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.
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