Virtual World Population: 50 million by 2011
When technology analyst group Gartner recently asserted that "80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 companies) will have a 'second life', but not necessarily in Second Life" by 2011, a lot of people jumped the gun and assumed 8 …
Context & Ripple Effects
Gartner's forecast lands at the peak of the Second Life news cycle: in March the BBC put virtual worlds' economy at $1bn, and two weeks ago TechCrunch noted European users now outnumber Americans in Second Life three to one — evidence the audience is real but shifting away from its US early-adopter base.
The analyst firm's careful phrasing — 80 percent of active Internet users and Fortune 500 companies will have a 'second life' by 2011, "but not necessarily in Second Life" — is doing double duty. It endorses the category while explicitly declining to crown Linden Lab's platform as the winner, which is where most of the corporate experimentation has concentrated so far.
First-order effects
- Fortune 500 brands that built Second Life islands on hype now have an analyst-grade justification to keep funding them — but also a warning that their investment may outlive any single platform.
- Linden Lab gets the halo without exclusivity: Gartner legitimizes demand for virtual presence while signaling that rival platforms can capture much of that projected population.
Second-order effects
- Platform startups respond to the 'not necessarily in Second Life' hedge by attacking distribution rather than scale — lighter, embeddable virtual spaces (the model behind TechCrunch's same-day MyMiniLife coverage) aim to reach mainstream users where they already are instead of asking them to migrate.
- Marketing agencies and virtual-world service vendors gain a forecastable market to sell against, converting one-off brand stunts into recurring presence-management contracts.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, virtual identity fragments across many small interoperable spaces rather than consolidating in one destination — making the durable business layer whoever provides the tools and hosting, not whoever owns the world.
- A user-base projection this broad invites the next cycle of measurement scrutiny: when 2011 arrives, the gap between 'having a second life' and actively using a virtual world will be the number everyone argues about.
The trend: Virtual worlds are transitioning from a single hyped destination into a distributed feature of the consumer web, with analysts betting on the category rather than any one platform.