State of the Virtual World – Key Metrics, January 2007
Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 5:50 AM by: Zee LindenIn December I posted a number of key metrics for the first time. As part of our effort to drive toward complete transparency and openness, Logan Linden and I have upgraded some of our internal systems to create the Excel Workbook posted here. (If you need a viewer, click here, check back later for a PDF). Please consider this a preliminary version of the report. With feedback from the community we will continue to improve the data, the explanations and – most importantly, continue to add more data over time. As you can imagine we have more data to analyze than we have time and people - so thanks for your patience as we roll out more and more of the statistics you are asking for.
The Size of the Virtual World - January was another record month for Second Life in many ways. The size of the world, as measured by the virtual square kilometers of simulation, expanded 23% over December to 361 square kilometers. In fact, continued brisk sales have left us with roughly a two-week backlog for new Island order delivery. (Thanks to everyone for their patience on this.) The backlog has also affected our ability to expand the mainland sufficiently to meet. demand. As a result, the average price for mainland auctions is up higher than I think anyone would like to see it. Over the next several weeks, we hope to rectify both situations with a greater volume of server delivery from our supplier. With a recent release of more than 40 regions of mainland, the addition of a new mainland continent & and doubling of the daily release of new mainland regions I would hope that we will satisfy the seemingly insatiable demand and stabilize the mainland auction market to a more sustainable price.
The Virtual Economy - The virtual economy, as measured by LindeX volume and user to user transactions, grew faster than the land mass in January. User to user transactions in-world increased 37% to 6.1 billion consistent with the 47% increase in user hours from December. On the other hand, Linden Lab sold fewer L$ than we sold in December - primarily driven by January having 25% fewer weekend days than December causing the supply of L$ to increase at a slower rate of 18%.
What is the Linden Dollar? Technically, the L$ is a limited license right to participate in and use certain features of Second Life. The value of the L$, as reflected on the exchange, is based on the demand for a limited supply of L$. “Sources” – such as stipends to premium users and direct L$ sales on the exchange - are the ways in which Linden Lab put L$ into the virtual economy. “Sinks” – such as the L$ fee that we charge to post classified ads or upload images – represent ways that the L$ are taken out of circulation.
How does the LindeX work? The LindeX is the Linden Dollar exchange market. Linden Lab operates the exchange as a peer-to-peer trading platform in which users can buy and sell Linden Dollars from and to other residents. Just like in a real economy, there are consumers (the buyers of L$) and producers (the sellers of L$). The ratio of buyers to sellers is approximately 10 to 1. The number os sellers is consistent with the number of in-world business owners with “Positive Monthly Linden Flow“. In January, buyers and sellers traded just under USD $5 million– up more than 29% from December. That’s an average daily volume of USD $158,000. To be sure, this is still a very tiny economy relative to countries, states, cities or even towns in the real world, but it’s probably not hyperbole to surmise that it’s the fastest growing economy on the planet (up more than 9x in the last 12 months!). A handful of the largest buyers on the exchange are reselling them in local currencies, languages & payments systems - such as the Dutch Exchange here. Third party exchanges agree to use the Exchange Risk API to to identify sellers who’s historical behavior doesn’t match the amount of Linden Dollars they are selling.
How is the exchange rate determined? In the face of this growth, the floating exchange rate continued to hold steady throughout the month as Lawrence Linden has done an amazing job managing the exchange rate by managing the supply of L$ in-world balancing the “sources” and “sinks” of L$ in world. Our strategy is to keep the L$ sinks to Linden Lab high enough such that the only lever we need to balance supply and demand on the LindeX is to expand the supply by selling new L$ - something that we can do in real time in response to the vagaries of the market.
Resident Population vs Unique Users vs Log Ins vs Active Users. With this report, I’ve released some more detailed population information including a comparison of total resident population to unique residents who have logged in - both grew approximately 38% over December. Residents with Premium Accounts increased 16% to more than 57.7 thousand. There has been a lot of controversy regarding the Total Residents number on SecondLife.com (A Resident is a uniquely named avatar with the right to log into Second Life, trade Linden Dollars and visit the Community pages). Unique users represent approximately 63% of Total Residents.
Approximately 10% of unique users have logged in for 40 hours or more. Committed usage at this stage of Second Life’s growth requires a great deal of effort. Mitch Kapor has said that giving away Second Life for free to everyone is comparable to if we were giving out Apple ][+ computers for free to everyone in 1980. Clearly not everyone is going to find relevance, and be able to build on a technology at this early stage. Interestingly, it appears that blogging has a similar ratio of committed users to registrations as indicated by Live Journal.
Usage by country and gender. The top five countries are the US, France, Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands. I’ve also included the percentage breakdown of unique residents by self-reported age and self-reported gender.
Thanks again. That wraps up the update for January. I am committed to continually improving the data that we provide about the metrics within the virtual world and I look forward to reading your critical and constructive feedback and questions each month. I’ll try to incorporate more of them into the metrics and this analysis that I’ll publish each month.
February 9th, 2007 at 6:16 AM
> doubling of the daily release of new mainland regions
8 sims every two days isn’t double 4 every day.
February 9th, 2007 at 6:19 AM
The spreadsheet is really interesting….but, I’ve never come across a country called “Satellite Provider” before. A virtual land, perhaps?
February 9th, 2007 at 6:27 AM
Looks like the proportion of ladies is going down and of gentlemen seriously up. Let’s have more stuff for the ladies!
February 9th, 2007 at 6:37 AM
Some statistics I would love to see… How many one-month Premium Accounts have been created, bought first land, and then been completely cancelled, within 30 days of account creation? Accounts that show virtually no financial activity other than the land purchase and passing the funds to someone else? In other words, how many fake premium accounts were created each month, just to steal First Land and pass profits on to land speculators? And of those accounts, how many can be traced to unique IP addresses?
Should be fairly simple to correlate premium accounts cancelled less than 30 days with the financial actions and land purchases that they made. Or would you rather turn a blind eye to that issue?
February 9th, 2007 at 6:38 AM
Nice to see a report that is so clear! Thanks.
February 9th, 2007 at 6:41 AM
Cheers for the stats, these are VERY useful when presenting second life to businesses.
Many Thanks
JP
February 9th, 2007 at 6:52 AM
I am curious how many accounts do the following:
Convert from FREE to PREMIUM?
Accounts that could have had, but did not have, activity in the past 30, 60 and 90 days … to get an idea of the retention rate.
Number of “one-shots” … how many create an account, log in once and have not been seen since? these are the ones who looked aorund and said “not for me”.
February 9th, 2007 at 6:54 AM
Ceera, IP addresses nowadays are dynamic most of the time, so you get a different address on each login to your ISP. There is no way to trace those people bach to an IP.
February 9th, 2007 at 7:28 AM
@Zi
The Lindens claim to be able to track a user to a machine ID - a hash of IP and other information that defines a “Unique User”, and allows them to perma-ban griefers and other problem users. In saying “IP Address” I was being overly simplistic. I meant “Unique User”, in the same sense as someone identified for a perma-ban.
Zee Linden says that they have statistics on “Unique Users”. Is that based solely on what the user volunteers on their account creation data? Is an account created with the “Real name” of “Joe Bogus” taken as real and unique, even though not one word on the application is real or verifyable information, and is that thus treated as a user that is unique from “Jane Bogus”, created 5 minutes later from the same IP address, with completely dirfferent fake address information on the form? I should hope that they are not that innocently trusting at Linden Lab, and that when they say “Unique User” it means something more realistic.
February 9th, 2007 at 7:34 AM
I noticed one very small issue with the residents by country tab. You have Korea listed twice (unless you have active subs in North Korea which would be very surprising). The combined sub total for Korea should be .14%.
February 9th, 2007 at 7:34 AM
Zee, a note on the Land Size sheet says “Mainland pricing ranges from $3 per 1000 sqm to $10 per 1000 sqm.”
Is that a typo or am I missing something? I think many would happily buy all the land you want to sell at US$10 (L$2500 or so) per 1000m2..
February 9th, 2007 at 7:55 AM
Hummm. I see from the spreadsheet that Zee counts as “Unique” the count of residents that excludes Alt’s matching users by payment information and/or email address. The calculation also excludes individuals that have not logged in.
So a single griefer who creates, and logs on at least once with, 100 alts, created with no payment information and random garbage for e-mail address and other account info, gets counted as 100 “Unique” users? Lovely statistic. Wonderfully informative.
On the other hand, a land speculator creating hundreds of disposable one-month Premium alts to steal First Land might just run it all through one credit card, on the assumption that since the Lindens haven’t yet taken public action against those performing this kind of manipulation of the system, it must be allowable. Correlating that might be informative.
February 9th, 2007 at 8:01 AM
Interesting to see that more than 50% of overall residents are from Europe!
February 9th, 2007 at 8:27 AM
Nefertiti Nefarious Says:
…Number of “one-shots” … how many create an account, log in once and have not been seen since? these are the ones who looked aorund and said “not for me”….
Or log in once, do their griefing, then cancel their account to prevent getting caught?
February 9th, 2007 at 8:35 AM
Thank you for the data! Just a minor nit, the “System Usage Hour Breakdown by Self Reported Gender” is in ascending order while the other date-sorted metrics are in descending order. As a feature request, the data I am most interested in is virtual land metrics. What are the numbers for private islands and mainland sims over time?
Do you have an estimate on how frequently this will be updated?
February 9th, 2007 at 9:05 AM
I know it’s not a positive number, but “population” with no activity in the 30 day timeframe would be important to know, since at this point, you’re listing the combined total population of history as your population. Sure it’s a higher number, but it’s rapidly becoming meaningless.
February 9th, 2007 at 9:19 AM
I would really like to know how much first-land was created each month.
It would be interesting to have a guage of just what your chances are. It looks like slim on one side and none on the other. I finally got land on an island and will be cancelling my premium account - should have saved the money in the first place.
This is one area where I don’t think Linden has a clue the effect this has on their user base. After checking ‘thousands’ of times I know that the supply of first land is very limited. But how limited - one parcel per 100 new premium users - one in a thousand???
Rather than appearing to advertise something that they can’t or won’t deliver, which is why I nearly walked away from SL - they could do it as a LOTTERY and publish the odds.
Looking at it, the odds can’t be too good. If every premium user got some FL the real estate market for those pricey islands and mainland regions would disappear. Heck, I’d start multiple accounts.
With the present system it’s very similar to those big ads for tv’s at a really great price - when you check the fine print it warns you there is a limited supply - usually one - at that price.
February 9th, 2007 at 9:22 AM
I see several comments about speculators (which is another word for “capitalists”
“stealing” first land by creating premium accounts just to buy First Land. Strictly speaking, unless they are using stolen credit card numbers, they are not stealing the land. They are just buying it for a low price… they have to pay at least ten dollars just to join up, as well as the 512 Linden… which comes out to a little more than 3k Linden per 512 m^2 lot. That’s a low price but not so low as to constitute theft. (First Land speculators are often pretty sleaxy characters, admittedly.)
Yeah, sure, IF the alt can find a buyer, he/she/it can flip the lot for 7k… for a profit of 4k— a whopping 15 real-life bucks for at least an hour’s work. It wd be quicker and easier to just buy a whole sim and subdivide it. And even more profitable in the long run…
I speak, BTW, as someone who recently bought one lot from a speculator— or more accurately, a real estate dealer— and ended up buying the 5 neighboring lots (1 from the same speculator, 4 from someone who originally bought theirs from that speculator.) That sequence of events couldn’t have happened if he hadn’t had a contiguous piece of land in the first place.
February 9th, 2007 at 9:31 AM
Thanks for thr clear report!
February 9th, 2007 at 9:32 AM
[...] Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments [...]
February 9th, 2007 at 9:33 AM
Thanks for the nice advanes. IThey are very helpfull!
February 9th, 2007 at 9:39 AM
if you really want do make a difference please consider ODF Open Document Format , aka : Open Office format for distributing you internal data.
Hell you have already opened the source code , what is the heck the problem here. Get with it or crash and burn , or fully embrace the Open Source movement
February 9th, 2007 at 9:41 AM
Evan Bill Gates realizes that
February 9th, 2007 at 10:09 AM
I’m somewhat disappointed that this summary would be posted in a proprietary, third-party format. No, I don’t have the world’s greatest virus distribution tool (Office) installed, and while I’d be open to installing a viewer, I certainly won’t install the Microsoft one, which I assume is based on common code with the horridly unsafe one.
I am pleased that you plan to post a PDF, which is more widely installed on most machines, and for which there are fast, light, reasonably safe viewers available for most platforms (e.g. FoxIt Reader on Windows and Linux, Apple’s Preview on OS X). Adobe’s reader has turned into a real mess of bloatware and bundleware… However, that extra step to produce the PDF literally takes 5 minutes (or less) so I am disappointed it was not done at the same time.
Please post the PDF as soon as possible, and please remember that Office documents are nice extras to have for (risk-loving) users who have that product installed, but should always remain as an additional helpful data format rather than the primary delivery form for the data.
Something to consider for next time. Thanks for listening.
February 9th, 2007 at 10:16 AM
its difficult to say wether the people who are concerned about people creating alts are right or wrong. So we are in the dark about the facts. I think Linden, it would be a good idea to address these fears - which i think are born out of us all feeling a little ‘in the dark’ about who we are sharing this space with. Sharing the space with invisible statistical people can lead to some rather bad paranoia, which couls be dealt with 99% by us just knowing EXACTLY what our stats are. That - would be truly transparent. Tell us what we ask - as we ARE the residents, and we are basicallyasking for a census. A true one, just like real life, we want to know what our criminals are doing, as well as everyone else, from residents to government, from us to YOU. this is not a gripe, its an idea…please tell us who we really share the land with, and if you cant, Tell us you can’t. Come on Linden lets have some feedback
February 9th, 2007 at 10:37 AM
How come out of these millions of users, only 1% of the total population has ever been logged in at once? That is why, for me atleast, the rapid growth of “new” accounts still seems fishy.
February 9th, 2007 at 10:50 AM
*turn his screen upside-down*
honozzz ! the sky is falling, the economy is collapsing !
*duck’n cover*
Run for your life, sell your Lindenzzzz, give me your private island !
haaa… i miss the good old time of the economic forum.
February 9th, 2007 at 11:07 AM
With regard to the unavailability of First Land for new residents, I’d like to see some statistics on how quickly First Land is resold. I suspect much of it is within minutes of first purchase. However, I don’t think LL could flag individual accounts this way, since genuine new residents often sell to developers (in December a developer offered me L$7000 for a specific First Land plot before I had even made my purchase; I declined his offer. Within a couple of days comparable plots in this sim were being resold for almost double that amount).
February 9th, 2007 at 12:03 PM
“Residents with Premium Accounts increased 16% to more than 57.7 thousand.”
Wow, so out of 3,400,000 accounts, only 57,700 are premium. Can you say Jaw dropper!? I really expected this to be much higher. No wonder people make a killing renting land.
February 9th, 2007 at 1:08 PM
i wonder how closely the renters/owners ratio mirrors second life - @darien - is it such a surprise that only 57,000 are owners? i think theres just a lot of casual interest in SL, where the 57,000 are really into it, and want to invest in it rather than just spend..? i dunno, im a landowner, but only for my love of 3d modelling n stuff - not to rent…
the thing i dont understand with some dtats is how cheap land seems to be. i paid at least 10K for every 512 plot i got, and i got 9 plots now joined up-just cos i wanted em in a nice sim. thats quite a lot of outlay.
February 9th, 2007 at 1:41 PM
Perhaps you are right alpha. I just can’t imagine not owning my own land. Perhaps that’s where LL needs to improve, make going premium tied to more than just land. If there were other reasons to go premium, maybe more would do it.
February 9th, 2007 at 2:38 PM
[...] neusten offiziellen Zahlen zu Second Life dirket von Linden Labs findet man im neusten Blogbeitrag von Linden [...]
February 9th, 2007 at 2:52 PM
G’day Zee
Thanks for the clear post - most informative!
Cheers
Alex
February 9th, 2007 at 3:02 PM
I agree with Darien and others. I think it is high time some spiffs are offered to Premium Accounts. Land is no biggie, for while I chose to own Mainland (LL) land until I can get my own island, for most, private island land (any account can own) and mainland (premium only) makes no difference.
An interesting metric would be the number of accounts owning private land (not sim owners) or renting land vs those owning mainland land. Probably not possible to get?
Anyway, with only 58K premium out of 3m members (less than 2%), it sure seems like LL could afford to add some other benefits.
DRD
February 9th, 2007 at 3:25 PM
Is time to offer Premium Members a bonus for staying this paying. Land? who really cares these days. Come on LLABS give us something for the money we spent in your world. Instead of feeding rh non paying accounts.( please don`t start that non-paying account buy monies )…..
February 9th, 2007 at 3:43 PM
I’d like to make several points/observations.
First of all, I’ll wait until the .pdf . If you guys are so bullish on open source please release things like this in open source formats. Except for WinXP, I don’t use Microsoft products. Period. And I’m not going to start.
First Land: Touchy subject, here. I look for it. Every day. I’ve been a member since the middle of last November and I have *never* seen FL for sale! Real estate tycoons, probably using ‘bots, are likely gobbling this stuff up as fast as it’s released. In other words, LL isn’t helping new Premium users by issuing First Land to anyone (or any*thing*) that can buy it. All it’s doing is driving up the price of mainland property. This doesn’t directly affect me, since I’m not a premium user, but my S.O. is and he’d really like to get a FL plot. Sadly, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.
I was *really* surprised to find that less than 57,000 SL user are premies. I suspected it would be much higher than that. I agree with other comments regarding the benefits of premium membership. There has to be something besides land and stipends or why bother?
And for those of you who talk about “buying” private island property, I think you need to take another look at the reality behind SL where it concerns land. You can buy mainland plots — ownership is actually transferred to you. You can *not* buy an island plot and anyone who tells you that you can is either misinforming you or is misinformed himself. Some island owners set plots “for sale”, rather than “for rent”, but that’s only to give you the rights of a land owner (such as banning, for example) on your plot. The simple fact is that you’re still renting and you will pay “tier” to the island owner and not to LL. The island owner can even evict you from your “purchased” land any time he pleases and doesn’t have to pay you a single L$ in return.
February 9th, 2007 at 3:47 PM
Usagi — I’m going to start that “non paying accounts buy monies” as long as people like you keep assuming/pretending we don’t/can’t. Since I joined last November I’ve pumped more than $250 (real money I earned at my Real Life job) into SL. Yes there are ways. You just have to be creative about it.
February 9th, 2007 at 4:06 PM
[...] interesting to the stats junkies might be the key metrics spreadsheet than Linden Labs has posted for SL usage. Still monthly uniques (alas) but we do get an all-time [...]
February 9th, 2007 at 5:12 PM
I’ve done some estimates on the aussie population in SL here:
http://www.sloz.info/?p=88
(Trackbacks don’t seem to work for me sorry)
February 9th, 2007 at 5:16 PM
Usagi - also keep in mind that there’s a difference between Premium users and paying Users. I used to be premium but after getting fed up with sim performances on the mainland (and apparently just before the real estate rates skyrocketed) I felt the extra stipend alone wasn’t worth paying 10$/month for. I still as needed and can afford in RL buy L$ from the Lindex. This means I AM a paying customer even if I’m not currently on an active Premium account. I’ve also paid 2 10$ fees for alternate accounts that I use for Roleplay purposes. All of my accounts are marked as ‘payment info used’ since they’re all tied to one CC/email address.
As others have said land and stipends alone aren’t enough to make a lot of people go to a Premium account, especially if they don’t plan on owning land. Maybe they don’t care about setting a home at all or they’re living on land owned by a group/friend. They may also be renting/owning land on an island sim (and yes I know despite buying the land the estate owner can kick you off at any time but I believe if you read the EULA you’ll find LL can do the same thing on the mainland). Finding the right incentives for premium accounts can be tricky since other than a few vocals here on the blog most users wouldn not want to see basic accounts lose capabilities. Perhaps give premium accounts X number of free uploads per month. This would be minor but would encourage content creators to go premium (they only reason they would at this point is to own land to put out a store/club/etc).
February 9th, 2007 at 5:26 PM
Hey all and not just LL I do have a comment on land owning. I do buy and sell land… I have two premium accounts and only bought first land once in both accounts….I do not use bots or any other type of things of that nature other than the “search” feature offered in the viewer program to find the land I want to buy and sell and even though I’m not the “million dollar” guy/girl in land and resell I do ok and happy with doing it based on just searching and seeking for what I want to buy and sell. I agree that any member that is able to buy multiple first land is doing so in grave error to all the potential new premium accounts that have potential Linden buying dollars even just based on thier stipen to spend Linden in my or your shops…I have tried renting and all that other jazz but the basic bottom line for me is by helping newbies get established has brought me great reward….if you don’t want to rent…simply don’t even though the purpose of renting brings your revenue. Yes the non premiums can buy lindens then where do they decide where to spend? It may be your business…. The only draw back that I have experienced is I know for a fact that kids are going into Mature area’s that they do not belong….if any one thinks that is not true then you are only in denial and just need to go to mature area’s and experience the flux of AV’s that come in and out.
February 9th, 2007 at 5:46 PM
Myth debunking time.
You can’t really track unique users across different sessions by virtue of their IP address.
Most SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) DSL and Cable connections come with dynamic IP addresses, not static.
So, if you want to avoid being tracked by your IP address, all you have to do is unplug your bridge (aka ‘modem’
and plug it back in. When it powers back up it will contact the DHCP server at the ISP for a new IP address, which 99.9% of the time, will be different than the previous IP address. After you do that, only a search warrant served to the ISP will reveal who was using that IP address and at a specfic time.
LL might be using MAC addresses to track unique users, but privacy software/security software can prevent it from being read remotely so that won’t be very accurate either.
I can’t think of a reliable technical way that LL could relate two AVs to the same human being if that human being wanted to hide what they’re doing.
Based on this I think LL’s use of the phrase ‘unique users’ is very misleading. Unique Residents or Unique AVs, surely. Unique Users? There’s just no reliable way to identify them.
But if anyone else can think of a viable way to do track unique users which doesn’t rely on IP or MAC addresses, than by all means post it here to debunk my debunking!
Other
February 9th, 2007 at 5:58 PM
37 Amada Ascot .hummmmmmmmmmmm well talk is cheap really. Ok I humor you with alittle less then proven remark that you added monies in to the game. But really you doi have a full account you pay money for for. So really your remark is not really meaningful…..
February 9th, 2007 at 6:00 PM
I think the “Unique User” isn’t a 100% accurate represenation of Unique Users it is to the best of their ability with the tools they have access too: registration information (like me with 4 accounts all tied to one CC/email), IP address/MAC address (while not totally reliable the client can probably ask the OS for the MAC and unless there’s security tools blocking it which most aren’t using they can get MAC address), and even just routing information. While many are on dynamic IPs now there’s still a pool for those dynamics and combined with other data over a period of time you can get an idea of Unique Users. WIthout every user having to show up in person at their offices to sign legal papers declaring what their account name is every time they create an account you can never be 100% accurate but you can give a ‘best reasonable guess’ and their statistic is probably a more accurate representation of the SL populace than most polls are of the US population’s views on things.
February 9th, 2007 at 6:00 PM
well I have a rl work and i can`t be bother working on sl. But I do pay monies to the game each and every month……..Stil don`t get your point but then again people are confusing that they have paying accounts wit their non paying account. Oh well so much for logic………
February 9th, 2007 at 6:02 PM
I would like to second the request to have the monthly stats in ODF format. Thanks.
February 9th, 2007 at 6:03 PM
39 Grazel Cosmo.
That is correct! I do repect those that do role play on sl. You bring up some very good issues. Nice posting!
February 9th, 2007 at 6:11 PM
I was really surprised to find that less than 57,000 SL user are prem.I am not since people can get some thing for nothing on sl these days……its all about whos cheeks you kiss that gets you places on sl these days. Have land to give you have inside power, give away things to newbies that get you chest to chest and inthe same bed with the company here. Its all about what you can give free to the company for free that get you up the next level in this game. Its not waht you know anymore…….Its with seeing how the company is putting some in ranks that have no real understaning. But offering land,monies, and objects to newbies ( those non paying account ) will get you up the rankers faster then knowing how to build etc inthe game.Its a sad state we are in on sl.
February 9th, 2007 at 6:17 PM
good work this is going to help me in my sl business in being able to incorporate it into my new rl business and be able to show my clients what they will be promoting. great fora regular lay person to understand lol cheers Zee
February 9th, 2007 at 6:49 PM
[...] Linden Labs released an excel spreadsheet today which gives us some insights into actual user behavior versus the hype around Second Life we have seen in the past. [...]
February 9th, 2007 at 10:46 PM
wow alot of infomation dude
February 10th, 2007 at 12:41 AM
[...] and additional information was released last December. Today the company got even more granular, releasing detailed information on the Second Life population, demographics, usage time and land supply in an [...]
February 10th, 2007 at 3:30 AM
Good job on the Data.
1) Thanks for the Excel format. Those of us who do SL presentations appreciate the raw data so that we can do charts and comparative trend analysis.
2) In the users by country data, it would be great to see how many new users are signing up by country and month.
Keep the data coming! It is a real help.
February 10th, 2007 at 4:25 AM
Fun to see how Europe takes over SL
February 10th, 2007 at 5:09 AM
La part des utilisateurs europens augmente
French translation of “Europe takes lead in Second Life users, by Adam Reuters”.
February 10th, 2007 at 5:48 AM
[...] 10th, 2007 · No Comments Second Life on julkistanut väestölaskennan tulokset. Asukkaita on nyt 3,1 miljoonaa, kasvua edellisvuodesta 124 000. Vaikka duplikaatit poistettaisiin, [...]
February 10th, 2007 at 7:26 AM
[...] Labs has published some detailed metrics on Second Life-usage from their launch back in september 2003 to january 2007 (link to [...]
February 10th, 2007 at 7:50 AM
Nice to see the data. As somebody said, it’s very useful to set up RL presentations about SL. Do you know how often it will be released?
Thanks
Karl Octagon
The Octagon Bank/SLRS
February 10th, 2007 at 10:23 AM
Good details. Looks like LL is really commited to openness.
February 10th, 2007 at 12:13 PM
You make much of the SL economy and the opportunities there yet your practices and lack of timely support are serious impediments to many who try to realise these opportunities. Requests for reviews of trading tiers, listed on your site as being answered within 5 business days, are going well beyond 2 months with no response. Until the Lindex and LL can be relied upon to behave in a businesslike manner and adhere to its own promises of service SL will be no more than a toy economy.
February 10th, 2007 at 5:26 PM
[...] Bron : Second Life Blog. [...]
February 10th, 2007 at 5:54 PM
[...] are new to avoid paying the $9.95 one time fee for adding an additional account? The detailed stats put out by Zee Linden yesterday don’t tell this story, although they do tell open up the numbers for further [...]
February 10th, 2007 at 6:09 PM
Regarding First Land, I’m new to SL, but upgraded to Premium just because the advertising said “First Land” - now that I have been a member for a while and searched constantly day and night for MANY days, I can only assume that First Land is a MYTH - at lease from a practical standpoint if not a technical one. Now it looks that my 30 day “newbie” status will expire without my EVER having seen any first land.
I’m getting disgusted with the whole thing, and I came in here all gung-ho about SL. Too bad I think a lot of good citizens are being lost over this.
February 10th, 2007 at 6:20 PM
[...] そして今日（2/10）また新たに利用人口、人口構成、利用時間、土地問題などSecond Life最新の詳細がエクセル表で開示され、さらに内情がクリアになった。 [...]
February 10th, 2007 at 6:49 PM
after seven days(nights) i have been banned from eros and big areas around for two sentences with a resident women of eros.IT WAS MAYBE NO CLEAVER but i am not very old in this game and you have if you can, to do something to explain why this “madame” have not compassion for new players and much sense of humour (french). THANKS TO EXPLAIN what can i do ?
February 10th, 2007 at 7:22 PM
[...] and expanding business/network. Always open with their metrics, SL released a newly updated Virtual Economy Metrics Excel notebook document (what no Google Documents or OpenOffice? how 1.0 icky) highlighting their [...]
February 10th, 2007 at 9:49 PM
Usagi, I’m renting an 8k island plot. It costs me L$20,000 a month. All of my “stuff” wasn’t grabbed from the Freebie Warehouse. I estimate that I’ve spent around L$35,000 (virtually all of it purchased with actual Real Life money) at various shops around the world, and have probaby paid out another L$5,000 to L$6,000 in tips and donations — and all of this since about mid-December. If you think you can get that camping at L$12 per hour then you haven’t done the math, and before you point it out, yes I’m escorting here in-world, and *that* doesn’t pay the bills, either. The fact is that I pay my S.O., who *does* have a premium account, and he uses that money to buy L$ and transfers them over to me. So … while I’m officially a free and unverified user I’m probably shuttling more of my own hard-earned Real Life cash into this system than the average premium user, and my S.O., and I will soon be going into the sim-building business, ourselves.
And back on topic: I would *really* like an explanation of just what “unique user” means. I would similarly like to know if LL would consider purging unused accounts — those that remain inactive for, say, three months, or at least removing them from the active data base. I understand that the shareholders might be impressed at 3,000,000 users, but, honestly, I doubt that many of them are ever on. How many of them have *never* been on — and how many of *those* are sleepers (in the sense used to refer to sleeper cells with regards to terrorism), do you suppose — just hanging around for instant use by a newly-banned griefer?
February 11th, 2007 at 2:54 AM
State of the Virtual World – Key Metrics, January 2007
Linden Lab have released an Excel workbook detailing the metrics for January 2007. Some interesting growth since December: total user hours grew by 3.5 million, L$ exchanged by 300,000 and unique residents by 500,000.
February 11th, 2007 at 4:27 AM
[...] dazu eine ausführliche Statistik zu Second Life: Reuters + Techcrunch + vaD Linden Lab Blog: The virtual economy, as measured by LindeX volume and user to user transactions, grew faster than [...]
February 11th, 2007 at 5:12 AM
[...] Official Linden Blog: State of the Virtual World – Key Metrics, January 2007 [...]
February 11th, 2007 at 5:18 AM
[...] Official Linden Blog » Blog Archive State of the Virtual World – Key Metrics, January 2007 « (tags: secondlife metrics) [...]
February 11th, 2007 at 8:47 AM
[...] cierto, que si hay algún director de marketing leyendo, Linden Labs publica un resumen estadístico de su pequeño universo, con análisis detallado de los usuarios conectado y el estado de la economía [...]
February 11th, 2007 at 1:27 PM
[...] Second Life is all the rage and whilst we take the odd visit from time to time the jury is still out for me as to how I feel about the experience. Part of me is intrigued by the notion of exploring a virtual world and meeting people from all over the planet plus of course their business model is interesting. The other half of me thinks that it is taking my interest in technology and culture a liitle too far and instead of hanging out with complete strangers on line I can be doing better things with my time. We’ll see - for now I am dipping in to see what’s going on and the most interesting thing is the revenues they are generating and the user base. One thing about Second Life is that they are being very transparent about who is hanging out, they have just released key merics for the site here. [...]
February 11th, 2007 at 1:48 PM
[...] Labs, die Herstellerfirma, hat offizielle Zahlen per Ende Januar 2007 veröffentlicht. Ich habe ein mal [...]
February 11th, 2007 at 2:39 PM
[...] Linden Labs divulgou novos números da economia, população e geografia de Second Life. Ainda estou esperando as [...]
February 11th, 2007 at 5:42 PM
lucas lindo
February 11th, 2007 at 5:43 PM
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/02/09/state-of-the-virtual-world-%e2%80%93-key-metrics-january-2007/#comment-152428
February 11th, 2007 at 8:48 PM
[...] o último estado da nação no SL, os portugueses são 0,39% da [...]
February 12th, 2007 at 1:04 AM
[...] Linden published a new set of statistics for Second Life on Friday, which includes some very interesting information. You’ll need an excel viewer to [...]
February 12th, 2007 at 2:31 AM
[...] Artikel dazu: Offizieller LindenBlog-Eintrag Robert Basics Eintrag Artikel bei TechCrunch Meldung bei Reuters Stichworte:Bewohner LindenLab [...]
February 12th, 2007 at 2:32 AM
I would like to add my opinion that the basic account is really important to allow people that do not have a lot of time (like me) or money to try and participate in second life, and make it a lively place.
But, even as a basic account myself, I strongly support restricting some places and features to basic accounts. I was surprised to see how easy it is to get to adult places and stuff. Any kid can create a fake identity and email account, log in second life and face erected penises and explicit sex. So I suggest restricting access to places with explicit sex and increase repression of greifers. I think this is really important.
February 12th, 2007 at 3:11 AM
[...] les derniers chiffres du blog officiel de Second Life, il y aurait donc environ 450 000 Français dans Second Life (sur une population totale de 3,5 [...]
February 12th, 2007 at 5:03 AM
The grid is crazy right now.. HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Searches not working..
IMs not working…..
missing images everywhere..
and worst of all… a friend logged in and their AV wouldn’t download, so, they disconnected and figured to try later.. now it won’t let them loging AT ALL!
Can login fine at website, even tried password change and login location change via secondlife://ahern/0/120/ method.. nothing works! help!!!!!!!
February 12th, 2007 at 10:03 AM
[...] links over to the Second Life Census and sums it up quickly. My key takeaway from [...]
February 12th, 2007 at 10:28 AM
[...] Second Life is not just for the kids. In fact, only 28.7% of users are 24 or younger. The majority, 71.3%, are 25 or older. The average age is 33 (Jan, 2007). The two major countries: US and France. Given the demographic [...]
February 12th, 2007 at 11:22 AM
Months ago, I suggested to LL that they place a limit on First Land such as not being able to resell it for at least 60-90 days after purchase.
As to the rest of the SL real estate market, the excessive manipulation and artificial inflation of pricing by greedy land barons can’t last forever. It didn’t in the RL market either.
February 12th, 2007 at 12:24 PM
Once again, I want to thank you for strong Mac support, as there is no Excel viewer for the Macintosh. Perhaps the PDf would have ben a better first choice being a cross platform format and reader.
February 12th, 2007 at 2:02 PM
It may be helpful to have a record of how long in any period SL is 1) completely down (we’re banging on things), 2) for all practical purposes down (like now, no inventory movements), 3) slightly wonky. Or perhaps we could do that for you?
The correlation between user numbers (30,000 online and sometimes it still works - congrats for that, by the way) and downtime periods would be very informative as a general guide; though of course there’s no accounting for a router going Pop (well, there would be sufficient resilience in a properly run network of course, but let’s not raise expectations unnecessarily).
In my business we are subject to strict performance measures. Number One is Uptime. I don’t see that. Perhaps it’s somewhere else?
February 12th, 2007 at 2:56 PM
http://www.openoffice.org/
Multi-platform free program that will open xls files.
“Platforms currently supported include Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux (”Linux”), Sun Solaris, Mac OS X (under X11), and FreeBSD.”
February 12th, 2007 at 3:06 PM
[...] ganz offensichtlich sehr viele Anhänger findet, zeigt ein Blick in die Statistiken, in die Daten des Second Life Census: Die etwas über 3 Mio. angemeldeten User (Stand Januar 2007) stammen primär aus den USA (31.19%), [...]
February 12th, 2007 at 3:29 PM
Zee, with all due respect, the Economy of Second Life is access based. When we can’t get in-game, we can’t buy, sell, serve, promote and generate those figures for your reports. Hugo is correct in asking for stats that are based on total access vs. downtime. We want Our World Our Imagination to work. Please do what it takes on your end to assure that.
February 12th, 2007 at 4:12 PM
I agree with Hugo, you may want to gather and include a down time (lag) metric as well. Because the state of the virtual word for the past week had been laggy or completely frozen and often un-second-livable.
——————————————–
“The underlying architecture of the Internet and of
‘Second Life’ is perfectly scalable.” –Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale
——————————————–
I am impatient for Linden Lab to put these words in action soon because business owners tier dollars are not worth much in these conditions, and a downtime metric going downward is affecting the SL economy and SL businesses a great deal here. We could use a network reliability such as one of Google’s…
February 12th, 2007 at 5:48 PM
Interesting that all the posts with analysis of the figures that showed things are getting worse have been deleted…
February 12th, 2007 at 6:37 PM
Why on the 12th are the statistics from Midnight on the 6th still shown as current? http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php
February 12th, 2007 at 9:01 PM
Well the State of the Virtual World is Dire. I think it’s dying, the virtual economy is borked along with evrything else.
But hey, they make all those numbers up anyway right?
February 13th, 2007 at 2:00 AM
[...] Linden posted an Excel spreadsheet about the key measures of SL. Very interesting read, you should give it a [...]
February 13th, 2007 at 4:31 AM
Well I presume Linden Labs are held accountable for those numbers in some way, by their sponsors at least, who will insist on their audit.
But what’s significant is the selection of topics, which are perfectly reasonable from a corporate point of view, but don’t give much of an idea of the customer’s viewpoint, except that there’s more of them (not always a benefit to existing customers), there’s a worrying trend towards a lower proportion of females, and a lot of them can no longer be assumed to speak English!
The supplier, Linden Labs, always has an advantage because it speaks with a single voice (presumably, though publishing cheesy messages when the world has gone Phut indicates they don’t always speak to each other).
On the other hand, customers have many voices, some of them audible through this here blog, to other customers at least. I’ve had a look around and Yes there are groups of concerned users, but again quite a lot of them, and I’ve not found anything yet which could act as a Union, as a pressure group, as something which has the power to make change. We’re basically a bunch of individuals. Divide and Rule.
Where I come from, it’s the customer who determines the level of service. Like Hugo above, we’re measured on performance, and if we cock up we get our asses kicked big time. I’m talking about Customer Satisfaction metrics, Performance against Service Level metrics. OK we accept the SL TOS, grudgingly, but it doesn’t seem we can do much about them except sit back and put up with it.
From the customer’s point of view it may be helpful to get some ideas about what an acceptable level of service is. I’m sure LL would be interested in that too, as long as it was considered and not aggressive, but intended to help both them and us.
And in doing that it’s helpful to start with what is Unacceptable. Downtime, lag, griefing, freeloaders, mess-makers, you name it. Attach a metric to each and you’re on your way to a Customer Charter. With penalties! E.g. all premium accounts get money back if SL goes down AT ALL! Nice.
February 13th, 2007 at 1:00 PM
There won’t be much economy left if each update keeps breaking one or other of the rental systems, and the lag keeps screwing up network servers and vendors… That’s of course if anyone can actually tp to your shop, or safely buy your products and have them delivered and accessible in inventory.
It’s getting impossible to do any business and yet shop rents are going up because of tier fee increases. Well I suppose it mirrors rl, get less and less service for more and more money…
February 14th, 2007 at 12:28 AM
Did some analysis on the geographic spread of residents: http://shapingthoughts.com/2007/02/12/the-relative-popularity-of-second-life-across-nations
February 14th, 2007 at 7:24 AM
[...] learned reading a piece on Valleywag by Clay Shirkey (that name sounds awful familiar…
that Second Life has released some interesting statistics. This one stands out…big time: Approximately 10% of unique users have logged in for 40 hours [...]
February 14th, 2007 at 8:15 AM
We looked at setting up a second life store selling rugs like our online store but I am not sure how I could interface the two or monetize the second life store.
February 14th, 2007 at 9:49 AM
[...] datos sobre LL-SL febrero 14, 2007 at 5:49 pm | In Economy & Business, SecondLife | Aquí la entrada sobre los nuevos números que nos presenta Zee Linden sobre [...]
February 15th, 2007 at 2:57 PM
Fakten über Second Life
Vergangene Woche hat Linden Labs zum zweiten Mal Statistiken veröffentlicht, um die Zahl und die Struktur der Nutzer von Second Life transparenter zu gestalten. Diese Zahlen wurden in einer Excelliste im offiziellen Blog veröffentlicht.
Das Wachstum …