Christian Renaud of Cisco Systems called for a little honesty in statistics reporting on the Virtual Worlds Blog today. While nobody is necessarily falsifying numbers, there's always a certain amount of coaching of the truth to make things seem more favorable than they really are. "Since this is still an early market without a common language, each company is reporting whatever statistics make their platform look more attractive," says Renaud. At present if one were to add together the reported subscriber base of the 44 "top" virtual worlds, you would total 465,003,915 people. The population of Canada, the US and Mexico together is about 443,230,979.
Renaud sees a need for two things: a basic taxonomy for virtual worlds, and a common market index.
Taxonomy is important because when we say "virtual worlds", we could be talking about anything. We might be talking about a chat interface with avatars, or a world simulation without avatars, or any number of things in between. Are we talking about a 3D or 2D environment? How do MMORPG's fit in? These are pretty basic questions, but if there aren't clear answers then the term "virtual world" falls apart.
A common market index naturally follows. This would involve working out a common set of metrics across all virtual worlds that they would all apply the same way. From this worlds can be compared and successes can be measured more easily. Renaud points out that more traditional advertisers are entering the virtual arena and this is the kind of metric they are keenly interested in.
The end result is a common understanding of what works and what doesn't so that we can get down to the business of properly cross-breeding these worlds. We may end up with fewer platforms, but they'll contain the best possible combination of attributes from their progenitors. The added benefit is that companies new to virtual worlds will be able to make long-term investments without as much concern over the potential demise of the platform they're investing in.
So...is there a basic taxonomy for all Internet sites, and a standard metric for measuring traffic and popularity on all Internet sites?
Not very good ones, but theres a common language and terminology, particularly with advertising.
@Prok, @Nick: of course there are some very strictly defined and controlled metrics for *some aspects* of popularity for websites. The advertising industry demanded them and after a somewhat lengthy and painful process in the late 90s these metrics are well established and accepted (with the usual grain of salt) by most professionals.
The accepted metrics only measure stuff like "impressions" and "visits", though - because that is most easily comparable. There is no way to compare the "value" of a "member", "registered user", "regular visitor" etc. across platforms as different as a company site, a e-business site, a blog, a forum ... Alas, similar metrics (members, visits, time spent online etc.) are the only ones which can be measured currently with virtual worlds.
And, while these metrics *seem* to be objective, they are not. What the marketing industry is interested in, is the effect their messages have on consumers. They expect, that an ad impression in a web browser has a certain effect on the consumer's mind - largely independent of the site's environment. This assumption might be naive but it is there nonetheless - and not completely unfounded.
The effect on the consumer's mind wich is caused by the 1 minute presence of this consumer's avatar on L-Word island, in a Kaneva lounge, in an IMVU chatroom or during an WoW raid etc. is much harder to define and to compare.
A taxonomy of worlds might help. A little. There are a few obvious categories. But there are so many REALLY different genres of virtual worlds on the market already, with more to come, that it might not be an easy task to categorize them into neat little buckets.
Its still a long way to go.