The Primfeed Experiment: Trying the Featured Content
I did an experiment with Second Life’s unique social media platform - Primfeed - to promote Bay City studio’s machinima, NAMARA. You may remember an article I wrote about Primfeed a few months ago, and now that the ‘traditional methods’ to promote the release of the scenes have been used to get views for our YouTube series, I’d like to try a little ‘Primfeed’ power to see if it could boost those numbers even more.
Primfeed offers a feature at the top of the app - a scrolling set of ads advertising for Second Life brands. Out of all of my social networks, I get the most ‘engagement’ on Primfeed. I’m curious to see if having one of those ad spaces for a few days will increase my subscribers and views for the machinima series as a whole.
I decided to start the advertising when a fair amount of the scenes had been posted to the public - that way my viewers would have something to watch when they clicked the link. I’d have the ad run for three days, recording the differences every day at 10 pm PST. Gonje & I picked December 22nd to December 25th. Primfeed is offering a special right now where we can ‘buy 3 days of advertising, and get 1 free’, but for my experiment, three days seemed like plenty of time. Sure, it’s the holiday season…but maybe we’ll get some people scrolling Primfeed while they are at home leading up to the Christmas holiday.
Channel Link: https://www.youtube.com/@namaraisekai
Curious how it turned out? The numbers were as followed:
December 21st - This is the baseline of what everything was like before the Primfeed ad.
Total Subscribers: 65
Unique Viewers: 243
Total Views: 413
Scene 1 Views: 105
Direct Website Traffic: 0
December 22nd - DAY 1
Total Subscribers: 67
Unique Viewers: 268
Total Views: 524
Scene 1 Views: 138
Direct Website Traffic: 2
December 23rd - DAY 2
Total Subscribers: 70
Unique Viewers: 332
Total Views: 633
Scene 1 Views: 169
Direct Website Traffic: 2
December 24th - DAY 3
Total Subscribers: 70
Unique Viewers: 376
Total Views: 695
Scene 1 Views: 193
Direct Website Traffic: 2
So, would I use the ‘Featured Content’ part of Primfeed again?
Yes, I think I would. At it’s most expensive rate, the Primfeed featured content is about $10.50 a day - if you only purchase the advertising perk a day at a time. For what I do, I think a reminder the day a NAMARA scene comes out could be an interesting way to promote the show to a targeted audience that is obviously interested in Second Life. Purchasing advertising for that day, plus posting an image to the Public Gallery could generate good momentum and growth for my YouTube channel if I can establish a regular cadence of posting new scenes. Adding an ‘in world event’ to utilize the Primfeed ‘event’ feature may also be a good thing to introduce the show to more targeted viewers as well.
For the Bay City Studio’s MACHINICON event, I’d likely purchase a ‘4 day advertising package’ because I need sustained advertising over a period of a few days - especially at the beginning when the event opens. It comes out to around $25 USD, and includes 3 days of advertising plus 1 day ‘free’ - which is perfect for any social gathering. That, coupled with targeted ‘Events’ and pictures in the ‘Public Gallery’, I think I’d be able to generate more interest than I did this past year - even without the use of other social media networks.
Other cool stats worth mentioning? I got over 100 ‘likes’ on Primfeed during that time frame (but most likely from simply posting decent images to the Gallery), and two ‘direct views’ on my full 30 minute episodes that are only accessible on the Bay City Studios website. Overall, I was pretty happy with the experiment! I look forward to seeing how the ‘numbers’ end up after the 1st of the year! :) We still have 6 more parts to post this year after all - haha!
