeth doesn’t mean the Virtual World business is circling the drain. Indeed, according to Bridges, things have never looked rosier.
To which I’m reminded of:
Sheesh, we’re not even in the equivalent of the 1994 Mosaic browser days on the web. We’re earlier than that. We’re in the Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL days, where each service was a walled garden, usability/stability were rough, and interoperability was a pipe dream. Sound familiar? (BTW, I just love doing that, show a screen from 20 years ago.)
Corey’s point is that equating Second Life’s problems with the whole Virtual World field (and possibly the 3D Internet) is like saying in 1993 that problems at Compuserve would have affected the future of the web. They didn’t and they won’t.
But more to the point, Corey and other Virtual World developers should take up the challenge laid out by Linden Lab. Primarily, they should freely publish their own metrics, like Linden Lab does. One of the reasons we’re having a debate about the effectiveness of Virtual Worlds is because Linden Lab publishes population numbers, including registrations, 30 day uniques, and economic measures. What other Virtual World does that?
Hello?
Bueller?
Bueller?
Thought so.
My advice to Multiverse, Kaneva, HipHi, etc is this: Want to change the debate? Then provide us hard numbers–real data–to talk about. Let the data speak for itself and there will be different discussions going on in the blogosphere, at conferences, and in conference rooms around the world.
Hey, Joel–
Good to hear from you. You know–this is the only site I’ve actually responded to, from all of ‘em that covered my op-ed. You make an excellent point about revealing numbers. I agree wholeheartedly. Here are Multiverse’s:
* Total number of development teams who have registered to download the Multiverse Development Kit: over 18,000. (We hit 18,000 about 3 weeks ago. Probably not at 19,000 yet, but I imagine we will be in a few weeks.)
We haven’t launched to consumers yet, so we aren’t tracking those numbers yet. That said, several of our customers’ worlds are available for you to check out now, in alpha or beta stage. Just download the World Browser. Though, again–we haven’t launched the World Browser for consumers, so the experience is still in a by-engineers-for-engineers state.
BTW, as for numbers from Linden, what I’d really love from them is a more precise number than the mushy “10 million residents of Second Life,” which of course includes all sorts of voodoo math and avoids talking about how many regular users are in there. If it’s only 200,000 regular users, that’s fine–that’s a perfectly respectable number.
Anyway, thanks for calling for honesty and precision in our industry. I think it won’t be too long before NOT making that data public will reflect very poorly on any world or platform. I’m sure I’ll see you at SxSW or VWNY.
–Corey
Exec Producer, Multiverse
Hi Corey,
Thanks so much for writing about this. I appreciate your thoughts. Look forward to catching up with you at SXSW.
As you know, LL publishes 30 day uniques, which is probably the most usable definition of “regular users” they have. Although, the definition of “uniques” can be hazy when comparing across websites, VW’s, or media campaigns. Anytime “uniques” are mentioned as traffic numbers in VW’s and websites, knowing the time period for defining a unique is critical. Therfore, I’m not concerned about SL’s regular users because I feel we already have that number. As you know, you need to be an SL member to see this number, but seeing as there is free membership, I feel this number is publicly available.
What I’d like LL to do is publish that 30 day unique every month in their spreadsheets like they do total registrations so that we can run a correlation between them. My hunch is that there is low, if no, correlation between 30 day uniques and registrations.
I’ve heard other people criticice LL’s registration numbers because they contain “voodoo,” yet, no one’s provide evidence, or at least a hypothesis for that “voodoo.” Specifically, what is your complaint? What’s the voodoo? If it’s the fact that people have multiple logins, lowering the actual number of people that are registered users of SL, then we have the same problem with registered users of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, etc. I’ve been in meetings where those services tout their registration numbers. Media planners rarely ask about dupes. Can you point me to any discussion of dupes on those services as guidance for having that discussion about VW’s? We can’t be the only ones who have had this discussion.
I hope you’re right that we’ll soon reach a day when NOT making the numbers public will reflect poorly on those organizations that don’t step up to this level of transparency.
Looking forward to seeing consumer oriented Multiverse Worlds. Thanks once again for writing.
Joel