In today’s Business section, the Los Angeles Times had a technology article wondering if the Nintendo Wii could “prolong it’s winning streak” and whether it was “little more than a fad.” It’s okay, even admirable, for a newspaper to be skeptical even in the face of a runaway hit like the Wii that has sold 2.5 million consoles since November and probably a lot more if they could manufacture them.

But looking at an article in the exact same Business section about the overly hyped Second Life and one wonders what happened to the healthy skepticism found in Nintendo piece. For reasons that escape me, the Times reprinted a Financial Times story on the press-friendly 3D community that is yet another no-research, no critical thought, “Breathless reports of an Immanent Shift in the Way We Live”. The article blithely reports that “Second Life is inhabited by more than 6 million avatars (digital alter egos of players). “

Six million players? That’s a lot. Or is it? It turns out that there has been a well-published discussion for the past 6-months in the blog world about exactly how hyped Second Life’s numbers are, though you wouldn’t know that from reading the Times. From ValleyWag:

Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand. Were the press to shift to reporting Recently Logged In as their best approximation of the population, the number of reported users would shrink by an order of magnitude; were they to adopt industry-standard unique users reporting (assuming they could get those numbers), the reported population would probably drop by two orders. If the growth isn’t as currently advertised (and it isn’t), then the value from scarcity is overstated, and if the value of scarcity is overstated, at least one of the engines of growth will cool down.

There’s nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived.

And in a different ValleyWag posting they point at how so many trusted names in mainstream media were falling for the Second Life numbers ruse:

The prize bit of PReporting so far, though, has to be Elizabeth Corcoran’s piece for Forbes called A Walk on the Virtual Side, where she claimed that Second Life had recently passed “a million unique customers.”

This is three lies in four words. There isn’t one million of anything human inhabiting Second Life. There is no one-to-one correlation between Residents and users. And whatever Residents does measure, it has nothing to do with paying customers. The number of paid accounts is in the tens of thousands, not the millions (and remember, if you’re playing along at home, there can be more than one account per person. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, how many logged into St. Ides?)

Both of these postings are from last year and since that time Linden Labs, the creator of Second Life, has offered up additional usage data–showing significant growth in the number of people who have tried it out. But with churn rates as absolutely high as they are, it is misleading for a reporter to not at least put an asterisk by any figure that is not limited to people who logged in at least once in the past 30 days (which is the industry standard so to speak for situations like this). In the real world when it a city reports its inhabitants it does include people who moved out years ago or who stayed in a hotel for a night never to return or who are dead, etc. The same standard should apply to virtual residents, it’s just common sense. Saying something is inhabited by six million avatars as the Times did implies that there are six million people using the game, which is simply untrue.

It’s ironic given the criticism put on blogs that there is no editorial check and balance for factual reporting. Without proper editors whose to stop misinformation to spread like wildfire through the Internet. Yet today’s example shows a mainstream publication (the Times) producing misleading hyperbole with a blog (ValleyWag) providing the more accurate and balanced analysis.

tags: los angeles times second life

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 3:56 am by Insider and is filed under Los Angeles Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.