Linden’s Second Life Affiliates

Ciaran Laval has an article up about Linden Lab’s affiliate program. So what is that and how does one find out more? Ciaran tells in his article: Linden Lab Launch New Second Life Affiliate Program [sic]. I get the impression Ciaran thinks this is a new program. It sort of is and isn’t.

Second Life Affiliate Program

Second Life Affiliate Program

The official Linden page that explains the program is here: Second Life Affiliate Program.

They describe the program as: “The Second Life Affiliate Program is an easy and simple way to be rewarded by associating your Web site with ours. When you place a Second Life banner with a link on your Web site, you have the opportunity to make money. When a visitor clicks a Second Life link on your Web site and registers as a new Second Life Resident, you earn a flat commission for each new valid registration that you refer to Second Life made within 45 days of click through.”

If your sight draws people that may be interested in Second Life™ and not already be signed up, then this is an opportunity to make some money. You would be placing a banner or banners on your site that lead people to the SL sign up pages. If they sign up in the next 45 days, you get a flat commission. You apparently have to sign up to see how much the commission is.

I think it is interesting that they provide a 45-day window. Obviously some tracking is involved.

If you put the page’s URL in the WayBackMachine, you find the page has been around since 2009. Or more accurately, the WayBackMachine has known about it since December 2009.

WayBackMachine Time Line

WayBackMachine Time Line

The Lab started out using a company named: Linkshare.com. Along about May 2010 they added Google Affiliates. Between September and November of 2012 the Lab dropped Linkshare. It appears that this month the Lab has dropped Google Affiliates and gone with Commission Junction.

It isn’t like the Lab had a choice. The Google Affiliates program was being turned off by Google. They planned for a July 31, 2013 shutdown. It happened. See: Google Affiliate Network Merchants: 7 Post-Migration Tips.

This has me wondering when SL sent out the emails that Ciaran talked about. I suppose if you were a Google Affiliate member you got word from Google that your account would be closing. I would think the Lab would try to avoid any down time for this promotional channel. But, we never know.

On an aside: I watch the concurrency numbers for SL. From August 2012 to February 2013 the trend was increasing concurrent logins. In February the trend changes and by May all the gains had been lost. That trend continues. In 2012 a downward trend continued until August then turned upward. It will be interesting to see if that happens again this year.

There is no doubt that Second Life is losing private regions. While Linden management tells us that use patterns in SL have changed, with more people doing SL stuff offline, the dropping concurrency numbers are probably a concern. Depending on some other factors, I would expect to see more advertising by the Lab.

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