Badie05
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Second Life on its last life
Lynden Lab’s Second Life virtual world was so popular that people were investing in virtual real estate and making significant sums of money off their investments. This was in the glory days last year and in 2006. Now the virtual world is bleeding users fast, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to hemorrhage the problem.
February 2007, Reuters reported that real estate prices in Second Life had climbed to undesirably high levels and that land speculators could suffer when more is created. Lynden Lab’s virtual world was so popular that people were looking towards virtual real estate as a smart investment. In fact, Second Life was starting to imitate the real estate climate in Sydney, with high property prices and a fear that cheaper properties being developed on the outskirts in large quantities could significantly damage to the market rather than help struggling families.
Website Alexa, which monitors website traffic, shows a significant decline in visitors to Second Life over the past year. It’s now outside of the top 1,700 websites in Australia, the United States, Great Britain and Canada (outside of the top 2,000 in some), and over the past three months alone has dropped six percent in its global reach and 18 percent in its traffic rank. Having had an almost 0.08 percent reach this time last year, it’s now dropped down to under 0.03.
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