Prokofy gives me his take on CSI:NY Episode regarding metrics. Now I will give mine.
Wayne Porter has some SL CSI:NY metrics, but they are merely taken from the Lindens’ own pages, and don’t look like anything new, not even the “baby avatar” increase –
Correct. Exactly. DId I allude otherwise?
and I don’t know where he even gets 50,000 concurrent as I was watching assiduously, refreshing and keeping a record, and I actually saw it go to 41,000 then down to 38,000 over 3 hours. To be sure, a few days later it crept up to 56,000. Sales of Lindens are brisker, and went up to a whopping L$70 million today, but that’s to be attributed to Halloween.
What was the rate of your refresh? Was it consistent? Did you take any breaks?
The real numbers to look at for CBS and the Sheep are their actual sales sites, shop.onrez.com and the special CBS site
— which I can’t even find in Google right now.
What is your background- out of curiosity? There are a wide range of metrics to look at and if cookies were employed in tracking far more accurate ones. Sales on OnRez? If you want to go deep into this I am happy to do so. While that is an interesting metric, the total dollars are not huge. Far better types of data in a properly configured system would be more valuable to CBS.
I think it was clear the metrics I quote and gave counter suggestions as to what they might mean are some (quick) betters ways to measure a number of traditional 2web metrics. Some could include network class, location, medium, bounce, TOS, AVPPV, LTV, AVB, Basket Abandoment, etc, etc, .I was in-world during the show and your numbers hit around what I saw when I bothered to glance up. I quoted their metrics directly from the blog at the time…and offered what I felt would be more useful more metrics. For example:
What I said and I shall clarify:
- Total sign ups continues to climb but they are like unqualified leads. Throw it out the window unless you want to develop an attrition factor or “sleep” factor.
Summary- so what? Poor GUI, and poor indoctrination of AVs (avatars) into the complex physics and even vertigo often experienced and I can probably run an attrition rate on those numbers and the longer term “conversion” (how do we want to define it? And would be lack luster… )
- More interesting would be Change in Concurrent users per minute or login delta. Especially Login Delta of Accounts created on the Day of exposure. Login Deltas of New Avatars and Login Frequency are really two critical health metrics that must be watched.
This would be interesting just to judge the media’s impact and curiosity at large as well as grid health.
- A longer term metric of great value would be conversion of Free to Premium and also factoring in cookie duration and attrition through deletion and chace attrition to normalize. (I believe negative in September for awhile.). Frankly this is where LL really needs to work or some leadership. A 512k lump of “server space” and a tiny stipend of L$ really is NOT a compelling factor for premium pay. Start by doubling groups! Hint.
I stand by this. The “right” to hold a virtual 512m plot really isn’t that great of deal and the tiny stipend is laughable. Start with advanced communication options, perks, double the groups, Up the IM cap. I mean get real…communication is very inefficient as I am sure you are aware.
- 51k New signups is like a small baby avatar boom, although in early April and a couple of other dates post there were similiar spikes, although not as high numbers.
In the end they had a nice rush but we I think we should calculate attrition q month and give the prolonged burst q 3 months. So let’s hold our breaths. Even so prime time TV had the largest spike, there were other similar spikes prior this year without the peaks and valleys for a prolonged period.
I did not set around refreshing an agent over and over. I do not think that would even give you an accurate number. How did you do this? What was the time? Was it fairly accurate?
- Peak Concurrency of 50k. Actually nothing incredible here. I believe we saw numbers like this in September.
That was per their blog. It has been hit before, and who knows it may have hit 50k for a nanosecond.
- Grid Stability Index of 1.22. Fine. GSI, I believe, is based on open-ended scale, starting at zero (stable) and increasing as indicators show variance from a stable situation this includes both planned and unplanned outages, service interruptions, login failures, and other grid-wide performance issues.The Grid held up.
As for metrics. I have been developing my own. Some new ones that are quote interesting and telling of a mixed story. When I release them, or how- I don’t know yet.
ALEXA ANALYSIS
Let’s get some other analysis corrected.
Even using Alexa numbers to judge is ridiculous, sits use it evaluate eCPC and eCPM due to lack of better tools. I have proven, as well as other e-commerce and security experts that Alexa can be gamed. I have seen Chinese malware inflate (try to inflated they claim) the numbers. In reality I know, at least at one at one point you can you use a serious of 4-5 pcs and a couple of auto-refresh programs set to certain time and inflate the numbers easily. The same with laundered onBlur traffic, hidden iFrames, or Traffic Slams or other methods. The numbers have improved, but they are a crude thumbnail and with such a small differential (the numbers don’t bake well until you get under 20k or lower) it makes your conclusion premature.
IN GOOGLE
I have to ask which inde did you you check against and with what agent and did you use a VMware environment or were their any external changes like .hosts tampering? In terms of the now morphine “SEO” industry one sjhould understand that Google has a thousands of distributed servers (I have plumbed them using various methods- sorry no need to say hi Google) and that not only are the results and databases radically difficult in both SERP ranking, but SERP composition- e.g. media format. They are effected by the fact you are logged into a Google Service or not, Your geographic location. The time of day, random tests and other factors. While there seems to be a “cluster” of searches of SERPS on a many servers they tend to show pages or media chunks with a similar mode, still this is not always the case. Further testing under disparate conditions would be needed to make a blanket statement and test away- we would get different results based on a number of variables up to and including where,who, how, agent, time, and other variable we could never ascertain. Sometimes very similar, sometimes radically different.
This will continue as Google launches their “dark fiber and server” infrastructure play against facebook and continues to use algorithms that are guided by individual behavior and other variables and people bite into search history and that AI.
The same for Yahoo! which is launching Search Intent.
Skewing SERPS from scholarly to commercial via an ajax slider.
SLEX and STABLE
Lastly, ” Slexchange.com shows a pretty stable traffic for that range in the last month.”
Unless you audited their server logs, and it would depends on the technology they use, this is again a “Support the Troops” kind of statement. There are simply far too many ways for sophisticated games- both SEOs specialsts, botnets, rogue agents, malware, and I have even seen virtual botnets created through the use of the triple-obcuscated Action Script injected into mainstream banners that are triggered to do their work when the IP filtering attacks they use allow them to dance around US based QA teams. It happened to MSFT x2 and they had a stellar record. They have hit You Tube and they will hit anyone. This happens ALL THE TIME.
These numbers are hazy reflections, albeit better then what LL provides now for traffic (and what I am trying to solve). Their numbers are probably meant to try to wrap engagement, curiosity, etc by factoring in time, maybe activity, etc. They do a poor job of it, perhaps, like you, it is not a core competency. I have some beta success with that, and that is one place Second Life could shine if they understood these emergent metrics. Heck- properly setup systems that could take the strain would allow us to model WOM.
I find the 2L economy all together “backwards”, but that is to be expected I guess- new. However, in my eyes so many solutions are very, very clear and not that difficult to fix. I share your frustration on that part- like sand-boxing no mod scripts for security hygiene. But I don’t play politics I try to solve problems.
Thanks for posting your thoughts and the reference. What solutions do you propose?
3D social networking attention Memetic Engineering Second Life Security web2.0 Popularity: 5% [?]
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Posted in Civic Issues, Future Science, Intellectual Property, Memetic Engineering, Web 2.0 by wayne.porter on June 19th, 2008 
I am ashamed to say it took me months to puzzle that out, but it is a reality and why it still holds my fascination- among other reasons…e.g. acceleration of relationship formation, the impact of the lack of accountability, Avatar as proxy, etc, etc. The issues are multi-fold and momentous and only way to get a grasp on them is to participate. Easy to get into but a steep learning curve to gain mastery.
