When Hype Doesn’t Work
I have just been catching up on my feeds and happened on this on Second Life from Darren Barefoot
The one on the left shows the dramatic increase in registrations over the past, with the total more than doubling to about 9.3 million. However, the chart on the right shows the number of ‘active residents’ (I think that’s users who have logged in in the last month). It’s pretty much flat. Assuming these charts are accurate, those new users are remarkably, uh, unsticky.
Essentially registrations have gone up while the number of people sticking around has remained flat. This says to me “churn”, a concept familiar to anyone who has worked with a utility or service provider. They are having to bring in more and more people to replace the hoards of folks who take one look, think “meh”, and go off and do something actually interesting.
Yes they are doing very well getting new registrations but I think if they spent more time making the service actually … um, good … then they might not need all the hype to get people to take a look. They might actually start getting some real and honest positive word of mouth from people who don’t have a vested interest in seeing it succeed.
All I am saying is a turd with added hype is still a turd.
I admit I don’t “get” Second Life, and one mans turd is another mans feast, but if these numbers are correct I think you will agree it means there is a real problem they need to solve. It’s not going to take long for those charts to start a downward trend without some pretty nimble leak fixing.
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September 8th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
I guess it all goes back to the age old adage… “Content is king”… all too often websites that look like they fell off the “turd” truck pull visitors left and right and actually keep them. Why though? I guess people would rather go blind from aqua backgrounds with red fonts as long as they find what they’re looking for? Who knows? As funny as this quote is… it’s still true.