Shirky and Second Life

Seriously, if Clay Shirky weren't just so damn good, I'd feel really bad at how he's doing our job for us, getting to the bottom of the dirty little secret that is the press and its relationship to Second Life.

But really, he is that damn good.

Curse you Shirky. Curse you.

Comments

[Amarilla]

Do you have any problem with that, Dan ? I guess you don't . In my book, you are a decent honest guy. Clay ? He is the one doing a favour to the gamers. And, Dan, we both know that there is more than Shirky getting to the bottom of whatever " secret " . Polichinelle's secret. Or Victoria's one. This your blog plays a role. Yes, you are an important person; the same is Clay. And it's not only about SL. It's about : we the gamers , we are looking for interractions.How many are we ? Does the numbers counts ? Dan,all this gaming thingie, it's about money.Influence. Power.
Dan, i have a question for you, and i mean it : do we, as humans, really need the PvP ? I come to you with this basic question.Care to answer, plzzzzzzz ?

[Ren Reynolds]

Dan >our job for us, getting to the bottom of the dirty little secret that is the press and its relationship to Second Life.

Not really. And a bit of credit for the TN hive mind might have been nice, some here have put quite a bit of time into analysis of figures (I’m not looking for credit myself, I’ve done squat). I do like his naming names and prediction of what story we are going to see next though.

I don’t think this is to do with journalists and SL per se, as Clay’s piece says “the press hasn't really covered Second Life as business story or tech story so much as a trend story”, it’s to do with journalists and new tech hype, as commentators on the piece have said, you can just swap ‘SL’ for ‘.com’ and here we go again.

Also, as I’ve pointed out before, journalists are still miss reporting Dr C’s numbers about GDP per capita as GDP – how many years is that?

You know, this could be cleared up pretty quickly. There is obvious confusion out there as to what a Resident is, people in investing money on the basis of the number that they hear in the press - yes they should do their own research, but how do they do that? As Second Life is an economy that people do invest in, and some of they key metrics behind it are how many unique people with actual money are there in SL then it would seem that Linden have a duty to the market to clarify two things:

What is the definition of Resident?
How many paid accounts are there?

If we are going to take all this virtual stuff seriously then is it not important enough for us to get actual facts like this and not work on things issued by PR firms. As SL is advertised as somewhere to do business, is there no requirement under US law for facts to be given to the market? If not, why not?

[Amarilla]

Do you want me to believe that Toyota ( just an example ) are investing money in SL based on SL hype PR ? Under the provisions of EULA and ToS ?
Is LL practicing double standards ? If yes, is it legal in the US ? How many accounts are paid by " institutions " ( like the CIA ) ? Are the LL employees allowed to run SL accounts ? What does mean " role playing " ? Am i gonna see Gitmo from inside , if my alt in SL gonna type : " i wanna nuke the USA " ? Are 10,000 players not important enough for the " public policy " , but 30,000 are ? I'm living in Belarus and i've just made 1 billion in SL , partially already sold for real cash, who - and how - gonna tax me ? Is SL - as it is today - a viable game-model and business-model ? My opinion is : as it stand today, SL model is not a viable one. For the above reasons and for many others. But , quoting a blonde : " the horrible death of a worm is the wonderfull birth of a butterfly " .

[Mark Wallace]

paid accounts is around 40,000, as displayed here:
http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy-graphs.php

[Ren Reynolds]

thx
the related page: http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/12/12/growth-of-second-life-community-and-economy/
makes interesting reading too

[Mark Wallace]

I wrote a long comment here about three times and then erased it each time, but what it boiled down to was that all this shaming and gloating is pretty distasteful to me. It makes me a bit sad. There are so many ways to approach this that would be so much more constructive.

[Cory Ondrejka]

Thanks, Mark.

[Peter (Newell) Haik]

Mark,

I agree 100%, and have avoided commenting and posting on the matter entirely as there really is only one point to be made and everyone seems to agree on it. "The numbers don't add up".

The point has been made and has been acknowledged by those who can actually change the discussion, lets move on.

[Mike Sellers]

Mark, I think Clay's article is the first of the backlash I've been expecting and writing about here (the three new dissembling approaches to SL's popularity that he mentions have all been seen here on TN already, FWIW).

I'm not interested in gloating or shaming; neither serves any useful purpose -- and for anyone who's tempted, I'd remind them of how incredibly difficult it is to build the kind of technology and community that LL has built in SL.

But I think that Clay's pursuit is valuable and important far beyond any chortling over Second Life's supposed comeuppance. At one level it acts as a sort of antidote to the 'irrational exuberance' (to hijack Greenspan's phrase) surrounding SL's PR and coverage in the mainstream press. Beyond that though, it is a reminder that virtual worlds now are in the mainstream, and will live and die, be raised or crushed, by the inexorable, often unthinking or at least unfair standards that prevail there.

If basic honesty and a desire for accuracy didn't do so, the current situation warrants a bit more caution on the part of virtual world operators: Don't claim a million people use your world (however obfuscated the claim is) unless they're really there. Don't say people own the world unless they do. Don't claim to be creating millionaires out of your users unless you really are. And as hard as this is, don't silently smile and nod as the press consistently overestimates your world's popularity or financial success.

The time for easy if not altogether accurate PR wins and P.T. Barnum antics in virtual worlds is over, IMO. We're no longer just a little niche that no one cares about. But along with the public notoriety of CNN, the NYT, the Washington Post, etc., comes the potential for overexposure and disdain if the worlds so publicly known don't live up to the hype -- and for better or worse, Second Life is at the head of this pack right now.

Clay outlined his next wave of reporting that's going to happen regarding Second Life -- no correction of past mistakes, support for the trend even if it's not borne out by erroneous SL numbers, and a deflection from talking about numbers altogether. My prediction is that beyond the retrenching Clay describes, the next big wave of stories covering virtual worlds won't be about Toyota or CNet being in SL, but will be about "average joes" trying to explore these brave new worlds, only to be accosted by endlessly replicating party hats, furry sex clubs, aggressive object trade requests, vulgar bombs launched randomly, or most especially, creative griefing by mortar-like attacks of giant flying penises disrupting interviews or other functions.

As Clay has said, the media backlash won't be about "hey we got the numbers wrong." It has the potential to zoom past that to "these places are dangerous and not where you want to be," especially if journalists feel a need to cover their past mistakes by pointing out "the darker side of this popular trend" as so often happens. It's a natural (if I hope not inevitable) reverberation from the earlier PR; the price that may have to be paid. But it doesn't help any of us who are supporters of virtual worlds, any more than virtual worlds are helped by trying to defend illusory popularity numbers that only obscure the (financial and popular) reality.

[Matt Mihaly]

Mark Wallace wrote:

I wrote a long comment here about three times and then erased it each time, but what it boiled down to was that all this shaming and gloating is pretty distasteful to me.

I'm sure Bush supporters find it distasteful when people gleefully (but rightly) point out the numerous lies that emanate from the White House. Linden engages in the same kind of behavior. Why shouldn't they be called to task for it?

I'm not asking a rhetorical question. It's pretty tough to argue that Linden Labs doesn't outright lie to the press (see Joe Miller's lie to the BBC about SL's technical capability, for instance). Is there some good reason I'm missing that they should be given a pass on this kind of behavior?

What I find distasteful is that anyone would implicitly condone that kind of behavior.

--matt

[Mark Wallace]

@Matt: I can't stand the Bush White House, but I find gleeful pointing out of political lies to be distasteful also. It's the glee and the gloat that bothers me, not the pointing out of lies. I don't condone LL's misinformation (read the Herald, and my blog), nor the White House's.

@Mike: I agree that the pursuit of accuracy is the most important thing here. I just think that setting up an antagonistic relationship with the press is not the best way to go about it. Why not take some more positive, more pro-active steps? Where is the joint industry/academic organization devoted to VW research and metrics? Where's the outreach to journalists in the form of clear, brief one-sheets laying out some facts? Why so few non-game journalists invited to most of the conferences? Why not bring these people into the fold instead of assuming they'll just get it wrong? Stuff like that.

[Matt Mihaly]

Nod, fair enough Mark. Personal taste I guess. I find a fair few reasons to be gleeful when those-who-deceive are exposed.

--matt

[Clay Shirky]

Mark,

I have to tell you, I only wrote those pieces after becoming convinced that there in fact _aren't_ ways to approach this that would be more constructive.

I've been thinking hard about SL since last summer, when I heard, at a conference on social software, yet another set of Second Life numbers that didn't make any sense to me. I used to be the CTO of a company that did media tracking online, and I've had a hand in the spread about the idea of social software, so it bugs me when I hear numbers I can't understand. It bugs me more when I see other people reasoning about the world using those same numbers. And it bugs me most when the press seems willing to amplify those numbers uncritically.

So, in the last month, I've spent a lot of time reading about SL and looking at their published numbers, and, more importantly, talking to people who are basing their conclusions on those numbers, and I don't think I can convey to you any better than the current piece on Valleywag how fruitless those conversations were.

When I pointed out a credulous bit of reporting on Schonfeld's Biz2 blog, he fired off a query to Linden -- in the comments of his own blog. There's hard-hitting investigative journalism for you. Wagner James Au, who calls himself an embedded reporter, wouldn't vouch for the SL numbers he'd published, but pointed me to Tateru Nino. Nino, who calls herself a demographer, denies that the two million number was ever meant to have any actual meaning.

No one thought to check what they thought they heard when the Lindens said Resident, knows what the real numbers are, and no one who writes about SL seems to want to know. Au gave me some attaboys over on GigaGamez, saying how glad he was that someone was looking into this, but his actions made it equally clear that this gladness did not produce any motivation to look into the numbers himself, and so on.

I could go on -- I've talked to people at the New York Times, Business Week, Forbes, on and on -- and no one actually asked Lindens how many people use Second Life regularly, or have even logged in. However, since they'd already told their readers a visibly phoney number, they seem in no mood to follow up either.

So, after a while, I came to conclude that it would be almost impossible to get the real numbers (if Linden would let the New York Times and Fortune get them publicly wrong, why would they share with me?), and more to the point, even if I had them, what would I do with them? My audience is a fraction of Business Week's. The only avenue I could think of for changing the rhetorical climate was to try to reach the reporters who cover the Lindens, and change their views. Even that is a Hail Mary play; I'm not terribly optimistic about the results. But I care a lot about the ways in which people reason about social software, so I couldn't just do nothing.

[Mark Wallace]

I hear you, Clay. The amount of BS surrounding the resident number, on all sides, is just appalling. But please don't paint all journalism on the matter with the same brush. It makes it more difficult for the message to get through.

[Clay Shirky]

@Mark, I'd be with you on that point, but for this: I haven't found anyone really digging, and I've read more articles about SL at this point than anyone except Linden's PR rep.

I've found people publishing numbers they don't know are BS, I've found people publishing numbers they *do* know are BS, and I've found people who see that the numbers don't pass the sniff test and put Resident in quotes, to cover their bases. What I have not found is anyone who can provide an answer to two simple questions: how many actual people have tried SL, and how many of them have become regular users?

No absolute statement is accurate, of course, but to a first approximation, the public explanations of SL demographics have been written either by manipulators or chumps. If you can point me to people who are writing about the answers to those questions, or are publicly pointing out that the rest of the press is wrongly reporting those numbers, I'd be happy to call attention to them.

[Mark Wallace]

"If you can point me to people who are writing about the answers to those questions, or are publicly pointing out that the rest of the press is wrongly reporting those numbers, I'd be happy to call attention to them."

Do you mean in the press? Because you've already noted that plenty of bloggers are publicly pointing out the inaccuracy of the figures and reporting on them. Anyway, here's a story in the Guardian quoting you, published before your latest VW post, I think.

"What I have not found is anyone who can provide an answer to two simple questions: how many actual people have tried SL, and how many of them have become regular users?"

I don't believe that's because no one has tried to get the answers to these questions. As you know, MMO companies are notoriously reticent about giving out these numbers. One issue is the definition of regular users. There's never going to be one definition of that term that satisfies everyone. It would be great if we could get this kind of information out of LL or anyone else for that matter, but it's just not out there. No one digs deeper than Sir Bruce, and if he can't get it, why would you expect a journalist -- most of whom are covering any number of subjects at once -- to be able to easily come up with it? Anyway, the broader research community can't even agree on what's important. Is it regular users (whatever that means), concurrency, total signups, paying customers, average usage per customer per month...? The problem is not solely with the journalists, it's with the companies and the academics as well.

And do you really want to keep calling us "chumps"? Is that the kind of discourse you want to foster around virtual worlds and social software? Is that how you hope to develop sympathetic ears among journalists? In your words: "I care a lot about the ways in which people reason about social software." Show it.

[Mark Wallace]

On second thought, there probably are people digging more deeply than Sir Bruce. Still, the numbers just aren't forthcoming, not from LL nor form anyone else.

[Mike Rozak]

By the way, in comment #5 on http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/10/03/second-life-posts-weekly-uniques/ , I pointed out an equation used to guestimate the number of SL players (excluding people that are browsing). The equation has plenty of flaws, but it's better than nothing.

[Jeff McNeill]

Of course Mr. Shirky posts on ValleyWag, a site that does not allow for open comments. Even over there, it is clear there are two sets of readers. Those who gloat at the one-upmanship, pissing contest that is the thrust of Mr. Shirky's article, and those who ask the more clear-headed question of what are the adoption rates and what do they mean.

But first, let me make the point: All this wonderful sleuthing, to reach the conclusion that journalists don't understand numbers? Hmmm. I would say that 1) duh, and 2) it just doesn't matter (and never has).

The "important" numbers go something like this:

2+ million accounts, most are less than three months old
~7% of which are ALTs
~10% of which are used to log in at least weekly, after three months

There is something strange about this misplaced diatribe, since the "damned good" investigative reporting never unearths the "real" numbers or engages with what they mean. Instead the goal seems to be an attack on media coverage which is deemed out of proportion.

Sincerely,
Jeff McNeill

[Clay Shirky]

@Mark, I mean in the MSM -- all the reporters I quoted wrongly claiming that SL had 1M+ users are from the traditional press. As I said in VW, the blogosphere is getting this right.

And numbers _are_ forthcoming form LL, but their function is camoflage, not illumination. I don't get out of bed early to write posts about private companies not publishing their numbers -- not enough days in the year for that. But what LL is doing is different -- they have created phoney transparency, with numbers that are visible, evocative, and meaningless. That is a different kind of danger than simple opacity, as people don't even know what they don't know, while thinking they know something they don't.

As for chumps, read this, from today, and grep for 'million people':
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16355252/

Alan Sipress was a chump for writing this. I know the word is insulting, but I can't really think of a more accurate one.

[Clay Shirky]

@Jeff, the story isn't that the journalists aren't understanding the numbers, it's that LL is not correcting the errors.

It may be that LL adopted Residents as an internal metric with no devious purpose involved, but the first time a reporter reported Resident as 'user' and LL didn't correct them or clarify the metrics on their site, they became a bad actor.

[Mark Wallace]

No, I'm saying the numbers you want aren't forthcoming from LL. Of course they put out numbers that make them look good.

Sipress could certainly have added a line about concurrency or something, but you have no idea how difficult it is to get that kind of thing into an article, especially when you don't have an accurate number from the company. That's what the fact-checkers you referenced in your post do: they make sure reporters aren't conjecturing about the figures. The 2 million is obviously wildly inaccurate in terms of regular users and Sipress could have tried to qualify it (and perhaps he did try, we don't know). That doesn't make him a chump.

[Clay Shirky]

@Mark, I just can't agree. I've written for the mainstream press, and I know the difference between agreeing to some inflection and presenting a lie.

We have *no idea* how many users there are in Second Life, ever or frequently. Anyone using the Residents figure as an indicator of anything real has been had, or has decided they don't care about telling their readers anything real. Either outcome is a bad one, and a journalist who lets either happen deserves criticism.

[Ren Reynolds]

I think Second Life is a great thing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t ask hard questions of Linden. SL is not going to pop if we prod it, Lindens are not going to run home and cry.

I think that Linden is disingenuous in many things that they put out. The ‘Residents’ figure and the fact that it seems to go un-corrected when mis-quoted is probably the prime example of this.

I think that in the long run that’s bad for all of us.

Why? Well journalists only hype things up for one reason – so they can tear them down. This sudden rush of luv is going hurt someone soon and I don’t want it to be Linden or the rest of the Virtual World industry, but I’d start to put padding down your shorts and tin hats on right about now if I were you.

One thing to keep in mind is that numbers are not easy. There is the Penguins and Puffins thread just below this that touches on it and there have been some good discussions here of late as to what we might count as a ‘resident’. But I remember, waaay back when MUD-DEV (a moment of referent silence please) had long discussions about what the best way to count users is – this one is going to run.

So I don’t think that Linden are alone in the hype-game. I also think that most journalists are doing a terrible job of reporting, if that it I hold them to the standards of ‘real’ journalism. Virtual World stuff is more like reading entertainment ‘news’.

I don't want to be or come over as wholly negative or not constructive in this, it just take virtual worlds terribly seriously, t'is all.

Then again, really we should all aspire to the PR standards set by Project Entropia, then everything would be just fine.

[Mike Sellers]

Jeff McNeill says:

The "important" numbers go something like this:

2+ million accounts, most are less than three months old
~7% of which are ALTs
~10% of which are used to log in at least weekly, after three months

How do you arrive at either of these latter numbers? As far as I know there is no way (outside of peering into LL's database) the number of alts -- but it's generally taken to be much higher than 7%!

Your 10% number is specious as well: since as you say most of the ~2M accounts are less than 3 months old, there is no way to say how many of them will be logging in weekly after three months.

And anyway, when it comes right down to brass tacks, you left out what is by far the most important number:

~1.8% of the 2M are actual paying accounts -- about 36,000 according to the SL economics site.

People keep shying away from this number under the bizarre assumption that some vague notion of "popularity" (still undefined, but never mind) is more important to a commercial company than is the number of paying customers. If this is so, should we also be counting as important all the people who visit World of Warcraft's website or who glance at it in the store before putting it back on ths shelf? Is that (very large) number more important than the number who assign their value to the product by paying for it? Perhaps in a world where companies do not need to consider making payroll via revenue or investment, but that's a world I don't believe exists.

For perspective, the number of paying accounts on Second Life is about 0.5% of the paying accounts on WoW; perhaps 18% of the paying accounts on EVE Online, and something less than the paying users on Puzzle Pirates. Each of these virtual worlds could easily and truthfully claim more than 2M accounts created, but they don't, primarily because the number is ludicrous and meaningless. Continuing to tout it only plays into the unfortunate combination of dissembling and gullibility that Clay is talking about.

[Peter (Newell) Haik]

Mike:

The paying users figure is not a good indicator, as it is very easy to be a resident of SL without paying a monthly tier. "Premium membership" doesn't do much for you at all these days, and many people are choosing to forgo that and just pay rent to someone else. LL is not making their money from the premium accounts, it would seem, but from island fees (which you don't have to be a premium member for) and these days the sale of L$ (both transaction fees and direct sales).

[Urizenus]

Wow, SL blogosphere has been posting about this over and over and over again. Take this post, last December, when we questioned the 100K milestone, pointing out it would be better to call it "100 dormant alts".

http://www.dragonscoveherald.com/blog/index.php?p=1065

More recently, we've had Raph, estimate around 100K regular users today (finally, a year later), and that number is endorsed by the people at Anshe Chung Studios. So from where I sit Clay is a year late and a dollar short.

But hey, I can tell you what genius study he might come up with next. Maybe Clay could take a look at the $600,000 "spent" figure, which, as we have reported does no such thing, but records something closer to dollars changing hands...

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2006/11/linden_lab_boas.html

How is it changing hands? Well, it could be dancer's tip jars, but in an informal investigation we did we came up with around 80% of it being generated by gambing -- money changing hands between the gamblers and the house (slot machines etc). Even this wasn't news to a lot of people as reported in Clickable Culture: http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/second_life_transactions_per_day_stats_rigged/

But back to the "residents" issue. So Clay comes along and states what people all through the SL blogosphere have been stating for months (at least for a year) and he looks like a genius to Dan at least, which suggest to me that although I love Dan, he's fallen into reading exclusively from the TN eggheadinfosphere. And then to top it all off, Clay selectively culls a quote saying the fake numbers don't matter, and of course the quote is from an idiot SL blogger who is a legendary sycophant.

Now, despite the obvious weakness of the "residents" numbers, I agree totally with Mark and Cory that Clay's post was not constructive in the least. We actually *do* have some idea what the meaningful numbers might be and we have discussed those as well, including an article that talks about the growth in land purchased.

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2006/12/what_is_the_tru.html

So what I'm saying is that (i) of course the "residents" number is meaningless (so what Clay is saying here is old news in spite of his selecting quote culling), (ii) that doesn't mean the bad numbers are ok, or harmless, and the Lindens whould be taken to task for it, (iii) there are other problematic numbers that he doesn't address (like dollars spent), and (iv) there are meaningful numbers that suggest SL is doing quite well thank you.

None of this is to give a pass to the mainstream media either for its constant hyping of the SL macktistics, but the blogosphere has been bitching about the mainstream media on that too. Trust me, we have.

In sum, LL should have dumped the junk numbers a long time ago, but we've all been *saying* they were junk forever, and they should stick with the meaningful numbers, which are not insane but suggest a nice healthy business model thank you. So please enough with the Shirkey fluffing. It's unseemly, and being unseemly is *my* job.

/rant

[Tateru Nino]

No, I don't call myself a demographer, or a statistician. Other people call me that, but other people call me a lot of things, not all of which are printable. :)

I keep a lot of numbers that Linden Lab publishes, and try to make something useful out of them, but one of them appears to be just plain wrong, and really the available figures don't include and can't be used to derive the sorts of numbers we're all really interested in, except in the most suggestive ways.

I chart them, and look for interesting or potentially useful trends. The signup rate for the last 14 days averages 17,705 per day, for example. I can't tell how many of those log in. One percent? One hundred percent? I can't tell you. It would be irresponsible to hazard a guess.

For me - in the absence of hard data - I find it more interesting what the press says about these numbers, whether they foolishly take them at face value, or whether they read malicious intent into them. That and the effect that those interpretations have on figures such as the signup rates is particularly fascinating, especially because it appears to run counter to what I would have believed the effects to be.

In my experience - journalists and reporters have asked me about the numbers before - nobody's interested in that. They want numbers that can be turned into hype or into a train-wreck. In the extremely few instances where one was genuinely interested in the actual figures (so far as we know or can approximate them) they were overridden by their editors who apparently thought the big round numbers sound better.

[Tateru Nino]

@Uri: Thanks, Uri. You demonstrate my point adroitly.

[Prokofy Neva]

What Uri said.

And frankly, Cory O. shouldn't be thanking just the inner circle, but the outer circle too who have been standing up to Clay. Clay's got some sort of agenda here, that seems to go beyond sour grapes or obsessive digging or even good, legitimate and needed journalism to something very ideological. I'm still trying to figure out what it is.

There's no two million; there's not even any one million. We've been saying that. The figure of 36,000 plus actual land owners, and the people they support to do various things which now is estimated to something like 120,000 (it was 100,000 quite some time ago) -- these are the numbers we go with and comment extensively on and have ways of backing.

Sign-ups and try-mes may or may not be back -- as some of us were mere try-mes in the dbase for a year before *we* came back.

But Clay pounding on this is what is now the thing people should be looking at. Why? If there isn't a million right now, well, there will be soon enough at the growing rate. And if it is only 100,000, why don't they count? And why can't some of the many other ways we've offered to assess the meaning and significance be accessed in a more serious way?

Where was this kind of scrutiny on WoW's 7 million? Didn't they expel numerous farmers and bots and alts?

I'm still tending to believe that Second Life's biggest crime here isn't having a bogus 2 million; it's not being a game.

[Hellinar]

Mike S.> People keep shying away from this number under the bizarre assumption that some vague notion of "popularity" (still undefined, but never mind) is more important to a commercial company than is the number of paying customers. <

Focussing on the subscription numbers would be a hefty distortion in the other direction. SL is not primarily in the business of selling subscriptions, 70% of its income comes from selling virtual land.

If the only people in SL were the 36K subscribers, I doubt they would be selling anything like as much land. I’d argue that the big spenders buy land partly to accommodate the non-subscribers. So non-subscriber numbers are an important part of the business analysis. Trouble is, we don’t know how much of the non-subscriber number is significant. Not the 2 million for sure.

The hundred thousand who spend a least a few L$ in a month are likely significant to those buying land for commercial purposes. Even tougher to get a handle on are the people buying land for social purposes. The two or subscribers that are a core of a large group of non-subscribing friends and relations. How you would estimate the size of that beats me.

All the hype about making money in SL, is downplaying the portion of people who go there to spend money. I believe there are an awful lot “idle rich” in SL. When you can buy an acre of land for $100, and a fine yacht for $10, a lot of people can aspire to an upper class lifestyle they don’t have in their everyday world. But, as we all know, that works best if there is an “average to poor” mass we can be richer than. I think a unknown chunk of the non-subscribing masses performs that social function.

Focussing on paying subscribers would be a distortion in the other direction. Like only counting upper middle class and higher in the US population. And it would underestimate Linden’s potentials for land sales, which is their main business income.

Postscript. A few people have made some similar points while I have been writing, and cooking my dinner. But the emphasis on the social function of non-subscribers is I think still worth making.

[Clay Shirky]

@Urizenus, you say "In sum, LL should have dumped the junk numbers a long time ago, but we've all been *saying* they were junk forever..."

We haven't *all* been saying that -- reporters at, inter alia, Business Week, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, and CNN have been saying quite the opposite.

You have in mind, I think, a model where, so long as the people who care deeply about virtual worlds know that the numbers are junk, then nothing more needs to be said.

I am working on a different model, where the press telling the _casual_ reader that there are two million people using Second Life is the problem. I've never claimed that other people aren't calling out the same manipulation by the Lindens -- the more the merrier in that department -- but I am saying that whatever has happened in the SL blogosphere to this point simply hasn't worked, because the bogus numbers are still very much in circulation. Whatever message it is you think you sent to the Lindens looks like it was never delivered.

[Nobody Fugazi]

Geez. If reporters can't read - well... the numbers demonstrate superflous knowledge. Sure, maybe LL could call the accounts something else (like...umm... accounts), but it is just a little too convenient to beat on LL for 'not correcting the numbers'.

It should be much easier to beat on the journalists who have screwed up. Clay has done this. Do I like the style? No. Is Clay saying it as it is? Mostly. Is Clay pointing out that the blogosphere has been more accurate than the mainstream, thus giving credit where credit is due instead of saying that the blogosphere has been ineffective?

Next up, SecondLife has WMD. 2 million accounts want no taxes. Film at 11. Spread the news and wait for the retractions.

[Mark Wallace]

"Anyone using the Residents figure as an indicator of anything real has been had, or has decided they don't care about telling their readers anything real."

That's total bullshit, and it's anything but helpful.

Also, the message has definitely been delivered to the Lindens, by me in person, among many other people. That doesn't mean they've taken it to heart. In fact, though, it's largely down to our persistence on this issue that they now release as many numbers as they do. You can call us chumps, but journalists have contributed greatly to the fact that we have access to half the demographic and economic data on SL that's now out there. LL didn't just volunteer it, you know. But I suppose that's immaterial, since when you started posting about this you couldn't even be bothered to drill down into the SL Web site to find the numbers that *were* there. Two weeks ago you were baying about only having a "last 60 days" login number. Yet Linden Lab has been reporting 7-, 14-, 30- and 60-day numbers *for months*. By your own logic, then, you clearly don't care about telling your readers anything real. Or were you just had? Or maybe lazy? Whatever it is, it's gotta be better than being a chump.

Anyway, this is all Dan's fault. "Dirty little secret"? Give the tinfoil hat back to Prokofy, Hunter! If I ever catch you in New York again I'm going to personally not buy you a drink. For a minute, anyway ;-]

[csven]

I read the article and noted two things.

First, after reading the article, I personally got a sense that someone who made some claims a decade ago got burned and is now so skeptical about even the possibility there might *actually* be an "Immanent Shift in the Way We Live®" that it's effectively impossible for him to conceive of it now. That may not be the case, but that's what I took away.

Second, that popping the hype balloon (which so many of us had previously discussed, as noted) seemed somehow to vindicate that position, and as such, seemed somehow personal. That bothered me. Again, that may not be the case, but after reading it that's the impression I had.

Consequently, while much of what was written was old news to many of us, I had a mixed reaction to the piece. On the one hand, I was glad to see the numbers being scrutinized by someone with a large enough audience to *maybe* get some attention. But on the other hand, the motivation I perceived as being behind the piece left a bitter taste in my mouth. And beyond that, the reaction from people who I believe should have known this all along has been pretty distasteful as well. By all means, hold LL and MSM accountable. I'm one of those who has been pointing out these very same things on any number of marketing blogs, so I have no problem with that. However, I agree with Mark in that the way it's being handled now by those inside the greater community is unfortunate. I have no idea from where the animosity I sense is coming, and I'm not sure I care to know.

"an informal investigation we did we came up with around 80% of it being generated by gambing -- money changing hands between the gamblers and the house (slot machines etc)."

No surprise to me, but it's good to hear I was on the right track when I made that comment over on CC.

[Andy Havens]

FYI: Here's what Sipress said about SL's users:

"In Second Life, where nearly 2 million people have signed up to create their own characters and socialize with other digital beings, the virtual economy is booming, with total transactions in November reaching the equivalent of $20 million... Last month, people converted about $3 million at the Lindex currency market."

Emphasis mine.

Didn't we just decide, a couple posts ago, that what Linden is calling, "Residents" actually, in fact, equates to "sign-ups?" Not "users" or "accounts" or "citizens" or "regular loggers-on," but people who had, as Sipress said, simply, "Signed up?"

So... "2 million people signed up." If that means they checked, "I accept" on the click-wrap and started the download, I think Sipress makes a true statement.

The rest of his article is pretty interesting and talks about (rather than penises); IP rights, virtual real estate law, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, copybot, 3D mapping as it applies to VR, a bit of RMT history, and has a quote from U.S. Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner's visit to SL where he spoke about "the eventual emergence of an international law of virtual worlds."

I've read a bunch on SL, too. And, yeah... there's a lot of chump-stain out there. But this? This is a decent article for the non-grognards out there. It touches on a bunch of points that we regularly get hot-and-heavy about here, and does so in a way that isn't creepy-stupid.

Just my 3-cents.

[Jerry Paffendorf]

I just wrote a much longer, more emotionally charged comment that I'm going to sit on over night and see if I still want to post. But here's the image I have in my mind right now:

Dan and Clay are at some conference giving a talk called "Why Second Life Sucks" (Dan's wearing his World of Warcraft baseball hat and Clay is wearing an "I'm blogging this" t-shirt, or something like that), and as they describe what SL is, what it aspires to be, and what the current bottlenecks are, 80% of the people in the room think, "Oh my god, that sounds like the most interesting thing ever. As soon as they fix the interface and make it easy to find things I'll have to go try that out," and the other 20% log in from their laptops and start making avatars.

[Cael]

@Jeffrey:

After the download completes, so does the conference but the three per cent of those who managed to download and got through making an avatar without giving up in frustration boredom finally venture out of the green line to be accosted by a ginat furry fox with breasts and an enormous penis.

Now, finally, they can see what Second Life is all about.

[Prokofy Neva]

It really is surprising that despite having MORE information and being pointed repeatedly to the economics stats page he ignored in the first round of his articles, Clay Shirky is now backsliding and acting as if he doesn't have this information again. Huh?

And Ren, you really have no excuse, either. How can you be writing a blog at this late date in the 3rd thread on this discussion, saying this:

"What is the definition of Resident?
How many paid accounts are there?

If we are going to take all this virtual stuff seriously then is it not important enough for us to get actual facts like this and not work on things issued by PR firms. As SL is advertised as somewhere to do business, is there no requirement under US law for facts to be given to the market? If not, why not? "

Resident is defined as sign-ups. I've mentioned this repeatedly on several threads and other blogs. I've referenced the Lindens' own statements saying that it is not a number including incomplete sign-ups (mess-ups) or those under discipline/expelled. Is this a real number? No. But they explain their definition very clearly, so all subjective associations with the word "resident" have to be dropped. They are not people who live there. They are only people who sign up.

Next, if the 30-60 day numbers don't work for you, and Tateru claims (without a whole lot of evidence) that they are busted, well, why would they mean that much ANYWAY? They strike me as really a poor source of knowledge given the velocity of churn, the huge amount of press coverage, and the enormous growth.

And Ren, I personally have stated over and over again that the paid accounts are: 36,000. More by now. Those numbers are on the economic statistics page. I don't see any reason to question those numbers. That figure has increased from 6,000 to 36,000 as I've written on my blog now in about 3 threads over and over again.

What more does it take? There aren't the 2 million or the 1 million. There is the 100,000. Cut off the foam, then, and look at that figure. It's a figure 10 times what it was a year ago -- probably more. Can't that tell you anything?

And I'm going to ask once again, since you've granted yourself the ability to keep trotting out indignant questions that have already long since been answered, where were you when these sorts of facile numbers were given out about WoW or Eve Online?

Can you point me to the hard-hitting, narrowed-eye cynical reporting that you did when Eve said it reached 100,000 online -- including my non-used account?

Can you show me how you dissected the figures for WoW?

And I say all this not as a person who AT ALL buys the 2 million fakery and has worked hard to supply the public, both on my own blog and on the Herald, more real numbers based on land ownership and rentals figures.

I say it as a person who suspects something is "up" when this much zeal converges on a topic -- Clay doesn't like the press gulping down whole fake numbers like 2 million; well, I don't like his refusal to take the real numbers people like me ARE giving him, as small as they are, and contemplate what they mean. It's absurd. It means that he's not acting in good faith on this.

I've never seen such emotional and tendentious posts on this supposedly dry and academic review. "For the Win" we're told in the first thread. "Help out Shirkky" we're told in the next as if there is some national emergency where all hands must come on deck. Now we're treated to a gushing fanboyz' "damn good" yet again about Shirky though he is just recycling his same rhetorical points now without any new insights.

Really, what's up with this?

[Prokofy Neva]

As SL is advertised as somewhere to do business, is there no requirement under US law for facts to be given to the market? If not, why not? "

This sounds pretty preposterous. Aren't you in the U.S. yourself, Ren? What agency or power could *force* companies to give "facts"...as determined by whom? It's a free market and companies are free agents to write any tripe they like. A whole array of forces then battles that in the form of consumer groups, community associations, the media, Congressional oversight, etc.

What facts did LL not give? They put out a figure of the total number of people who signed up. .They called such persons misleadingly "residents". Well, it's their game, they can call them tuna fish if they want to.

We've all come forward and explained this -- after all, we were the ones debunking this on blogs ages ago ourselves.

The round of criticism then prompted people to point the critics to the Lindens' own economic statistics page where it has a number that some of us fought long and hard (a year!) to be published (it was considered "proprietary").

In meeting after meeting, in lobbying group after lobbying group, in email after email, I was the one constantly, over and over again, asking the Lindens to come clean with us and tell us HOW MANY PREMIUM ACCOUNTS. Long before Clay Shirky got on this -- YEARS ago -- I recognized this as the only valid number -- everything else was subject to flaming out. Of course, there is a small but hugely vocal minority that never got land since beta and live in sandboxes and constantly bark about how "you don't need land to have fun" and imagine that all basic accounts coming in like them will also want to learn to build and script (they don't). But other than this tiny figure, most people who come in and stay beyond the four hours or 30 days are on land, one way or another. So that's the figure to watch.

It's because I and other land owners kept hammering on this inworld that you even see this figure of 36,000 FINALLY on the statistics page. We LONG AGO were fighting the phonyness of the front-page statistics.

And for this, I got slammed as wearing a tinfoil hat? Hell no.

[Just a thought]

Premium accounts are not the only thing that matters - if you honestly think so you need a reality check.

[Prokofy Neva]

This isn't a discussion about your mom not being able to justify a recurring fee on her credit card for $9.95 each month, just a thought, it's a different discussion. It's not about the relative worth as citizens of basics or premiums.

It's about how to cut through the fog of play -- the 2 million trymes and sign-ups that led nowhere and don't retain. The only way to cut through this is to look at some other metric to try to examine growth and well-being.

And there, only premiums matter for the purposes of finding REAL NUMBERS. They show who really shows up and keeps logging on because they have property. Few people will let a bill keep recurring for $9.95 each month if they aren't logging on.

From there, a significant number of us have independent come to the same conclusion: 100,000 or so real people really logging on, because those 36,000 sustain others on their land as renters or club-goers or shoppers.

[Cory Ondrejka]

Prok,
Amusingly, I thanked Mark thinking I was looking at the first (second?) Clay thread that had an scary amount of emotion thrown in on both sides and then noticed that we were on thread three. Teaches me to log in early the day after Christmas when I'm still trying to finish opening all the presents that Uri sent me.

c

[Mark Wallace]

Cory, you didn't get the goldfish we sent along?

[Nobody Fugazi]

I sent cheese, Cory. Hope it made it past the killer watermelon. :-)

[Andy Havens]

Where does one get all this swag? I want a goldfish. And cheese. And a killer watermelon.

And I want a tinfoil hat. All I got for Christmas was my two front teeth (+3 to s**t eating grinning).

[Scott Jennings]

In this week's Time, which focused on social software, the "Second Life has 2 million users" meme was repeated over, and over, and over.

Whether or not "that number has any meaning" (wow, did anyone use the same logic during the 2000 Florida recount?) you have the most popular newsmagazine in America publishing this number as fact.

[Matt Mihaly]

Mike Sellers wrote:

For perspective, the number of paying accounts on Second Life is about 0.5% of the paying accounts on WoW; perhaps 18% of the paying accounts on EVE Online, and something less than the paying users on Puzzle Pirates. Each of these virtual worlds could easily and truthfully claim more than 2M accounts created, but they don't, primarily because the number is ludicrous and meaningless.

Just to be fair here, Three Rings/Puzzle Pirates made a big deal out of hitting 2M accounts created. They had it on their front page for awhile and issued a press release, etc. Linden isn't the only one who trumpets registered users as something particularly meaningful.

Scott wrote:

Whether or not "that number has any meaning" (wow, did anyone use the same logic during the 2000 Florida recount?) you have the most popular newsmagazine in America publishing this number as fact.

Don't worry Scott. Not only does that number not have any meaning (except in situations when it does), but the fact that Time would publish it is, in and of itself, final proof that the number does matter, except when it doesn't matter or when the number has a meaning it shouldn't have.

--matt

[Iao]

Visiting the 'Second Life' World: Virtual Hype?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6682433

NPR has been as guilty as anyone in over-hyping SL, but I heard this story on the radio a couple of days ago and it seems they have taken off the blinders (at least partially).

If the main issue is Linden fudging, or even outright lying, about their numbers, I really think only mass media has the resources to put that message out and make changes.

If, however, the problem is the media not doing any research on those numbers, I think this NPR story is starting to address that.

A couple of quick quotes from the article:

"The community's creators say the site has more than 1.8 million members, but that overstates the reality. In fact, many members who come to try out the game leave, never to return again."

"Mark Glaser the editor of PBS's online blog Media Shift, says that at any given hour, there are usually less than 20,000 people inside Second Life."

Of course, this link isn't a direct transcript, so if you don't listen to the story you will miss the story of the judge who gave a speech and had to contest with giant purple bears and bricks falling from the sky, or Ben Folds promoting the BMG store to a grand total of 25 people.

Maybe not the last breath for SL, but it does seem like some in the press have begun wearing their shades so the "future" of SL doesn't seem so damn birght.

~iao

[blaze@blaze.com]

Who's going to puncture the dirty little secret that Terra Nova has mad virtual world envy?