Five Million
Published by Rob Flickenger March 26th, 2007 in Second Life
Second Life received its five-millionth sign-up today. For those of you keeping track at home, the growth rate looks something like this:
- 1,000,000 on October 18, 2006
- 2,000,000 on December 14, 2006 (elapsed time: 57 days)
- 3,000,000 on January 28, 2007 (elapsed time: 45 days)
- 4,000,000 on February 24, 2007 (elapsed time: 27 days)
- 5,000,000 on March 26, 2007 (elapsed time: 30 days)
Of course, the relevance of this number will continue to be a matter of debate (according to today’s stats, less than half of these accounts were logged in during the last 60 days, and the number of premium (land-owner) accounts is still only in the tens of thousands…) And while a million seems like a pretty big number, the actual growth rate is definitely slowing.
I like to think of the SL economy as nearly pure marketing: there are no inventory problems (ignoring lag), and just about everything can be easily copied. If you’re in the world for business, the only thing that can possibly set your products apart from the competition is your reputation. And with a million new residents added per month, the opportunities for interesting interaction are definitely increasing.
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So what you’re really saying is.
in the past 60 days, 1.7 million accounts logged in.
2 million accounts were created in the past 57(60) days. more people created accounts than logged in.
people logged in at any given time is in the 10s of thousands, here, 36k. that’s a pretty dismal percentage of people actually using it.
i think instead of tracking the account sign ups, a better meter might be to track the actual logged in participants. what is the reach of second life?
5 million accounts with 36,000 logged in doesn’t strike me as successful at all.
And with a million new residents added per month, the opportunities for interesting interaction are definitely increasing.
I’m not sure how you get there from here, but OK
It’s really hard to draw meaningful numbers from what Linden publishes (which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise; the hype machine is working for them at the moment, so why be completely honest?)
One interesting way to massage the numbers is to estimate how many people quit SL every day. If you believe those numbers, then the number of unique people logging into SL at least once is increasing, but fewer of them hang around for very long.
But the biggest problem I see with Linden’s numbers is that they pretend to give you an idea of how many people are actually using SL, but they don’t. The extended economy stats page isn’t much help either, although there was an interesting post on the Linden Blog with more details back in January.
Even the concurrency stat has problems: if yesterday’s average concurrency was 25,214, how long was the average person logged in? How many game-hours were played? That’s really what businesses in-game want to know (since more hours played means more opportunity to present your stuff…) But there is no way to compute it with the information provided. Those logins could have been for 8 hours each, or 5 minutes, or might even include attempted logins where nobody actually rez’d in world at all. And since the same person can log in multiple times in a day, we can’t even figure out average unique logins assuming a given time period. The stats from January tell us that 1,974,607 residents logged in for 10,817,667.97 hours (making the average session 5.47 hours per month, or about ten minutes per day per resident).
But yeah, based on LL’s everyday stats, about all you can intelligently say about Second Life’s user base is that lots of accounts are being made, and that yesterday 17.5 login attempts were made per minute. Apparently some money changed hands, too.