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Social Research Foundation

Did you ever wonder who is in Second Life, how they interact with virtual and real-life businesses (or represent them), and whether it actually IS getting harder to find work in Second Life? We hear the results of one of the most comprehensive panel surveys of Second Life from Andrew Mallon of Social Research Foundation, with commentary by Erica Driver of ThinkBalm.

Professionals See Their Future in Second Life

by Robert Bloomfield

The Social Research Foundation (SRF) has created a panel of about 11,000 Second Life® residents, and has just released their first public survey on why the panel members are in Second Life, what they are doing there, and how their activities are changing. This was a collaborative effort, in that SRF asked a number of people (including yours truly) to add in some questions. SRF’s Director, Andy Mallon, was kind enough to provide me with the raw data (stripped, of course, of any data that would allow me to identify participants), and gave me permission to publish this preliminary writeup of the results likely to be of most interest to those who follow business and policy in virtual worlds.

My headline for this analysis comes from one of the most interesting results of the survey: people who are using Second Life primarily for professional reasons predict that they will be using Second Life more in 2009 than they are in 2008. Those who use Second Life for personal reason also see increases in Second Life use, but not as strongly. Among professionals, those seeing increased use outnumber those seeing decreased use by 4.4 to 1, compared to “only” 2.6 to 1 for personal users.

There are other results that could have also served as a headline, such as “Second Life Residents May Be More Interested in Your Brand Than You Thought,” or “Getting Harder to Find Good Paid Work—and Good Workers—in Second Life.” Read on for the details.

According to Andy, people responded so quickly to the survey — they got 1,259 responses in 4 days — that they had to cut off participation before they exceeded their budget for compensating participants. So what follows are reports from these 1,258 Second Life residents who (1) chose to become members of the panel, and (2) didn’t dally when asked to complete the survey. So take everything that follows with the caveats that might flow from these self-selection criteria.

Demographics

Gender, Age, Country

Let’s start with a look at the basic demographics here: the sample is roughly equal by gender (51% female, 49% male). This contrasts with Linden Lab’s published statistics, which show that males account for 60% of user hours. However, I think that by user count, the mix is more equal.

The average age is in the mid-30s, with 21% in the 18-21 range, 13% in the 22-25 range, 15% in the 26-30 range, 12% in the 31-35 range, 13% in the 36-40 range, 15% in the 41-50 range, and 10% in the 51-60 range, and 2% over 60. The sample is relatively young, compared to linden lab, which reports 16% under 24 (as opposed to 34% under 25 in this sample), 35% in the 25-34 range (as opposed to 27% in the 26-35 range in this sample), and 49% over 34 (compared to 40% over 35 in this sample).

Just under half of the respondents are from the US (47%), with Europe at only about one-third (32%), and the rest responding from Asia (8%), Canada (6%), South America (3%), and the Middle East, Mexico, Africa and Central America all under 1% (in declining numbers). Not surprisingly, there are more Americans and Canadians than the Linden Lab population at large, because the survey was in English.

Income and Education

The SRF data include variables for income and education, which Linden Lab does not publish (as far as I know). For household income, 48% are earning less than $50,000, 36% are in the $50K-$100K range, 13% are in the $101K-$250K range, 2% are in the $251K-$500K range, and 1% (14 respondents) were willing to devote their time to answering the survey despite the fact that they are bringing in over half a million dollars a year.

When asked about their education completed, 19% report a high school diploma, 33% have “some college,” 24% have a BA or equivalent college degree, 13% have a masters degree, 4% have professional certification (CPA, JD), 3% have a PhD, and 4% list “other.”

Second Life Experience

Now, while the panel members might be a self-selected group of Second Life residents, they are pretty engaged. 19% have been in Second Life for more than two years, another 38% from one to two years, and another 22% over 7 months. Only 20% have been inworld less than 6 months, so this is not exactly a crowd of noobs. They are also spending a lot if time inworld: almost a third (31%) are in SL for 16 hours or more every week, with the average being inworld about an hour a day.

Resident Goals

Why are these residents in Second Life? Social Research Foundation asked participants to assign a rank of 1, 2 or 3 to indicate how important each was as their reason to be in Second Life. People were free to assign a 1 (most important) to as many reasons as they wished (as they could with 2 and 3, decreasing in importance).

This chart shows the number of residents (out of 1,259) who assigned a rank of 1 to each reason. The vast majority of panel members are in Second Life for fun and creativity (1,052), and to socialize (774). Smaller, but significant numbers are inworld for more professional reasons: to network (184), conduct business and scientific research (179), to bring a real life business into Second Life (121), or to run a Second Life business (282). Again, keep in mind that people can give a rank of 1 to multiple reasons.

At risk of oversimplifying, I categorize users as ‘professional’ users if they ranked any of the last four categories with a ‘1’, and as ‘personal’ users if they didn’t assign a 1 to any of those categories. This gives a total of 458 professional users and 800 personal users. There are many other ways to categorize the data, and I am sure we will see them from SRF soon. But for now, this will have to do.

Brand Engagement The first key result of interest is that 34% of the respondents are “very interested” in engaging with brands, 51% are “somewhat interested” in doing so, while 14% are “not interested.” I have argued more than once that the problem with branding plays in Second Life (the failure of Coke, American Eagle, Nike, etc.) was partly poor planning or execution (Nic Mitham’s refrain) but also a hefty dose of brand engagement being antithetical to many residents’ reason for being in Second Life. These numbers seem surprising, to me.

However, keep in mind that this is a self-selected sample of people who are willing to answer surveys, and motivated enough to answer this one within four days. To my mind, evidence of interest in brand engagement is probably the result in the survey that is most susceptible to criticisms about the panel method. So take it with a big grain of salt. Still, those who want Second Life residents to engage with their brand may be rightly impressed that SRF was able to get 11,000 residents willing to sign up for the panel, and that over 1,200 of those responded quickly. Not bad in a world of maybe half-a-million regular users.

To get a better test of my preconception that Second Life residents wouldn’t be interested in brands, I created the following chart that splits the sample into personal and professional users (as defined above). Only 223 of the 800 personal users with “very interested” in engaging with a brand (indicated by a rank of 1 on my chart), half the number that are only somewhat interested (446), and not even double the number who are “not interested.” In contrast, about as many professional users are very interested as somewhat interested (211 vs. 199), which is four times the number who are not interested (48). So perhaps my intuition of brands being antithetical to the user experience is not so far off—for personal users.

Changes in Use of Second Life

The survey asks “overall, how has your use of SL changed in the past year?” (with the suggestion that “If you are in SL less than a year, choose a respond based on your current use of SL compared with when you started.”). 28% report that used Second Life more, 35% indicated they used SL less, and 37% unchanged.

I find these results a little hard to interpret, for two reasons. First, I don’t know what a baseline should be. With the 28% increase outweighed by the 35% decrease, that could spell bad news for Second Life, but I don’t know what Linden Lab needs to maintain strong growth (with new residents continually coming in). Also, the survey was conducted just after the summer, when we know that Second Life use tends to drop. Perhaps readers have a take on this.

We can get a little more insight by looking at specific types of activities that residents intend to engage in more and less. Note that everyone can choose as many activities they are going to engage in more of, including “other” and “none”, and as many activities they are going to engage in less of (including “other”). It might be gratifying to those invested in Second Life that the “more” responses outweigh the “less” responses, even after deleting the responses by people who are saying that “none” is what they are going to do more of. I am not quite sure what to make of this, except that those who are leaving SL say they are going to do more of nothing and less of a few things, while the ones who are staying say they are going to do more of many things.

I find it particularly noteworthy that “more” beats “less” for running a Second Life business, more is about equal to less for professional activities, and more is significantly less for running a real life business in Second Life. I take more socializing, creating and (of course) shopping, as being fairly predictable. To look at this in a little more detail, again we can split projections of use for personal and professional users.

Projections for 2009

The survey includes a similar question, which focuses on projections of overall time in Second Life for 2009. These predictions are pretty bullish. While 611 respondents expect their overall time to remain unchanged, and 179 simply aren’t sure, 352 expect their time to increase, which is more than triple the 110 who expect it to decrease.

Among personal users, 72 expect to decrease their Second Life use in 2009, while 186 expect to increase it, so more use beats less by about 2.6 to 1. In contrast, only 38 professional users plan to decrease their time in Second Life, while 166 plan to increase it, so more use beats less among professional users almost 4.4 to 1.

Bottom line: I don’t know what level of retention and growth in hours-per-user Linden Lab needs to achieve overall, but we can expect to see significantly more professional use of Second Life over the coming year, relative to the (still much larger) base of personal use.

Among personal users, 72 expect to decrease their Second Life use in 2009, while 186 expect to increase it, so more use beats less by about 2.6 to 1. In contrast, only 38 professional users plan to decrease their time in Second Life, while 166 plan to increase it, so more use beats less among professional users almost 4.4 to 1.

Bottom line: I don’t know what level of retention and growth in hours-per-user Linden Lab needs to achieve overall, but we can expect to see significantly more professional use of Second Life over the coming year, relative to the (still much larger) base of personal use.

Second Life and Primary Occupations

Now we get to a very interesting issue for those interested in the inworld economy and enterprise use: 198 of the 1258 respondents reported that they use Second Life for “any purpose related to your primary occupation.” Of the people responding yes, this use of Second Life represents less than a quarter of their time inworld. But 71 people report that over half of their time in SL is devoted to their primary job.

A follow-up question asks for details on what types of activities are being pursued in Second Life. Teaching and learning (mentioned by 114) and collaborating to get work done (86) lead the pack, with meetings close behind (81). An interesting surprise is that 70 are using SL for visualizing information in 3D — are they all architects? — and 34 are recruiting or interviewing.

One unfortunate aspect of the study is that the answers don’t allow people to indicate whether their primary occupation is in fact running a Second Life business for Second Life residents—landlords, clothing designers, etc. So it is hard to distinguish the augmentationist uses of Second Life—using a virtual world to achieve real-world goals—from the immersionist uses of Second Life—creating a business whose goals lie entirely within the real of Second Life success. Well, that is what follow-up studies are for! (Also, we might be able to make some guesses by looking at the form of wages, as discussed below).

Further good news, for those interested in inworld economies… those who are engaged in their primary occupation in Second Life expect to be spending more time on those activities inworld. 17% expect that time to increase dramatically, 34% expect it to increase somewhat, 7% expect it to decrease somewhat, 5% expect it to increase dramatically, and the remainder expect no change or don’t know.

Employment Markets

The final questions I’ll discuss are my own contribution to the survey: some questions on the employment markets.

Methods of Payment

The first question addresses how residents are paid for any work they do: in Lindens from their employers, in tips from customers (presumably in Lindens), in real currency (dollars or Euros, etc.) or not at all (if they aren’t working or are volunteering).

Each user indicated whether they received a nonzero wage in Lindens, tips or real currency, and I coded them as receiving no income if they didn’t report income in any of those three forms. Note that percentages add up to more than 100% because people can receive more than one form of income.

Among both personal and professional users, paid work is rare: only 4.1% of personal users report any form of wage income, and only 21% of professional users do so. Among personal uses, payments in Lindens from their employers (3.3%) are more common than tips (1.3%), and payment in real currency is very rare (0.6%). Among professional users, Linden payments are again most common, at 18.1%, roughly double the proportion who receive tips (9.6%). Interestingly, real currency payments are not so extraordinary for professional users (7.9%).

State of the Job Market

The last question I will discuss concerns the difficulty of finding work and finding workers. All of the 198 participants indicating that they use Second Life as part of their primary occupation were asked whether they though it was getting easier or harder to find good paid work, and whether it was getting easier or harder to find good workers. 85 residents said they didn’t know, which would suggest they are not engaged with the labor market.

The results from those who did have an opinion show that it isn’t enough just to think about the labor market as one which pits supply against demand. More people think it is harder to find good workers (77) than think it is easier (36), while at the same time more think it is harder to find good paid work (86) than think it is easier (27). 56 respondents claim that it is harder to find good workers and it is getting harder to find good paid work, far larger than those who thought both were getting easier (6). 30 thought it was easier to find good workers, but harder to find good paid work, compared to 21 who thought the opposite.

If it were just a simple supply-and-demand story, either workers would be in clover as employers bid for them, or employers would be able to get the workers they need for a pittance.

One explanation is a failure of a search mechanism. Everyone complains about the difficult of navigating search and classified, so maybe workers and employers can find one another. Another possibility is that there is a mismatch between employers’ budgets and users’ aspirations. Workers want to get paid reasonable wages, but employers are not prepared to pay them.

As an accountant, I actually suspect this is a failure of auditing, combined with the rarity of those willing and able to take on serious work in Second Life. I have argued before that Second Life wages are depressed because there are so many residents who are looking for inworld activities to engage their time. Because even relatively mundane tasks can seem novel in Second Life, there are many residents who are willing to take minimal wages for work that isn’t too onerous. However, such workers are not particularly reliable, since they are in it for fun, rather than money. Those who want good paid work must have some way of distinguishing themselves as people who have the dedication needed to deserve a hefty wage.

I think these results suggests an opportunity in Second Life for firms like Kelly Services (one of our sponsors), which essentially provide an auditing service to determine workers’ credentials, abilities and likely dedication.

Thanks again….

….to Andy Mallon and Social Research Foundation, for running this study pro bono and giving me and others a chance to contribute questions. If you have questions or comments on this analysis, feel free to pass them along to me or Andy. I will add updates to this post as Ifind time for additional analyses.