With all the press that Second Life has been getting, it's causing a huge increase in members, along with traffic surge. With the increased numbers has also come a growing demographic change. Like the Web itself, this self-contained virtual world is experiencing its own growing pains.
According to Hitwise, the total share of Internet searches for 'second life' has increased by 73 percent just from the previous week, with visits to Second Life from the two weeks ending on Oct. 7 more than doubling. Compared to last year, the site has increased its visits by 219 percent.
For the age of the average visitor (not necessarily participant), the week ending 9/23/06 saw that around 33 percent of the Second Life 
visitors were between the ages of 18-24 with less than 6 percent being over the age of 55. In just a month, this changed dramatically. On the week ending 10/21/06, the group over the age of 55 grew by 15.05 percent for visitors to Second Life, while the 18-24 crowd dropped by 7 percent to 25.67 percent.
What is important in all of this is whether older visitors will convert into players of the game, which could change the entire economy of the community; just like it would in the offline world.
It does make me wonder if fast growth and publicity is always good for an online company that can cause this type of change so fast, and potentially change the entire way the virtual world participates and takes action; that answer is probably about to be found out by Linden.
Traffic really doesn't matter as much as repeat traffic - the 18-24 crowd might be much happier in WoW because they can kill things.
The appeal of SL is for creating, not destroying. How that appeals across age groups is probably an interesting thing to consider.
Posted by: Nobody Fugazi | October 29, 2006 8:29 AM | Permalink to Comment