Linden Lab just started publishing new ads on YouTube for Second Life, one of which you watch here. (“It represents one variation of many that are being tested”, the company tells me.) Screengrabs of it throughout this post.
It’s part of a new and aggressive marketing campaign for Second Life — basically the first one in nearly 4 years.
To get more context and strategy, read my latest interview with Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager and CTO Philip Rosedale below!
Inside Project Zero: Brad Oberwager & Philip Rosedale on Marketing & Designing a New User Second Life Experience
Project Zero is not simply a cloud streaming option for existing SL users. It’s tightly integrated into an aggressive marketing plan with a growing budget, and a completely revised first-time experience that discards the “Welcome Island” model that’s basically existed since 2003.
In my recent conversation with Linden Lab heads Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale, we explore their vision for growing the user base with Project Zero — and why the company is re-starting external marketing of SL for “the first time in four years”.
Yes, you read that right. In the nearly four years since Oberwager took over leadership of Linden Lab, the company hasn’t much marketed Second Life:
BRAD OBERWAGER: You know the adage, “I know half my marketing is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” When I came in, I asked [Linden staff], and they didn’t know. Turns out it was 100% wasted.
So since I couldn’t figure it out, I turned off all the marketing and it didn’t have an impact on revenue or any of the financials, other than we weren’t spending the money on marketing.
But it stopped, obviously, it stopped bringing people in. It’s just that the marketing wasn’t bringing people in that were converting into dollars. So we kept it [off] until we had an ROI we could prove out.
And it took us a lot longer. I figured it was going to be six months to turn marketing back on. It went a lot longer.
Now, with Project Zero and with different partnerships we have now, the ROI makes sense for money in the marketing. So starting small, $1,000 a day, it’s going to go up fast.
So today [late December 2024] was the first day that we’ve spent a dollar on marketing in three years, nine months. And this is going to be great for all the creators, all the communities. We’re going to start driving people back in only where we know where we’re driving them, and we have different partnerships with different community bases, to start sending people not to just where we want them, but we’re testing sending them to other places. We’re going to test with Project Zero.
So come midway through the first quarter [of 2025], we should be on a much higher run rate for marketing than we’ve ever had before. It makes good sense for everybody. We’re going to drive more revenue to the creators. The way our whole model is set up, we do well when other people do well; we are not able to monetize if other people in our world are not doing well. We don’t really sell anything directly to anybody other than land, and even that, you only buy land from us if you’re getting the benefit of it…
Next: Redoing the old first-time user experience, and partnering with MadPea games.
Breaking the Old First-Time User Experience
Philip Rosedale: Like Brad was saying, we’ll be able to experiment really aggressively in the first quarter on things like completely changing the welcome experience, because our hope is that we can try now — this is another thing we’ve been thinking about — how all the historical welcome experiences, and in fact, all the ones we have today are they’re presumptive of a pattern that we’re going to try BREAKING. We’re going to try not doing this anymore.
The [original] idea is that you get acclimated and learn to use the software in a three dimensional area that is meant to be a sort of a training ground for the software, right? Like you can remember going all the way back to that first welcome isle that I wrote, pretty much the same one that Firestorm uses today. If you come in through the Firestorm area, it’s basically the same thing as what we had in 2004.
So our [new] thinking is that if we completely redo the UI, we can do the tool tips in-app, in-browser, tutorials that one much more traditionally sees with games. We can do rewards for learning parts of the UI, that kind of stuff. And then we can shift to a model like Brad was saying, where we just let people onboard anywhere in the world…
One of the things we think we’re kind of doing wrong is that, [a new user] might have heard that Second Life is a cool place to go to listen to live music or something. But you’re presented with an experience for the first hour or so, which is maybe you wandering around a weird little garden doing a bunch of orienting experiences, right?
But in doing that, you’re looking at like a visual treatment that may not be one, not representative of Second Life, and it may not be even vaguely related to what you’re looking for.
So what we want to try instead is to say, “Look, are you a computer programmer? You want a sandbox… Listen to live music? We’ll put you in a live music venue right now.”
And then, because we’ve got this new UI [in Project Zero], we should just hold ourselves to the standard that you don’t need to go through a welcome area to get to that experience. We’re just going to load you in and say, “Hey, do this. This is this, and get started, you know..”
Wagner James Au: So you’ll have an experiential or thematic menu of, you know, “I want to build”, “I want to go to parties”.
PR: Yep. That’s one of the first things we want to try as we’re thinking about as we start changing the UI. How do we start people in? We’re thinking, OK, we know what the five or six top destination experiences that people actually want to have, and they’re a pretty different mindset.
“Build a house” is another one that you touched on earlier, right? Like, “I want to build a home for myself.” Okay, cool, we’ll put you into one of those neighborhoods. You’ll be standing on a street, you know, trying to buy houses. Or if you want to go to a party, we’ll put you in a party.
That’s the kind of stuff we think we can now do [with Project Zero], but it’s all about the cycle time. Brad sent me this great article from a friend about all the different ways of analyzing failure in software companies. And it was a reiteration of the thing that [Marc] Andreessen said before, which is: you want to fund a company based not on how smart you think it is, but on how many shots on goal it’s going to get before it dies. And you want that number to be like five, and if that number is one, you just don’t invest because nobody’s that smart.
So I think part of the problem with our welcome area experiments, for example, is that our cycle climb is so slow, because of all the considerations and the way the software is designed, and it’s just so brutally slow… Brad and I are just extremely hardcore internally about saying: we have to get to regular software startups’ cycle time on this stuff, which is days between adjustments.
WJA: I think even just being able to jump instantly into a sandbox, which for the Minecraft generation, I think they get to be, “Oh, I can do all kinds of way more cool shit than I can do Minecraft, and it’s super high res, and, you know, there’s a group in [the sandbox] already futzing around making cool shit.” And, you know, that seems immediately compelling.
PR: Yep, that feels like one of the five or six options that we want to give people.
Why Linden Lab Partnered With MadPea Games
BO: One of the things that a lot of people do is they play games in Roblox. Roblox considers themselves a metaverse like ours, a lot of the [user base] plays games. Are you familiar with [SL game developer] MadPea?
WJA: Yeah.
BO: So MadPea has a lot of experiences, a lot of games. Our Christmas gift to all the residents, and, I mean, everyone — MadPea has an unlimited subscription. So we bought it for everybody… we’re giving six months worth of MadPea to any resident who wants it. And it’s not one of those gimmicks where you sign up, you get six months for free, and then at the end of the six months [you got to pay for more]. It’s not that, it’s wide open to everyone.
And at the end of six months, we’ll evaluate. We may keep it like that. And because we have this partnership [with MadPea], why not try to send 20% of our people that we’re marketing to, to a MadPea designed welcome area? Let them try to figure out how to do it.
So part of the deal is, [MadPea is] gonna build a welcome area. We’re gonna send a bunch of [new] people there. My guess is they outperform us… Certain ads, they’ll get the right people that work well with [MadPea games], and then we’ll put more money into that, and then those people are going to want to get dressed. They’ll buy stuff from creators. That’s my hope.
PR: And like Brad says, we’re talking to these big [SL] content providers. So [MadPea] is an example of a game on a HUD right. Both as a way of like Brad just said, let’s just streamline getting [new] people into those experiences, the ones that want it.
And then we’re looking at their technology and saying, Okay, how do we make this actually accessible to a normal person? Because in the case of MadPea, their HUDs are pretty good… We gotta make [the SL tools] something that a modern developer would actually be willing to tinker with, which we are not at right now.
Thanks to New World Notes For This Post.
Have A Great Weekend From All Of Us At Zoha Islands/ Fruit Islands/ And The Nocturne Project coming soon!
