When *precisely* did we hit 1 million Residents?
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 3:56 PM by: Pathfinder LindenAnd the answer is…
October 18, 2006 at precisely 8:05:45 AM (Second Life Time).
61 Responses to “When *precisely* did we hit 1 million Residents?”
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October 18th, 2006 at 4:11 PM
Thanks for the future answer in SL trivia contests.
Congrats again on such a wonderful landmark in SL history.
*raises glass to the future*
October 18th, 2006 at 4:26 PM
One million of us!
Of course we all know that this number only means: “one million of avatar names with valid UUIDs on Linden Lab’s database servers for Second Life” and not really “one million users”. Still, it’s a nice metric, and o…
October 18th, 2006 at 4:30 PM
Awee. And who is the lucky guy who became the millionth avatar?
Congratulations! Now the next step is getting one million people active on the past 60 days. Let’s see if that’s doable by the end of the year!
October 18th, 2006 at 4:39 PM
Congrats! Now you can concentrate on fixing all the bugs in SL instead! Like the one where applying a texture to a single prim doesn’t apply it to the bottom face half the time…
October 18th, 2006 at 5:06 PM
do we get to know who the 1 millionth person is?
I thought balloons were gonna drop and loud buzzers were gonna go off?
October 18th, 2006 at 5:14 PM
How many of those 1,000,000 are original accounts, as opposed to Alt accounts?
October 18th, 2006 at 5:20 PM
A lot.
October 18th, 2006 at 5:42 PM
***Since I can’t seem to post this to the SL Answers forum, I’ll try here.***
Going off of this response, which was linked to…
Hi,
Thanks for writing. As per the process credit page the time frame for processing credits via Paypal is 0-5 business days. Business days are Monday through Friday, PST (excluding holidays).
At this time, processing credits via Paypal has been averaging 2-3 business days.
Regards,
Jill Linden
__________________
Are some people actually getting their transfers in 2-3 business days? Mine have been taking the full 5 days for weeks now, as have my husband’s. I have one currently from the 12th that still hasn’t gone through.
What makes some people get theirs in “2-3 business days” (if that’s actually happening at all, because no one I’ve talked to is receiving theirs that quickly) and others get theirs in 5 or more business days? Why faster for some than for others?
October 18th, 2006 at 5:49 PM
@ Jonquille
As Jill stated, 2-3 days is the *average* which means that some people will experience shorter time periods, while others will experience longer ones.
If you have more questions about PayPal processing for your own specific account, you should contact Support for assistance (http://secondlife.com/community/support.php). Thanks!
October 18th, 2006 at 6:02 PM
Yay!! Congratulations Lindens and Residents! wOOt!
October 18th, 2006 at 6:08 PM
“How many of those 1,000,000 are original accounts, as opposed to Alt accounts?”
3. I have 999,997 alts.
October 18th, 2006 at 7:21 PM
Good point!!! Who’s to say that they’re not padding the stats!!!
October 18th, 2006 at 8:13 PM
1 million in two years , five million in three years. Progress, look out omg! :0 Congratulations, did you all ever think sl could be this big. Good promotions, marketing, and commerce. Plan for the future growth today!
October 18th, 2006 at 8:20 PM
When I click the hand to sign in for Second Life.. I just get a blank white page. ANyone else having this problem. This morning when I signed on it was fine. I wonder whats wrong?
Christyy Ohara ( avitar name )
October 18th, 2006 at 8:33 PM
More importantly, what was that avatar’s name? And did loads of people come and greet him/her/it to shower him/her/it with gifts and a trolley dash in a supermarket?
Did he/she/it win L$1,000,000 ?
October 18th, 2006 at 8:35 PM
when WoW reached one million, that was the tipping point. It rapidly grew to 5.. and then on and on
October 18th, 2006 at 9:09 PM
wooohooo - 1:05am 19 Oct 06 Aussie time!
Any chance of every getting stats on numbers of residents by country?
And are there any plans to have a secondlife.com convention in Australia? I am in Brisbane, but would definitely fly to Sydney or Melbourne for it!
Tell Philip that it’s just gorgeous down here - a country very much like secondlife, but you get to experience it first hand!
October 18th, 2006 at 9:44 PM
1 Million Residents…
YAYZERAMA!
I predicted that Second Life would hit the 1 million mark on October 29 at 3:05 PM SLT/Pacific time, taking into account that daily signups would increase. Little did I know that they would increase as fast as they did, with all the media co…
October 18th, 2006 at 9:44 PM
“How many of those 1,000,000 are original accounts, as opposed to Alt accounts?”
More and more, apparently.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:27 PM
770,000 alts MAYBE the rest real accounts
October 18th, 2006 at 10:44 PM
Congrats, but now what?
It’s pretty obvious that SL has been enduring some pretty nasty growing pains for the past month and a half now. We can thank all the media coverage for the huge influx of new users (though I suspect the turnover rate is going to be pretty high, considering the number of people who don’t quite “get it”), and of course this means that SL is going to be even a more prominent target for attack. We can expect more grey goo, more direct attacks on the systems themselves (ddos, etc), and of course, more inworld spam.
Security really needs to be a top priority, now more than ever. QA needs to be a close second, since the two go hand-in-hand. As I’ve said before, LL has demonstrated that it’s quite adept at crisis management, but really needs to focus on crisis prevention.
First off, since registration is open now, take some STRONG measures to prevent bots from generating accounts. It doesn’t take a huge stretch to imagine how much damage bots could do to SL. Inworld spam is the most obvious thing, but imagine the economic issues that could come from hundreds or thousands of bot-generated accounts collecting stipends and (naturally) making the owners of said bots very rich.
For all the bugs and issues and general nonsense that’s happened over the last couple months, SL has still come a long ways in terms of Cool Stuff(tm). But, I think it’s time that everyone at LL stop for a moment, take a deep breath, and focus on getting everything working, and working properly, before adding more Cool Stuff(tm) to SL.
Cool Stuff(tm) is good, but Cool Stuff That Works(tm) is better.
Take care, and good luck!
- SDW ^..^
October 19th, 2006 at 12:16 AM
Does he/she know they were the millionth? Will you release their name?
October 19th, 2006 at 12:22 AM
This girl think were headed into a surprise in technology in the future. *cheers*
October 19th, 2006 at 12:31 AM
I’ve said it once and i’ll say it again, ALTS and Lindens Do Not Count as acculte Numbers so Please stop saying you hit 1million members when you haven’t And stop Double posting it as well, you aready made a post you should just “Edit It and apply that to it” so it takes up less resource on the blog and peoples pcs, Wich would allow us to load this faster even in Traffic heavy times, That I am POSTIVE About.
Or heres a Idea, Hire me and Tossican Itoku and Robbie Dingo and a few others I could probly name off, We would help fix Sl So much that we would know when something goes wrong and be able to fix Quickly.. But Hey I can dream can’t I…..
October 19th, 2006 at 1:24 AM
I guess you won’t tell us who the millionth account was? Usually when a real store hits a landmark like that the lucky person is featured in all sorts of promotional stuff.
Now you’ve hit your magic million … how about giving us premium account holders something to make it worth actually paying to play, because all these freeloaders are really straining the resources.
Lewis
October 19th, 2006 at 2:01 AM
Come on now, Lewis. Had they announced the 1,000,000th registered account holder’s name, you would have figured out a way to complain about that too.
October 19th, 2006 at 3:03 AM
[...] UPDATE : Pathfinder Linden posted the precise time - 08:05am SLT - after the jump. This makes Mystra’s comment #21 on October 2nd the SLI winner. [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 5:06 AM
Congrats on the 1mil but if you all dont start treating your customers a WHOLE lot better and start taking responsibility for the mistakes you make…IE distroying a persons WHOLE ENTIRE account and taking pathetic measures to compensate that 1mil will not stay around for long. VERY disappoint in how I was treated and compensated after the mistake Linden Lab has made with my account.
October 19th, 2006 at 5:08 AM
Good job, guys.
Normally I disregard or don’t even care about anything Lewis Nerd says but I agree whole-heartedly with this, however. You’ve broken your million mark, it’s gonna be a little while until 2. Maybe you could begin to consider more picky immigration procedures…
October 19th, 2006 at 5:31 AM
imagine the economic issues that could come from hundreds or thousands of bot-generated accounts collecting stipends and (naturally) making the owners of said bots very rich.
Except that stipend-collecting accounts would have to be PREMIUM accounts to collect anything, and that takes signing up with a verified bank account.
October 19th, 2006 at 5:37 AM
“you are the one millionth user! click to get your plasma tv!”
One can imagine the millionth user telling people “I’m the millionth user!” and not being believed.
Is number one million an active user now?
…
October 19th, 2006 at 6:47 AM
“Except that stipend-collecting accounts would have to be PREMIUM accounts to collect anything, and that takes signing up with a verified bank account. ”
False. Basic accounts receive L$50 for any week in which they sign in for more than 5 minutes.
October 19th, 2006 at 6:58 AM
“False. Basic accounts receive L$50 for any week in which they sign in for more than 5 minutes.”
That’s not completely true Ricky.
It is true that older basic accounts still receive an L$50 per week stipend as long as they log on …
But!
The basic account stipend was eliminated several months ago for new basic subscribers and now receive no stipend whatsoever.
October 19th, 2006 at 7:32 AM
A million members — with around 700K generated within less than 60 days, yet logins are only at 400K for 60 days — does this # represent subsequent logins only then? It would suggest only about 100K on top of the 300K base a month ago actually logged in again. And concurrence really hasn’t varied much — in last 30 days top # I’ve seen is between 10 and 12K. Would be useful to have an explanation of what the #s really mean somewhere.
October 19th, 2006 at 7:40 AM
“The basic account stipend was eliminated several months ago for new basic subscribers and now receive no stipend whatsoever.”
I stand corrected.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:04 AM
“Except that stipend-collecting accounts would have to be PREMIUM accounts to collect anything, and that takes signing up with a verified bank account. ”
Rick Zamboni says:
“False. Basic accounts receive L$50 for any week in which they sign in for more than 5 minutes. ”
This is false, Rick. I’ve been in for more than 3 weeks as a basic member and haven’t received a single stipend yet. If you’d like to pay me one, I’ll happily accept it, of course.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:31 AM
1,000,000 no way… everyone I talk to on SL has 2 or 3 alts at least….
so even at best odds, real true people on SL is only around 500k - 600k.
Here’s an idea… GET RID OF UNVERIFIED ACCOUNTS and reflect real users! not how many times someone can make a second, third , or forth identity so they can cybersex strangers!
October 19th, 2006 at 8:35 AM
My girlfriend joined on Oct 18th? Was it her?!!!
She’s called “Beav Ur”
Vince.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:36 AM
Who was the 1000000th member?
October 19th, 2006 at 8:54 AM
[...] UPDATE II: I ran into Akela last night at The Shelter, and he was of the opinion that it was the news story about Reuters that put SL over the top. This would appear to be consistent with Pathfinder Linden’s report of exactly when we hit the 1-million mark (just after 8 AM SLT on the 18th), which means the Yahoo! article may not have made much of a difference when it came to hitting the mark. Meanwhile, Tateru reports that more people signed up yesterday than were actually registered at the time she joined (woah!), and, with fully 1/5 of the user base having signed up within the last two weeks, it’s creating some new challenges. [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 8:55 AM
I am reminded of two well worn aphorisms. The first is:
“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics”
and the second on is:
“Figures don’t lie, but liars figure”.
Now, I am *NOT* accusing Linden Labs of being liars. However, I do believe that they are playing a numbers game to impress or satisfy investment bankers and venture capitalists.
Myself and virutally everyone in my Friends list has at least one alt. So I have to assume that the majority of premium account holders have at least one alt. Just that alone will make a significant reduction in the total number of residents.
Furthermore the current total includes very many people who signed up for a free, unverified account to see what SL was all about, didn’t “get it” and never logged in again.
This Total Residents number is such a flawed datum as to be statistically worthless and it should be ignored.
The Logged In Last 60 Days number could be equally flawed, depending upon how it is generated. I login every single day. Have I been counted 60 times in the last 60 days? Or does this figure represent unique account logins? Even that is flawed, because some times I login with both my primary and my alternate account in a single day. Is that counted as two logins or does the counting software include the First Life account holder as part of its query and only count me once?
The only way to really know how well SL is doing is require some form of verification of the First Life person behind the avatar (no, that will not be perfect, nor hack proof, but it will be better than the current situation) and then only count that First Life person ONCE for total residents and only count any logins by any avatars owned by that person ONCE in a 60 period for the Logged in Last 60 Days stat. Alternatively, if LL insists on continuing with unverified accounts, then they should be counted separately.
The result will not look as impressive to the uninformed, but it will be far more accurate and honest.
Just my L$0.02
October 19th, 2006 at 9:53 AM
Mija, do you honestly think that LL is going to take the time and energy to produce relevant and accurate numbers like the “Logged In Last 60 Days” statistic? I think they have far bigger problems to manage than that… like making sure everyone that wants to log in can do so… and making sure purchased items are returning to people, etc.
If’n LL took the time to properly code statistic-generating programs or processes, and they provided accurate results to you, what would change? You would be happy. That’s about it. Wouldn’t you much rather be recieving your lost purchased items than some meaningless statistic?
October 19th, 2006 at 9:57 AM
I am wondering… are you actually going to start using the new wecome area in the sims of Gukyeol, Hangeul,Hanja, and Idu now? I am making the guess that new users will randomly be dropped at one of the various welcome areas about.
October 19th, 2006 at 9:59 AM
(not sure why this isnt posting…)
Mija, do you honestly think that LL is going to take the time and energy to produce relevant and accurate numbers like the “Logged In Last 60 Days” statistic? I think they have far bigger problems to manage than that… like making sure everyone that wants to log in can do so… and making sure purchased items are returning to people, etc.
If’n LL took the time to properly code statistic-generating programs or processes, and they provided accurate results to you, what would change? You would be happy. That’s about it. Wouldn’t you much rather be recieving your lost purchased items than some meaningless statistic?
October 19th, 2006 at 10:41 AM
I got 620 members in my sim group-2 to 5% or 12 to 30 member are in the sim/Isle at all times
SL got 1 mill members? 2 to 5%= that 20.000 to 50.000 are suppose to be in at all times?
Its known that on any game/com were you pay bout 8 to 10% are “active” users.
How many users can SL hold in on one time today? Are SL ready to hold 50.000 users? ( Philip Linden say 50.000 new a day) There will be 3 mill ” members nick” 2006/2007 and that = bout 3 times the 12.000 to 15.000 that SL got in today.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:47 PM
Why not just eliminate the use of alt accounts all together. Then you’d have more accurate numbers, and less greifers.
just my $.02 worth
October 19th, 2006 at 10:20 PM
Why do you care about the number of alt ?
What does it change, anyway ?
Linden Lab say : “1 million registered accounts”
You say : “Hey, that’s not 1 million active resident then”
Yes, that’s true… so what ? Who care ?
When linden lab will say : “A million active account past 60 day”
You’ll say : “hey ! But that count active alt too !! *whine*”
And so on …
October 20th, 2006 at 3:01 AM
I believe there has been genuine substantial growth in Second Life’s population.
When I first started to take real note of Sl stat figures last year, there were about 94,000 members and on a typical weekday at around 10.30am GMT, around 1,500/1,800 people were logged in.
This morning the stats are 1,049,835 total residents, and 5,846 members are currently logged in.
Of course some people have the computing resource to have more than one simultaneous log in, however given that sl consumes computer resource I would suggest that is not common.
Just a personal view
October 20th, 2006 at 4:31 AM
I’m sure if LL cleans up SL from all Users they inactive more then 180 days, we have only 100.000 residents max.
October 20th, 2006 at 7:50 AM
Hunter,
No, I don’t expect them to do much of anything with the stats, but not because it is difficult. It was LL that put the stats on the web page in the first place; they consider them important, they made a big thing over the bogus 1 million number residents. The problem is that these numbers are so inaccurate as to be meaningless. They should either be made meaningful or dropped, just leave the grand total to keep the bean counters happy.
As a software engineer I know that the hard part has been done: doing the database connection, querying the DB, and displaying the query results and all the other tasks that go with it, that’s the hard part. What needs fixing is the SQL Query or stored procedure that gets and copmputes the number from the DB and hands it back to the .jsp or .asp page that puts it up on the website. That is less than one day’s work. In fact, depending upon how the query is currently written, it could be as simple as adding the keyword UNIQUE to the SQL SELECT statement.
October 20th, 2006 at 8:01 AM
Despite all my statements about the lack of meaning of the “Total Residents” and “Logged In Last 60 Days” numbers, I am nonetheless impressed by the growth of SL in the 3 months that I have been a resident. I judge that growth by the only meaningful number on the website, “Online Now”.
When I first came to SL that number would hover around 5 to 8 thousand at the time I was usually logging on at about 6:00PM SLT. Even before the recent influx cause by the Yahoo! publicity, that number had grown to be more like 9 to 12 thousand. That is a pretty significant increase in current users for a three month period. Now, with the Yahoo! induced population boom, it is running more like 10 to 13 thousand. It will be interesting to see where this number settles in about a week.
October 20th, 2006 at 8:04 AM
[...] Prompted by Second Life recently hitting the million accounts mark (though including alts and dormant avatars, SL has pushed around 50,000 sign-ups on each of the last few nights, so I’m much more interested in the force of the sweep) here’s a cut and paste of something I posted to the Second Life Future Salon blog back on October 12, 2005, almost exactly one year ago, coinciding with the first Second Life Community Convention. In Alvis Brigis’s first post on this blog, Rosedale’s Bloom, he considers Second Life’s growth as measured by the number of SL accounts. Both he and I think that SL’s growth pattern looks and feels more like technology adoption (more and more people coming to use open-ended digital worlds for a variety of purposes), not media consumption (a burst of people coming into a closed-purpose and/or game virtual world before wearing it out and leaving). Below is the subscriber data taken from MOGchart.com for you to look at and think about. I’ve augmented the out-of-date MOGchart with red arrows pointing to their subscriber updates plus my own taken from Second Life’s homepage over the last couple of months. Note that SL hit 50,000 accounts on or about September 16th, and is already up to 63,224 at the time of this posting. That’s 20-some% growth in the last three weeks?! [...]
October 20th, 2006 at 10:27 AM
Mija:
In February it was more like 2-3k on during peak times.
October 21st, 2006 at 7:04 AM
The actual new resident rate has increased somewhat. my metrics are now at I can stand by the door of my club and be informed by newbies that they need a job at a rate of one per minute now instead of the 2 or 3 per day a month ago. “i need a job. hire me now?, “how do i make money in sl?:, etc etc. gratz on the milestone LL. I would love to see a feature in search to show where everyone is: avatar counts by sim in descending order. Being as how i can never find more than a few per sim except for a certain 2 or 3 places that are always full constituting a couple hunfred avis. For the most part it is rather difficult to beleive there are really more than a couple thousand online at any given time. The residents online metric on the main website page seems to be quite questionable but it is just my hunch as i have no facts. that “Where The Action Is” feature would be very nice to have.
October 21st, 2006 at 12:08 PM
[...] The first thing that threw me off was, i was very unaware of how many residents lived in New York City, yet alone Brooklyn, only because of previous experience with smaller MMO markets where the people I met were always in different locations. Granted, I knew there was more of a density of people in Brooklyn and NYC having met more and more people through the SLCC and other metaverse related meet-ups, but to gather a small group of 15 people on a random Friday night, now that’s a major feat! There’s also has to be some sort of logic that you are bound to meet someone who lives close to you, now that the digital world population of Second Life has hit the 1 million resident threshold (regardless of the fact that 20% of these people are alts, that is still a significant number of people). [...]
October 21st, 2006 at 5:21 PM
Angela,
Send them my way i’m hiring. lol
October 24th, 2006 at 9:26 PM
[...] It might not have a point, but it does have momentum: it recently crossed the one million residents mark, companies like American Apparel have opened shop there, IBM has held employee meetings in its virtual space, and Reuters has a bureau in-world. [...]
October 25th, 2006 at 9:49 AM
Wow… a million sign ups. I agree with Mija that the number is probably not anything close to a realistic count, but the number has value in it’s own right. As an analyst, I deal with things like this often. And yes, you can scrub a number a 100 ways if you want to and continue to get closer and closer to what you might call reality, but sometimes, what is needed is just an relative, consistent measurement that can be observed over a long period of time for trends. I suspect that the incidence of alt accounts, etc., etc., has probably not changed since the dawn of SL. So the measurement suffers from the same issues now as it did then. Any attempt to rationalize the number would just introduce the need for further scrubbing and over-analysis. Sometimes, simple really is better.
Congratulations, Lindens. The simple act of getting someone (even if each one did it 4 times) to fill out that sign-up form 1 million times is pretty impressive. I would love to know who the 1 millionth avatar is. I sell houses in world and would be glad to give them one for free. I bet lots of other SL business owners would kick something in, as well, just for fun.
October 31st, 2006 at 9:27 PM
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November 3rd, 2006 at 1:21 PM
[...] SecondLife has achieved a signifncant milesstone: 1 000 000 accounts as of October 18, 2006 at 16:05 GMT [...]
January 8th, 2007 at 4:19 PM
[...] a credit card to verify your identity), leading to a severe hike in the populous to a count of 1,000,000 and then shortly after 2,000,000 registered accounts. While this has played into Linden Labs’ [...]