VirtualWorldsNews Interview: Reuben Steiger, Millions of Us CEO and Founder

We're beginning a new feature here at VirtualWorldsNews.com. Each week we'll be talking with some of the major players in the virtual worlds industry about the trends they've noticed, predictions for where we're going, and what perspectives they can offer from their unique positions. Last week we caught up with Millions of Us CEO and Founder Reuben Steiger while he was vacationing to talk about some upcoming Millions of Us announcements, working with the entertainment industry, and sharing  user statistics.

Virtual Worlds News: What has Millions of Us been up to?

Reuben Steiger: We’ve been up to a lot. We’re pulling up on our one year anniversary as a company. Every year my family comes to Cape Cod for a vacation, and last year I left town not knowing if I was going to start the company or not. The week I came back, I decided to start it up. So now it’s sort of a nice time to see what we’ve done in the last year. It’s been a rocket ride. We started off in a garage, and now we have a big office in Sausalito with 24 employees and a client list that’s a third of the fortune 50.

We began in Second Life, and we’ve recently begun diversifying as an agency specializing in virtual worlds across multiple platforms. We’re a bit contrarian. There’s a big focus among our colleagues on 3D virtual worlds. We don’t think 3D is what matters. It’s cool, but what matters to our advertisers and clients is that whatever platform you operate in has scale, defined by more than a million users, and that those users are an interesting demographic.

The first platform that we announced, two weeks ago, was Gaia. And we’ll probably make a similar announcement about six other platforms before the end of the year. We’re in the process of opening offices in LA and NY in addition to Sausalito. And we just hired Douglas Gayeton, an amazing guy as our Chief Creative Officer. Douglas is a filmmaker who made a documentary that caused a lot of stir in Second Life and was recently purchased by MTV. They’ll be using it as their way of introducing virtual worlds in general to the mainstream audience. Prior to joining us, he was leading MTV’s Lower East Side project.

VWN: It seems as if you’re one of the few developers really focusing on multiple platforms.

RS: I think the Electric Sheep would say the same thing, but they concentrate on 3D platforms. And they say they’re a metaverse company, but our clients don’t know what that means. And we think that’s problematic. We just think of ourselves as an agency that specializes in connecting brands with large online worlds, whether they’re closer to social networks or 3D platforms. And I think the lines will be increasingly blurry there. Good virtual worlds will have a lot of social networking aspects to them, and social networks will take on aspects of virtual worlds. But put together that’s a global market of close to a billion.

VWN: I know the Electric Sheep Company works on software development as a part of that metaverse commitment. It sounds like you’re not interested in that as opposed to just working as an agency?

RS: Actually, we are. I think we have a pretty advanced intellectual property in development as an arm of the company right now. We’ll be announcing our series A funding shortly. And when we make that announcement, we’ll also announce some details of our intellectual property strategy that focuses, vaguely, on virtual worlds and is non-platform specific and entertainment focused.

VWN: It looks like you already deal with a lot of entertainment brands as your clients. Is that accurate?

RS: I wish it was more accurate. I think increasingly our client list will be entertainment industry focused and consumer goods oriented. On the consulting side of our business I think it will break into traditional lines of business-to-consumer marketing and business-to-business marketing. But one of the weird and amazing things that’s happened over the last year is that we have a client list that is very B2B oriented, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco. And we were putting their builds very close to each other, and we realized that we’d rebuilt Silicon Valley.

Increasingly we’re doing more work with people like HBO, and I think you’ll see more of that as we go forward. I think the use case is really strong for entertainment brands. They port naturally into virtual worlds. I was giving a lecture at an annual summit for a talent agency, and I was really pleasantly surprised at how easily they understood it all. Near the end of the presentation, I commented that it shouldn’t surprise me at all because these guys come from an industry that’s all about pretending to be someone else and has been for 100 years.

It works well for the display of content that’s essential to fans, and it’s very social. And there’s a whole range of very cool possibilities opening up when you think about the way we all watch movies and television and rock stars. It’s all very aspirational and projecting yourself into the story lines. Virtual worlds allow us to cross over and enhance that imagination experience and live out those possibilities.

VWN: There’s a lot of mainstream media backlash right now against virtual worlds, Second Life at least. From looking at your blog, it seems like you disagree with their reports. Do you worry about the impression they’ll create?

RS: We’re not seeing any backlash among our client base. And the interest levels that we see in in-bound leads, we get around 30 or 40 per week, and no one seems to be worried about going into Second Life. The “backlash,” I think, is largely media created. I think it’s mainly what the media wants to talk about right now. More importantly, I think the big points I was making in the post I dropped this morning is that it’s a bigger space than second life. That’s a good thing. And it’s important for emerging platforms not to measure themselves by Second Life. They’ll all do different things really well and offer different demographics. Measuring against Second Life is a short-term phenomenon and unhealthy.

But clients would like to have standard metrics to compare these communities. And there’s not enough transparency to measure those effects. But you get these weird things from ComScore numbers, which makes no sense because it’s only Web-based. What everyone should publish is total usage hours, aggregate, and they should also publish standard demographic information. They should measure age information by age bands, whatever household income stuff is available without intruding on privacy. And also monthly information. I think you’ll see over the next year a move towards standardization.

VWN: Right now a lot of those measurements happen on the sim, right?

RS: That allows us a lot more granular control, but it also causes a lot more fragmentation. I think one of the interesting things to keep in mind is that you saw the same thing in the early days of the Web. There wasn’t a single standard or tool for measuring, and people would talk a lot about the number of page views, but it wasn’t really satisfying to people or tell you more about what users were doing. We’re seeing the same thing in virtual worlds. It’ll be worked out over the next couple of years. All the virtual worlds for whom advertising is important will get together and decide on a number of statistics that they’ll regularly publish for advertisers.

In Second Life, all the developers have their own tools, and I think everyone does a good job. The only stuff that’s unified is what Linden Lab puts out. That’s generally out dated and it wasn’t created for the stuff we’re doing now. They’re things like the traffic statistics. It’s flawed in that it doesn’t produce a meaningful number. In terms of solutions, I’m not sure what the ultimate solution is. The tough thin in the case of Second Life is that they’re not an ad-supported platform, so making this better isn’t a direct priority for them. Their approach is that users have the tools to create their own, and they’ll do that. But there’s tens of thousands.

VWN: You seem a lot more optimistic than the platform developers I’ve spoken too.

RS: Maybe we’re just disagreeing about the types of information, but the type I’m discussing is total users, male/female breakdown, and basic demographic information like geographic and age breakdown. It’s all stuff that Second Life publishes and is very helpful for advertisers. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t want to share that. And there are two different scenarios: one is for companies entering a consumer world and another is for a company licensing the platform, like MTV. For the second it’s not useful because you’re not accessing the audience, but for the first, it’s critical. And I don’t think they can make the argument that it’s not helpful. They might argue that it’s proprietary and that they’ll share it on a case by case basis.

Right now, we’re in a phase where virtual world platforms and their attitude toward their statistics is one in which they’re competing against each other for dollars. This means There.com is battling Second Life is battling others, and they’re comparing each other. I think it’s unhealthy, and I think it’s over. What we’re driving and seeing demand for among our clients is not a desire to choose a single platform, but to have a virtual worlds strategy. That strategy involves a presence in a variety of worlds. When it was just There.com and Second Life, those were the days when the choices were to build your own using There or Active Worlds or build a presence. And Second Life won. In my opinion it’s because, one, they published a variety of statistics, and, two, it was much cheaper and easier.

Now, with the advent of the Web-based worlds, what you have is a scenario where it’s no longer sensible to just choose one. You have to choose from a menu to reach a broader group of demographics and promote the product in different ways. When that’s the scenario, the element of nasty competition goes away. I think they’ll realize that their customers aren’t simply choosing one or the other. And in many cases, they’re not overlapping audiences. And even if they were overlapping, there are just different things you can do.

VWN: Just to wrap things up, what has you the most excited and the most worried about the foreseeable future of working in virtual worlds.

RS: The things I’m most excited about are the international expansion and the advent of voice. It becomes one step more real. In the other picture, this is the year of mainstream adoption where these platforms begin to become much less early adopter and niche populations and much more mainstream. What that means is that the numbers from things like Gaia or Second Life become very substantial and the position of those user bases goes from being techno geeks to the guy next door. I think we’ll see the effects of that trickle out into non-virtual world properties, to things like social networks. There’ll be an increasing avatarization of Facebook or Myspace and an increasing network in virtual worlds.

The things I’m worried about are what we’re all worried about. As you increase the immersiveness of technology, things that are worrisome become possible. When the Web was just about viewing printed information, it wasn’t possible for one user to directly reach out and touch another. Now it is, and that makes troublesome situations possible. I’m not worried about it, but there’s going to be a natural evolution and I think there’ll be a lot of legislation written in the next few years to provide guidance for copyright, gambling, and taxation in these environments. All of those were interesting theoretically when you talk about a global pop of less than a million, but when there’s billions of people and revenue, the IRS gets interested.