Those very Virtual Customers in Virtual Worlds......

Wagner James Au feels that the above graph shows the end of the growth of World of Warcraft, not sure thats what it shows - the line seems fairly straight growth except for the release of the Burning Crusade in Jan/Feb....another few months before its clear methinks.

More amusing is his post re Second Life advertising goodness: - how many customers do you think those high profile Second Life launches get

So how does anywhere from 6,454 to, well, zero, grab you?

That’s the spread of weekly visitors to real world corporate sites in Second Life, according to SL demographics expert Tateru Nino. (who analyses this for James)....

....In the three weeks since she began, the highest weekly total belongs to Pontiac, which hosts a kind of virtual autobody island where Residents can customize their cars...followed by a site for Showtime’s The L Word (4,687), where regular events are held on a recreation of the show’s main locations; IBM has an expansive site which includes an open source coding tutorial lab (4826).

The low end, however, is littered with some of the world’s most prestigious corporations and brands. Despite entering Second Life to much mainstream media fanfare, companies like Sears, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Coca Cola, Reebok, Coldwell Banker, and Calvin Klein have so far failed to attract even 500 weekly visitors each (during Tateru’s headcount, at least)— some of them far less. For comparison’s sake, there are currently about 400,000 Residents who log into SL on a weekly basis; about a million have logged in over the last month.

One would assume, guessing what it costs to put something on Second Life, that this is several (tens of?) thousand pounds per customer acquired....

(Ah....a mere 2 weeks on, the news has gone mainstream....)