Second Life: Europeans Outnumber Americans 3 to 1
If Web 2.0 is a bubble of hype, then surely Linden Lab's Second Life is the shiniest bubble of them all. Companies from IBM, CNet, Reuters, American Apparel, Coldwell Banker and many more have established their presence in the metaverse …
Context & Ripple Effects
Second Life entered 2007 under a cloud: back in November 2006, coverage flagged a threat to its virtual economy, even as IBM, CNET, Reuters, American Apparel and Coldwell Banker all staked out confirmed presences inside the world. The corporate land rush assumed an audience that mirrored Silicon Valley's own.
The 3-to-1 European skew punctures that assumption. The users brands like IBM and Coldwell Banker are paying to reach are not predominantly American — a demographic fact that cuts against the 'shiniest bubble' framing TechCrunch opens with, because it shows real, geographically distributed usage rather than a purely US hype cycle.
First-order effects
- The US brands that established Second Life presences — IBM, CNET, Reuters, American Apparel, Coldwell Banker — face an audience that is mostly European, making their marketing bets mismatched with who actually logs in.
- Linden Lab's growth story becomes an internationalization story, putting pressure on the company to support non-US users across its platform and its LindeX-based economy.
Second-order effects
- Corporate residents must adapt or reprice their investment: localization, European-hours events, and currency considerations move from afterthought to requirement for anyone keeping a presence.
- A user base skewed outside the US complicates how prospective entrants evaluate Second Life's reach — population counts alone stop being a proxy for access to American consumers.
Third-order effects
- If virtual worlds mature as globally distributed platforms rather than US exports, the winners will be whoever handles cross-border identity, payments and community governance — the same economic-stability questions raised when the virtual economy came under threat in 2006.
- The gap between where users live and where marketing budgets sit becomes a recurring test for hyped platforms: adoption metrics get scrutinized for composition, not just size.
The trend: Consumer virtual worlds are growing into global platforms whose user geography diverges sharply from the home markets of the corporations marketing inside them, forcing early corporate adopters to treat them as international media buys rather than domestic experiments.