Hilarious yet fascinating blog post about the energy consumption of an avatar in Second Life… courtesy of the sciam.blog. It says a lot about general household usage of electricity in the United States in general. And even more about the waste of time nonprofits are going to spend on Second Life should the nonprofit marketers have their way.
Come on people, get off the Second Life bandwagon, it’s a long-term loser. Think about it — it’s a 23 MB download plus it helps to have a 3d video card. Do you realize that the minimum requirements and the introduction of a significantly different user modality alone will put a cap on the long-term growth of Second Life? Let’s not even mention the possibility that a virtual world’s participants are almost more fickle than social networking users. And on top of all that, we’re talking about trying to extend our marketing reach to people who are not particularly technical, our donors. And Second Life has what? 65,000 users? That’s a small audience.
You know, there are even larger virtual worlds besides Second Life in the video gaming sector. Everquest hit 550,000 users in 2005 and it’s dropped steeply since then. Wasn’t Everquest so addictive at one point that people called it Evercrack? Looks like the drug (eventually) wears off. Take a look at Second Life’s subscriber chart on Swivel. Looks pretty good right? Now scroll down a bit and take a look at many of the subscriber growth curves for other MMORPGs out there. Notice that downward curve at the end of almost every graph there? If a MMORPG can’t grab people’s attention for more than 3-5 years, what about Second Life? The jury is out of course but the odds are not good. And we’re talking about a smaller user base in absolute numbers. I just don’t see where the case for Second Life has been made for nonprofits.
No one seems to factor in the delays many nonprofits experience in adopting new technologies. Frankly, by the time most nonprofits look into getting a Second Life avatar and storefront, the Second Life community will be in decline. I can just see a wasteland of nonprofit storefronts in Second Life four years from now.
It’s a shame too but I feel that if the hype keeps continuing, many nonprofits are going to feel burned by bad advice should they get on the Second Life bandwagon and ignore the rest of the best on the Web right now. The best bet is to steer nonprofits to initiatives they’re good at, slow burns, that is, long-term, low-intensity media pushes that require little management interaction. Why do you think direct mail is still such an integral part of a nonprofit’s fundraising efforts? I’ll let you all figure out what new Web technologies will work in this “slow burn” context.
Loading ...
I don’t think it has to be one or the other; not-for-profits can and should still experiment with new technologies and techniques, so long as the costs and risks are kept low. Investing all your fundraising or marketing cash in Second Life would obviously be insane, but trying out a few emerging approaches means you’re in a better position to build on the ones that turn out to be effective.
There are also secondary benefits on being first in – the media loves a new story.
I think there’s no doubt that Second Life should be left to the hungry, small nonprofit looking to make a splash. That’s already being done. Yet, so much of the marketing of Web 2.0 is one size fits all, so generic that it’s inevitably bad advice for most nonprofits. For instance, I love the advice that you have to have a “buzz director”. So you’re telling me that a nonprofit should staff up just so they can respond to blogs, etc. Wow, where’s the ROI for this?
However, it’s the long-term cap on growth that’s the real problem. You can’t really build an marketing campaign in virtual communities (3d or otherwise) unless you’re able to execute meaningful media projects in a short timespan and agile enough to exit when that community gets stale. There’s not many nonprofits that can do that.
I know we want nonprofits to be early adopters but so few of them have the business acumen to understand how to apply metrics to their marketing efforts and make the right choices in the REAL world much less a virtual one. How do you expect them to be able to do this with Web 2.0? I suggest you go back to the Swivel charts and try to mine the data. It’s not a good story for MMORPGs or virtual worlds unless you can warn a nonprofit that ultimately their efforts are going to be fleeting and ephemeral. (And you KNOW what the answer is going to be once you say that.)
Allen,
I’ve spent a lot of time exploring Second Life and I agree with your comments re: early adopter. But I’m not quite in the camp if “Run screaming it is a waste of time.” But it certainly isn’t appropriate for all nonprofits, but as the comment above suggests trying out a few emerging approaches means you’re in a better position to build on the ones that turn out to be effective as long as risks and costs are low.
In fact, when nonprofits ask if they should spend time exploring or be in SL, I point to the ROI. SL is still in the early adopter stages, it is a huge learning curve, and you need pretty decent computers and bandwidth. Plus, the interface can be buggy. The ROI plus time/equipment investment puts it low on the to do list for many npos.
I agree with your observation re: small org willing to make a splash – most examples so far have been dreamed up by PR agencies and getting ink … but then the novelty wears off.
So, why bother exploring it at all?
I’m not one to entrench myself in the nonprofit silo — I silo dance – I look at othe fields education and libraries ..
Well, in addition to the nonprofit activity – there is significant presence of educational institutions and libraries. The 3-D web has huge potential as an online learning platform, whether that be SL or something else. I think that the web will be a 3-d interface in 5-10 years – imagine your web browser merged with google earth and navigating web pages and content that way.
Have you read about the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative and looked at that research? Might help inform your opinions about games in the context of “good” — education, nonprofit and library activity.
You raise some interesting considerations that a non-profit should think hard about before investing staff time and money in virtual worlds.
Clearly virtual space has not yet proved its viability for fundraising purposes; the largest fundraiser to date being $40K for the American Cancer Society in July. This has not kept groups like World Vision and Save the Children from launching their own Second Life fundraisers this week.
However I would contend that there are exciting possibilities for education, awareness-raising, and membership mobilization using virtual worlds like Second Life. In my experience, much of these will be most successful where they are connected to real world and web campaigns.
For example, Camp Darfur is a simulated Sudanese refugee camp in Second Life created by activists trying to get more public attention and political action on the crisis in the Sudan and neighboring Chad. The Camp is a powerful experience for everyone who has been there, with images from actual refugee camps, links to humanitarian groups on the group, streaming video of Sudanese refugees, and even a comic book you can take away. Camp Darfur is connected to real world mock camps that are erected in public spaces all over the United States to raise awareness of Sudan.
The reality is that as the cost of computing power and broadband access continues to go down, our online experiences are going to be more and more immersive. Non-profits should stay abreast of these changes and new forms of media as ways to get out their messages and find supporters for their work. Second Life has in many ways a much lower barrier to entry than other forms of new media like podcasting, vlogging or viral video campaigns.
Also, check your facts!!!
Follow the links in this post about Second Life Statistics — you’ll see the numbers are closer to 2 million.
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/11/key_second_life.html
Oops . mean 1.2 million as beginning of Nov.
The data you cite is coming from Linden Labs and figure you cite is probably number of active users in the last six months. The earlier roughtype.com post mentioned that Phillip Rosedale who runs SL says that total number of users is roughly around 12,500 at any one time. That suggests only 1 in 100 of those users you cite are in-game at any one time. However, we can be more charitable and pick the data we’re seeing from mmogchart.com that shows up in Swivel. That’s 65,000 actives as of July 2006. Let’s double that for now — 130,000 actives. Let’s say instead of 1 in 100, we’re seeing 1 in 10 of those actives showing up at any one time.
My argument is data-driven and just plain common sense. Myspace is still (for all its warts) a probably better bet than SL at this point. The sheer numbers are there. Youtube/Google falls under the same rubric. You gotta go where the people (and their money) are.
Much of my experience in virtual worlds is derived from my earlier experiences in one of the earliest 3d communities, Alphaworld and my constant video gaming. I even ran a Counterstrike server for some time that had a small community of hundreds of players. I’m also an avid player of Battlefield 2. I usually don’t do the MMORPG thing but I’ve dabbled in it from time to time (City of Spandex, er Heroes). I think SL follows the MMORPG model but only time will tell. On the other hand, we’ve seen similar virtual communities try to last and eventually die long slow deaths. We’ve seen that happen with Friendster already.
Does the notion of an open-ended MMO title like SL mean that it will transcend the normal lifetime of an MMO? I don’t know but I don’t give it high hopes. There’s already an open-ended MMORPG out there that has been around longer than SL. It’s called The Sims Online. Much larger marketing budget, more press, every advantage that SL has — and the result? Stagnancy within 36 months. I don’t purport to know why this is but it seems to be closely tied to hardware refresh cycles. Basically, every three years is when completely new graphics and CPUs comes out that enables some other new MMORPG to give users a richer experience.
Allen,
See Koster’s post – he suggests 120-150,000 regular users. If you look at the Linden stats on frequency, you’ll see the spread. But, I don’t think it is totally a numbers game … after all nonprofits are not corporations … and we go after niche markets. Who is the audience in SL and is that who need to reach? Why are you doing a SL project? Is that the best channel for what you want to do.
Also, the big point is that the future isn’t so much as a game – but as platform.
And, with all this blather – we’re essentially agreeing!!! Except for you seem to be saying – forget it – it’s crap. I’m saying, for most it isn’t appropriate, but some it might be worth a low risk experiment depending on audience and outcomes.
Blog comments that say “I agree” are pretty dull, but… I agree. We provide services to 16-25 year olds (information and advice) and need to look for channels they are already using for communications and feel comfortable using. So yeah. MySpace and Bebo are important. And IM and mobile. We haven’t invested millions in any of these but low risk experimentation is something we need to do.
I guess I’m saying that SL will feel like crap to nonprofits that want to see their efforts last over time in a community that doesn’t eventually stagnate. Warn them that SL’s community could eventually up and move away because similar communities have had that happen to them and that this may mean the eventual rebuilding of their virtual assets elsewhere. If they can live with that, I think the table has been appropriately set.
I think experimentation is fine and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see those experiments take off. However, to those of us in the sector living in mundane-nonprofit-world it won’t cause us to add a position just to do it until serious money starts to show up.
Web 2.0 is getting beat up a bit (rightly so…)…
Allen, one of my favorite bloggers (who I only recently started to read, which is my loss), has a great curmudgeonly post on Web 2.0. (I consider Allen a fellow neo-luddite, whether or not he agrees with that characterization.) He…
Thought this might be of interest
http://gigagamez.com/2006/12/18/second-life-hype-vs-anti-hype-vs-anti-anti-hype/
second life? that nice
The Best Way To earn money is my site: http://ptcbuxsites.blogspot.com/