Second Grade Math
Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 9:00 AM by: Ginsu LindenOver the past 4 years, there have been many thousands of news articles and analyst reports about Second Life. Some of these have included incomplete facts, questionable assumptions, or odd comparisons, but we at Linden Lab do our best to take all of it in good humor. We live in a fast-paced world of constant information and change, and we know that even the best-intentioned people can put out results before understanding the facts. Hey, we should know - some might say that we ourselves put out product that isn’t always fully baked.
However, sometimes misinformation takes on a life of its own - especially when the source is a normally reputable institution. We respect Yankee Group as an analyst firm in good standing in its field. But their press
release this week cited a figure that we just can’t figure out: they claim that the average time spent per user of Second Life is just 12 minutes per month.
Just this past August, users of Second Life spent over 23 million hours in Second Life. During that month, there were just over 974,000 user logins to Second Life - that’s an average of 23.6 hours per user!
But hey, maybe Yankee Group was looking at a different user number. Were they counting the unique user registrations? That would be 6.2 million users - but that’s an average of 3.7 hours per user. Maybe they were
counting cumulative total registered accounts through August, 9.3 million users. Uh, but even that is still an average of 2.5 hours.
So, just what is that 12 minutes per month number?? As near as we can tell, that might be the average time that users spent logged in on the Second Life website in a month. Or . . . could it be . . . the 6.2 million unique user registrations divided by 23 million hours is close to 12 minutes . . . but that makes no sense - is it possible that anyone would have done the division backwards??
October 5th, 2007 at 9:06 AM
probably just another place paid by a secondlife wannabee to try to generate more anti secondlife content. i recall seeing an article by a “respected” IT industry analyst predicting secondlife would be gone by now because it was so lame. too bad such “media people” are never held accountable for what they write.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:09 AM
Hehe, that is hilarious!
I am of the opinion that Yahoo itself is half baked LMAO or perhaps some of their staff are lol
October 5th, 2007 at 9:09 AM
Obviously a typo! I ,for one, spend an average of 350 hours per month! And most of it is involved in reading stuff like this! LoL!
October 5th, 2007 at 9:10 AM
If a lot of users (like me) tend to spend 3 or four hours a day in SL and more at the weekend (i know get a real life) then the time spent on by some users must be in the milliscond range.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:11 AM
I just spent most of today in-world and hope to do much the same over the weekend. For my sins I work in an industry that relies on stats and data…and know only too well the misunderstandings and occasional liberties takent.
Now, where’s that pinch of salt..?
October 5th, 2007 at 9:13 AM
Hah!
Ginsu, that’s hilarious!
Not that I’m on the grid for the money myself, really, but if they analysed what market demand is like for me it would starch their socks pretty good.
And all in those average 12 minutes! grin
October 5th, 2007 at 9:15 AM
Who cares. We all know the substantial number of campers that do absolutely nothing for 24 hours a day each are taking up a lot of those 23.6 hours per user. Also alts on at the same time by the same user is not divided out of the equation.
I find it ironic you guys are complaining about some else’s numbers when your own is far from accurate/truthful. (or should I say up front and transparent.)
October 5th, 2007 at 9:15 AM
Second Life is a wonderful platform. Do not be discouraged by misinformation distributed by people and/or entities with ulterior motives.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:18 AM
Come on, any organization that would name themselves “Yankee Group” can’t be taken seriously. LOL
October 5th, 2007 at 9:18 AM
Yeah, they should really bother doing some investigative work. If they wanted to give SL a bad name, they could just point out the monster-spider-rape picture I just found at the top of the Flicker bar on the main blog page.
I don’t get why people would go out of their way to make up stuff when they can just use real dirt! Lame.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:20 AM
I spend usually 12 HOURS a DAY (every day of the month) on SL. I suppose that means i am messing up the average. that also means i dont have a real life…but i make real money from building and selling things, so what’s the dif?
October 5th, 2007 at 9:23 AM
I spend the remaining 12 minutes of my life in the real world per month.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:24 AM
23,6 a month is also actually very low considering the amount of bots some camping farms have installed leeching lindens 24/7 minus the outages.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:26 AM
sigh…..my mother HANGS on anti-SL articles just to lecture me and guilt me…argh!!!
October 5th, 2007 at 9:27 AM
12 minutes?….an average?…jeez…i’d like to see some of their figures…cause i thought i was crazy, i didnt know that a whole group could be crazier than me
October 5th, 2007 at 9:30 AM
I am not real sure logins are an fair or accurate measure of traffic, since we have to log in after every crash and there are times when crashes become horrific. I realize though that logins are a two edged sword that indicate artifically high traffic numbers but very deflated average time spent in game if they are taken during times of lots of crashes. For accuracies sake though it might be better to use some other metric to gauge traffic than log ins, since if I crash 10 or 20 times a day that is hardly a number that reflect my actual participation in sl. Also if you found some other metric to measure traffic then you might be less likely to fall victim to stastics like the one you have cited.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:32 AM
Wow, hehe, man I am a professional content developer within second life, and I hate to think I only work 12 minutes a month in second life I would be really broke haha! but I guess if you can develope 4 full sims in only 2 months at 12 minutes per month, well hell your hot stuff hahaa!
Anyways, I know I put in between 8 - 16 hours a day nearly everday. my work schedule entails long hours when I work, and then maybe a week vacation here and there since I usually work all 7 days of the week.
Anyways, thanks alot for the laugh!
Perefim Cao
Owner of Iota Studios
P.S. ask yankee group if they will pay for my full months wages I usually earn if I work 12 a month for them ^^
October 5th, 2007 at 9:34 AM
No question they got it wrong. I use my 12 minutes just waiting for my inventory to load.
(not a complaint, attempted humour)
\:D/
October 5th, 2007 at 9:36 AM
i read this and my jaw hit the floor, i for the first time had to actually post something… HAHAHAHAHAHAH.. 12 minutes?!? a month?!? oh lordy i’m far from average this is true by anyone that knows me but lets see.. i work in here an average of 4 hours a day just doing my dj’ing/hosting, thats 28 hours a week 112 hours a month… given that i don’t just come in to work… i spend roughly another 4-6 hours just hanging out with my friends and shopping, playing games or what ever… so now we look at more like 8-10 hours a day.. this works out to what?!? 224 - 280 hours a month?!? and thats ALL not camping (i’m not a camper)
yep.. i’m not average as everyone knows but damn… 12 minutes?!? a month?!? i think someone might wanna go back and check their numbers
October 5th, 2007 at 9:36 AM
who cares sort this vat out charge the people that dont have too pay it,the same as we pay then you make more and we all got a equal buisnes playing field simple as that then maybe i got a fighting chance
October 5th, 2007 at 9:40 AM
Yankee Group aside, I’m a bit concerned that from the tone of the entry and the links provided that you seem to be asserting that the media commentary on your user metrics came from anyone but you guys.
For years people have been criticizing the steadily-rising number of users that became more and more inflated until only recently. This was done by no media organizations but LL itself.
I surely hope I’ve misunderstood you and this isn’t the start of revisionist history.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:41 AM
“Hey, we should know - some might say that we ourselves put out product that isn’t always fully baked.”
No, I believe that everyone at Linden Labs is fully baked and puts out product in accordance - which is fine by me
October 5th, 2007 at 9:41 AM
Well since I spend practically my entire first life in second life, I guess that means the rest of you average about .0001 of a second. I thought all you other residents were really bots - now I know for sure.
So darn it stop your bots from IM’ing me all the time.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:41 AM
12 minutes per month?
Wow, I am SO above average!
(Sometimes I’m logged in for 12 hours a day, lol!)
October 5th, 2007 at 9:43 AM
I spent 12 minutes enjoying your replies.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:43 AM
It would be nice if analyst “groups” like that would actually publish their “work”. Normally, handing in an answer without showing your work gets you a “Fail”.
Withough explaining how you come to sich a surprising number, why the hell should anyone belive it? ANd the more unbelievable the number the more you neet to prove that that number is right.
Claiming 12 minutes a month per user average then walking away from the conversation withouth the slightest shred of proof is just rediculous.
Though if those groups actually DID publish their work, well, it would show everyone what charlatans most of them really are
October 5th, 2007 at 9:43 AM
I can’t believe that someone would believe that on average that a person could be on SL for only 12 minutes a month. That is crazy. Especially when I spend nearly 90 hours a month (and that’s only 3 hours a day) and my husband and many of our friends on SL spend more than that on SL.
No matter if people are running alts or not, there is no way that a person can spend only 12 minutes even in one session let alone a month. It must have been a typo. They must have meant hours not minutes.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:47 AM
Nice pwnage of the Yankee group, guys!
October 5th, 2007 at 9:49 AM
Tee hehehehe maybe they meant 12 mins and hour! LOL
October 5th, 2007 at 9:50 AM
Im spending about 65 hours per month in SL and see most of my friends near the same time here.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:51 AM
Here is some more math for you…how can you charge the same tier to previous owner and the new owner of the same piece of property in the same month…thereby DOUBLING YOUR FEE! IE $75 x 2= $150. Maybe you need to take the same lesson as you are giving to Yankee Group! Please refund my fees!!
October 5th, 2007 at 9:55 AM
You guys need to use the e-mail links on the yankee group website and enlighten them their numbers are not correct.
i used every calculation I could come up with. Best I could do was about 12 HOURS a month and that is a shady calculation.
If they really want to make a point against SL’s economics there are better topics for it.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:56 AM
More media BS… they would make me laugh if it was so utterly pathetic!
It reminds me of articles that say “Secondlife is a website where users…..” Website, right. I mean actually *do* some research before putting pen to paper!
They should have spent 12 minutes looking into the facts (metrics, stats readily available) - it would have saved a lot of egg in their smug media faces.
“Back to you in the studio, !$*^£$%”
October 5th, 2007 at 9:59 AM
Honorable Ginsu,
It’s apparent to me that they meant to say:
“we only did 12 minutes of research and writing”
October 5th, 2007 at 9:59 AM
Why are they even comparing Second Life to MySpace and Facebook? Are these the same people who consider Second Life a website too, as Time Magazine did?
October 5th, 2007 at 10:10 AM
I would encourage Linden Lab to provide third-party validation of its own figures before citing the questionable math of others.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:10 AM
Good one ginsu!
lol
October 5th, 2007 at 10:10 AM
Data and facts will never stand in the way of a good story. Mark Twain famously said there are 3 kinds of untruths: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Give me 15 minutes and I can make any data say whatever you want it to………..
October 5th, 2007 at 10:11 AM
12 minutes is about the average stay time in a sim within range of cheap detectors I’m guessin.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:13 AM
Seems dat a lotta peoples wanna knock down SL right now. It’s an easy target, in a lotta ways, I guess. But dis 12 minute ting is jes silly stuff. Even jes ancedotally, it dun make no sense.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:18 AM
12 Mins seems light - but - perhaps it’s the mean log on time between crashes!
October 5th, 2007 at 10:25 AM
XD funny stuff
October 5th, 2007 at 10:29 AM
I know I spend many hours out of my day out here running my store or helping customers from another store that sells a simular product when their owners are off line and people need help now in the update group.
choice one world your physical limitations keep you house bound up all night unable to sleep or choice two a world you can run fly and go places meeting people. (not to mention something to do while the ambien tries to work) I do 20 plus hours a day out here easily. Those numbers must be a typo.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:30 AM
Yankee Group is a very well-known marketing research consultancy, and I would think it would be worthwhile for LL marketing to speak directly to them about it. I’m puzzled as to why this in in the Blog, of all places.
Perhaps there would be fewer analysis firms trying to poke holes in LL’s published stats (Gartner, the 800 pound gorilla of market segmentation firms, has also devoted attention to this) if LL made more meaningful stats available. See this thread for some pointers as to a few sample numbers that residents are curious about:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=212151&highlight=office
At this point it is widely known that LL’s published numbers don’t actually characterize utilization. LL would be better served by opening the kimono a bit.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:34 AM
i spend an averange of 16hours a day
from when i wake up until i go to bed and then sleep for about 6a8hours then back on sl
like some of say first life is second life hehe
in last 3months im on sl i spended 1069 hours in sl can you calculate?
+-11hours a day and that is low becose this week i wasent mutch at home so its even more normal
12min a MONTH even no way thats posble :p
October 5th, 2007 at 10:38 AM
Ginsu, better for you dont losing your time with all the wrong or partial things people write on SL. I have always the impression that those who write more about it are those who know it the less.
A lot of people trying to figure out what SL is and who are those who use it… they simply doe snot accept that that exrcise is like like trying to saying what life is and who are those living it… good luck!
October 5th, 2007 at 10:39 AM
i spend 12 minutes every minute online
October 5th, 2007 at 10:39 AM
I would say I spend about 12 hours a day on here as I am allowed to play while at work. I”m lucky.
Don’t know where they got their numbers,but obviously wrong.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:40 AM
Oh, so I wonder who Yankee Group’s client is.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:43 AM
ROFL LL well I am certainly glad you looked into the facts and stated your own on the 12 min log in time. Now what about the rumor that SL peaked in October of 06
Mar/Cat
October 5th, 2007 at 10:44 AM
Oh and I did a little figuring of my own I worked in SL for about 80 hours a week and made a whole 10 cents per hour. Then I quit my SL job.
Mar/Cat
October 5th, 2007 at 10:44 AM
12 minutes is the average time a user has online before encountering LAG or crashing
October 5th, 2007 at 10:48 AM
Probably the Yankee Group used the computer from the Hitchhiker’s Guide that spent 10 million years figuring out the ultimate question to which “42″ was the answer. (The question: “What is 6 x 9?”).
October 5th, 2007 at 10:48 AM
Deduct all the Time the thousands of Bots are online almost 24/7 and you will see that you are far away from an average of 23.6 hours per user… or did you only count all the traffic/camping/land bots?
October 5th, 2007 at 10:49 AM
Let´s see… 12 minutes that in SL is not even a “Quicky” but anyway the matter here is the quality of time, i did made a live gig yesterday as a singer. ¡Gratest 45 minutes in my whole Seconf Life! I know how numbers are important to MKT executives, but the quality of content is the real issue for me. That i think will keep SL alive and growing. And i´m posting from México where the broadband is everything but broad. I decided to “Embrace the LAG” and still have a lot of fun and friendship and quality expierience here. 12 minutes of fame for them…thats a measure.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:49 AM
I just logged on and can testify that anyone that loggs on is going to spend the first 3minutes at any sim they go to just waiting for things to rez. So if you go to 4 sims you just spent 12mins just waiting to play. That figure should be more damaging to SL appearance than the 12 min stat. lol
October 5th, 2007 at 10:49 AM
secondlife.reuters.com for credible information.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:54 AM
You say right now you have 9,863,518 residents LOL. I am 5 of them, I know ppl with 12 avies (yeah, twelve), and the minimum for each REAL resident is 2, so your maths are as crappy as the ones from Yankee Group… LL, always manipulating everything LMAO. ‘Thanks for your continued patience’ HAHAHAHAHAHA.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:58 AM
6.2 million users - your own much ballyhoed number of residents.
23 million hours login time per month
23/6.2 = 3.7097 hours per month
3.7097 hours per month
222.6 minutes per month
31 days per month
222.6 / 31 = 7.2 minutes logged in per day.
Enjoy
October 5th, 2007 at 11:00 AM
So who exactly is in remedial mathematics, Ginsu?
Using your own numbers, in the *month* of August, there were 23 million player hours. That means that for each *day* in August there were 766,666 player hours logged. Unfortunately my trail ends there because there are no published statistics on number of logins so I have to take the number you put in this blog which was 974,000 logins. BUT there is no indication whether these were unique logins, or re-logins because of client or grid crashes, or rolling restart kick outs or most significantly campers.
So let’s check your conclusions for reasonableness. You did a simple, yet logically specious division of player hours / number of logins and find that for each login over an entire month, about 23 hours were spent per login. Most of the humans I know sleep sometimes. They also work, eat, fight with their families, etc. So your average login spends less than an hour sleeping, eating, attending to personal hygiene, and so on. Could this possibly be a realistic number? No, it is a mean, that would indicate that some logins were playing SL for more than 24 hours per day.
Keep practicing and you might not have to go to summer school.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:02 AM
Speaking of problems with figures the “US$ Spent in Last 24h:” figure on the website has been jumping around a lot for me (sometimes losing over $1 million from the figure usually posted only to jump right back up to previous levels a second later), although I haven‘t seen it happen yet today. Also, when I click on that figure to get economic statistics it doesn’t have any information about October at all (and it was there until just the other day) except that the “Avg L$ Paid Per Square Meter” figure for September (I think that’s what it is) is mislabeled as October. As I recall, 6.4748 was the Avg. L$ paid per square meter figure for September, with 6.09ish being the last October price per meter squared being the last October price that I could get access to (gone from the page now). Anyway, this isn’t really a gripe so much as curiosity about what is going on.
Sorry for the off-topic post. Feel free to delete it, but do look into this issue, please.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:05 AM
A lot of people acquire an account without checking system first — and then never manage to log in, because they don’t have NVidia or Radeon cards. (Or, they have Vista.) Those who never manage to log in at all, and wander away from the site never to return, should not be included in any overall averaging of users login time… but maybe that’s what the Yankees were doing. LOL
October 5th, 2007 at 11:07 AM
Secondlife a time tief? I bet i do spend to many hours in SL. But it Started with making frienships.My first 3 weeks was ” Exploring”Then i got a job , no a big jib in SL but i feel that i had to do it and was on 6 hours a week, things happens fast in this world of fantasy. Now o own 3 SIM- a giant mall- 76 shops in 60 SIM and hire a payed staff of 24. I spend 20 to 25 hours a week, half of it as work.
You get fast depended on the “game” if you are serius and engaged
i “Trye” to separate SL and RL as i got a fulltime RL job but its not easy. I had to think hard somtime as i stared to “think and act” RL as my avatar in SL—lol be carefull.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:08 AM
“Probably the Yankee Group used the computer from the Hitchhiker’s Guide that spent 10 million years figuring out the ultimate question to which “42″ was the answer. (The question: “What is 6 x 9?”).”
YOU BASTARD, YOU JUST DESTROYED THE UNIVERSE.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:16 AM
*waves to Soft Linden*
October 5th, 2007 at 11:18 AM
Interesting figure I must say… I spend about 16 hours PER DAY in world, and know QUITE a few others that have similar time schedules… This must be erroneous data… I thouroughly enjoy Second Life and am happy to help create content it for others to enjoy. Thanks for making such a wonderful program…
See you in world…
October 5th, 2007 at 11:19 AM
@ shockwave yareach #60:
I don’t know about you, but time is based on a 24 hour day where I come from. If you read carefully you will see it said 12 minutes PER MONTH not PER DAY!!!
As someone said, stats can be made to say anything you want with exceptions, exclusions and so on - but do you really think it’s 12 minutes per user, per month. Hardly!
October 5th, 2007 at 11:20 AM
rather than dealing with such fripperies why dont you address the poor mathematics associated with the collapse of Ginko Financial and the many like myself who have found hard earning savings now worth 5% of the their original investment?
October 5th, 2007 at 11:21 AM
Soft, that’s 12 minutes you could have spent fixing a bug. Get back to work!
October 5th, 2007 at 11:23 AM
Oh god, that’s funny. Just this week I’ve logged in 43 hours in SL - and it’s been a slow week for me! (I use a stats counter I got from SLBuzz - I don’t even want to mention how many hours I’ve logged since the beginning of May when I got it!)
October 5th, 2007 at 11:24 AM
ROFL i wish i spent 12 minutes!!!
<– needs a RL lol
i spent tons of time in-world, or on SL related websites, blogs and all.
or even on photoshop doing stuff FOR sl
October 5th, 2007 at 11:26 AM
LL, you have no one to blame but yourself in this, and by your own words:
“So, just what is that 12 minutes per month number?? As near as we can tell, that might be the average time that users spent logged in on the Second Life website in a month. Or . . . could it be . . . the 6.2 million unique user registrations divided by 23 million hours is close to 12 minutes . . . but that makes no sense - is it possible that anyone would have done the division backwards??”
9,864,432. That is the number currently showing on your splash page as the “Total Residents”. Not 6.2 million as claimed in the quote above. We have all known for a long time that is a totally bogus number, that some 95%+ of those users never log on to SL any more… but you keep posting that number.
Now, we don’t really know how many hours people spend online each month, do we? Considering the camping chairs, the simultaneously logged alts, the people who log on and fall asleep at their computers with ping devices running…
I would say that the ACTIVE users probably spend quite a bit of time on SL, and I will grant that. But the number of people who visit SL, get immediately fed up with the griefing and the lag, and never return again? The number of people who come over time to dislike how SL is operated and leave, never to return? The number of potential hours that they DON’T spend on SL is an equally telling number. And that, I think, is what the Yankee article is about.
Basically, they claimed LL numbers are market hype and propaganda. And from what I’ve seen, they’re right. SL could have been so much more than it is, if a little common sense had been added to the vision pie, if more time had been spent working out platform problems instead of introducing new, buggy and lag-fested features.
If you had spent more time shoring up the foundation instead of painting the walls, maybe more of that claimed 9.8 million residents would be using the system rather than not using it.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:34 AM
When someone is shooting himself in the foot, i’ve learned by all means, let them be. The most worrying part is that you give this attention
October 5th, 2007 at 11:34 AM
BTW, I am amused by the number of people who posted here that “I spend 16 hours a day on SL from the moment I wake up until I go to bed. So no way 12 minutes is right!”
LOL LOL. Is that how logic works these days… extrapolate one’s individual, personal experience and apply that to the entire grid?
It seems like there are more who didn’t even get to 2nd grade math. You can’t do statistical analysis based on your individual, personal experience people. And as for spending 16 hours a day on SL? That’s just sad.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:40 AM
XO: I was not trying to certify Yankee Group numbers. Not my job. But I have my own numbers based on LL’s own data, and they aren’t all that flattering either. Nobody (I) know on SL only plays 3 to 4 hours a month. Then again, 6.2 million users is just as far fetched as someone only logging in one night per month.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:42 AM
@Blinders Off…
I run a simwide art center, and tour with a RL band in Second Life as their staging/lighting director. JUST because you have no Second Life; doesn’t mean others dont 
I might suggest if you have nothing good to say; keep it in the peanut gallery where it belongs 
No it is you that are a sad individual; YOU can take into account that “I” said I was in world, but you seem to have forgotten (half baked are we?) the fact that I mentioned there are “others” that have the same schedules (being half baked can do that to one; make them forget
October 5th, 2007 at 11:43 AM
what would be really neat to see would be lindens finally taking a look at the amount of their 9.8 million users actually log in or have logged in over the past few months. I am guessing its maybe at most 1-2 million if that. And once they take a look at how many resources in the databases that these other 7 million one time use members that are left over from bots and money transfer dummies and alts used for various reasons, perhaps they will realize that they should clean that mess up and relieve some stress on their obviously overtaxed asset servers and databases… and my opinion on why they have not done that as of yet is because they like to see that number that just a year ago was being celebrated to be 1 million… lol in other words yeah so theres 9.8 mil users , but the average user base which when there was 1 million users was about 25-30k online, and now theres 9.8 mil and the average online runs about 35-45k online, theres some 2nd grade math for ya…
October 5th, 2007 at 11:44 AM
WHAT!!!! 12 minutes!!!
dose that mean the hours i spent biulding my home in incubus was all a dream!!!!! OMG LMAO
October 5th, 2007 at 11:54 AM
If we want to talk about real facts, should we check LL’s own claims? Almost a year ago a website released two enlightening articles on LL’s statistics policies. I’ve enjoyed keeping these in my FAVORITES folder for future reference:
http://s183430029.onlinehome.us/Is_Second_Life.html
http://s183430029.onlinehome.us/Is_SL_pt_2.html
If LL wants to condemn shoddy presentation of facts, maybe it needs to clean its own house first. I agree with the posts above that this blog entry was a bad idea. You don’t pat yourself on the back when people are lagging and crashing several times a day.
I enjoy SL. I don’t enjoy the performance and I don’t enjoy the bogus PR. As far as I know, Yankee Group is a professional and well-respected business entity which likely has no alterior motives for publishing this information. While I agree that 12 minutes a month is a bit hard to swallow, that could be a typo or some other thing, but LL should seriously check into why they produced that figure rather than publishing a snide blog entry about it.
Yankee Group’s reputation is probably why LL is so alarmed by this. They’ve just been spanked before the business community and they’re in the middle of damage control.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:58 AM
12 minutes?!?! Wow..if only I could spend just 12 minutes in SL then maybe I’d get back all the hours of sleep I’ve lost since I started playing this game. =^_^=
October 5th, 2007 at 11:58 AM
That’s a jolly good laugh! 12 minutes per month? What would be the point?
October 5th, 2007 at 12:08 PM
@79 I completely agree. Another interesting fact might be that this place is run by Linden Lab RESEARCH.
LL and SL are very poorly run with CONSTANT miscommunication and lack of “team work”.
Also, your facts are a bit off. I highly doubt that you have 6.2 million active players. (Unless underaged campers count.)
October 5th, 2007 at 12:10 PM
Interestingly enough, you fudged numbers while accusing someone of fudging numbers. By your own admission there was 974,000 logins.
What kind of logins? 1 resident logging in everyday for a month equals 31 logins? Yes/No? It still means several million residents didn’t login at all, drastically reducing the averages.
Seems to me they made their report based on the total base of residents as opposed to logins.
If you are going to fight misinformation, using misleading facts is a bad way of doing so……..
October 5th, 2007 at 12:11 PM
its funny how much misinformation is involved with second life. in the game its self, people assume things about people and their businesses without talking to that person, and end up writing bias blogs.
i’ve yet to see a blog dealing with second life business that had its facts together (not including tutorials). Its easy to say take it with a pinch of salt, but when theres misinformed people agreeing with their own silly ideas, whats the point. You could ignore it, but that wouldn’t help much.
October 5th, 2007 at 12:17 PM
One nice information to publish could be the lot of money wasted in SL by investors who believed in the possibilities of this virtual world. But those are 3rd grade maths…
October 5th, 2007 at 12:19 PM
So now we have LL posting Op/Ed pieces by the head legal beagle, and here I thought the blog was supposed to be LL’s premiere information dissemination outlet. Maybe I have that backwards.. premiere disinformation emanation outlet.
I find it particularly funny you all can poke fun at obviously bogus statistics while publishing your own which are no less suspect and bogus.
Amazing, truly.
October 5th, 2007 at 12:19 PM
From Tommy Parrot: “No it is you that are a sad individual; YOU can take into account that “I” said I was in world, but you seem to have forgotten (half baked are we?) the fact that I mentioned there are “others” that have the same schedules (being half baked can do that to one….JUST because you have no Second Life; doesn’t mean others dont…”
If I may Tommy, I have a Second Life. I also happen to have a REAL one… which is why I don’t spend 16 hours a day online. LOL.
BTW, when you use a quote like “half baked”… it is customary to make sure the person you’re replying to actually USED that phrase.
I’m glad you enjoy SL and hey, hope you continue to get a kick out of it. That doesn’t invalidate any of the issued presented above… which you not only failed to address and counter, but continued to insist on judging SL by your own individual experience. That was the whole point of the previous post. When you’re talking data analysis, that really doesn’t work.
There are people all over who just love SL. There are others who tolerate the performance. There are far, far more who have decided to have nothing to do with it (like 95% of the total claimed residency). Glad you like SL. 95% of its “residents” don’t. So whether that “12 minutes a month” figure is accurate or not (it’s probably not), it’s based on a sound concept… that the vast majority of claimed SL residents use the system very little or not at all. And that is really the issue LL should have been paying attention to rather than belittling actual figures.
Maybe Yankee group meant to publish 12 minutes a day… or 123 minutes a month, and missed a key or whatever. Would LL have done better to make a phone call to Yankee Group rather than bringing additional attention to the information by posting here? Your guess is as good as mine.
Enjoy your SL. I’ll enjoy my REAL one.
October 5th, 2007 at 12:27 PM
Nice to see that all levels of Linden Lab feel the urge to communicate to be honest.
Interesting read.
It’s a bumpy ride on the bleeding edge, but plenty of us understand that.
Keep up the pioneering work LL!
October 5th, 2007 at 12:36 PM
ROFL, i spend more than 12 minutes a month precashing!!!
October 5th, 2007 at 12:39 PM
I really feel sorry for the EU folks. They get a discount on L$ just because of exchange rates and they want to whine, that it’s not fair that the EU wants their fair share. Get over it already.
October 5th, 2007 at 12:42 PM
Thanks Blinders, but when I quote someone, I will use quotation marks (the fact that they werent there might indicate that I was not quoting you..) Nothing personal; but when you call one “sad” that is online building a world for people to enjoy, I tend to defend myself and the multitude of others… For some of us; this IS what WE do for a living (Sorry if you aren’t able to do so, or DO not want to, but to be here for my clients 16 hours a day (THAT’S customer service ;)) helps me make sure everyone is happy…
Please Njoy your RL (and your Second one
October 5th, 2007 at 12:45 PM
Heh.. I spend a great deal of time in SL myself. Maybe 6 or so hours a day (working from home leaves my schedule.. flexible :P). Still manage to earn a living and keep the house clean and the wife happy.
However, login is hours per user per day. If your conection and PC (even if you use more than one) can handle two or sessions or more, how many folks do this ? And why ? My first alt is my backup account in case my main account gets hacked/broken/deleted and my second alt is my test account for things I build/script.
Yeah, it messes with the “total user accounts” number, but can hardly be expected to greatly inflate the unique online user numbers or number of hours daily they are all logged in.
October 5th, 2007 at 12:48 PM
Maybe they meant 12 minutes of fame in SL as opposed to the 15 minutes we get in RL?
October 5th, 2007 at 1:00 PM
“If your conection and PC (even if you use more than one) can handle two or sessions or more, how many folks do this ? And why ? ”
Camping and club owners. They fill their clubs with alts to make them look busy and camp farm. Some people have dozens of alts running 24/7 at camp locations. Those are the big one’s. A lot of pervs run more comps/avies to increase their chance at virtual loving.
October 5th, 2007 at 1:04 PM
You could get that number of 12 minutes average by going to a welcome center and asking people there how much time they are in SL. Then average it out and you have your number.
October 5th, 2007 at 1:14 PM
0_o 12 minutes wow
i spend like 12 hours a weekend day online lol must be only counting a few new peaple or something
October 5th, 2007 at 1:14 PM
And 99% of those online hours were used by bots/alts.
October 5th, 2007 at 1:16 PM
12 minutes?? I average approximately 200 hours per month. And I know tons of people to spend much more. 12 minutes is probably the time they spend “verifying cache files”. Ha!
October 5th, 2007 at 1:18 PM
out of your average 45000 users i suspect 5000 are not campers.
October 5th, 2007 at 1:26 PM
how much time logged in? how much time thinking logged in when actually crashed? how many attempts at logging in and staying logged in? how much time logged in and able to do anything….hmmm theres lies, damn lies and statistics….
SL is fantastic and still without equal but when the day comes………….
October 5th, 2007 at 1:50 PM
Maybe it was supposed to be 12 Hours a Month if you include all the users that didn’t login at all during that period?
October 5th, 2007 at 1:51 PM
THANK YOU!
That link was sent out to my company and I keep getting emails along the lines of “so I hear your secondlife game is failing.”
Gah. I’m sending this out in response
October 5th, 2007 at 1:55 PM
LOL and still more posts about “this is how much *I* use SL so the stats must be wrong”. LOL.
While I seriously question the “12 minutes” claim, I also seriously question those who thing all “residents” of SL use the system 6-16 hours a day just because they personally do. Get real.
The question isn’t how much YOU use SL. The question is how much the overall, claimed residency uses SL. That includes the millions of “resident” accounts claimed by Linden Lab that never or very rarely log in. That’s the point of the whole thing. And while we may disagree with the claim of 12 minutes, no one with a “second grade math” education can look at the residence / hours / logged in during the last 7 days figures and not be able to figure out the stats themselves…. IF they want to take the time to bother.
The information is there people. If you choose to ignore it and view SL through rosey-colored glasses, hey, that’s your world, not the real one.
October 5th, 2007 at 2:03 PM
perhaps its an estimate of the amount of time per user that they log in before they have to relog in order to move or get things to rez, or perhaps it the amount of time it takes to see anything once your logged in. the possibilities are endless
October 5th, 2007 at 2:28 PM
i hope the Lindens don’t forget my Ticket while busy with that useless mathematics. It is untouched since a week now……
October 5th, 2007 at 2:32 PM
CHALLENGE TO LINDEN LAB: PROVIDE THE STATS
OK, when it all comes down to it, a prominent website makes a claim about degrading SL user statistics. LL says this claim is wrong. Technically LL is probably right; the 12 minute thing is hard to believe. But HOW MUCH OFF IS IT?
So, LL, I issue this challeng. Put your stats where your PR is. Provide us the following three categories of information on a monthly basis for the last 3 years, say from Jan 2005 to Sep 2007. That will mean 31 statistics per category:
AVERAGE number of UNIQUE users per month, on a month-by-month basis.
TOTAL online time spent by UNIQUE users per month (not an average or massaged data, the actual total online hours by unique users. Surely you track such information).
TOTAL claimed residency per month.
With those figures, I can work up a nice RATIO statistics graph that will prove whether or not SL user online time is increasing or decreasing. I’ll post the stat on a website for everyone to examine.
Taking it for granted that the raw data you give us is accurate (and not skewed like the claimed “residency” figure), that will put an end to the argument, one way or the other. That’s a much better idea than making fun of another website in your public blog.
Now, Tommy, regarding your post: “For some of us; this IS what WE do for a living (Sorry if you aren’t able to do so, or DO not want to, but to be here for my clients 16 hours a day (THAT’S customer service ;)) ”
Look, I wasn’t attacking you personally, nor anyone else. What I was questioning was people spending so much time on SL that they lose track of reality. For the record, intimating that I can’t start a business on SL… or don’t want to… thus my opinion, you put yourself in a bit of hot water. Want some facts?
I not only run a business on SL, I run several. Do pretty well at it too. I don’t have to spend 16 hours a day supporting my customers, because I get IMs through my email and answer every single one of them. I work smarter, not harder. In addition, I also own a RL business which does pretty well; I retired at 45. What’s your planned age for retirement? (Oh wait, you’re working 16 hours a day. NM).
In addition to the above, I put in between 15 to 40 hours a month in charity work, because REAL LIFE people need help. I also don’t want my tombstone to read, “Played a lot of computer games”.
The message here? (and no, it’s not patting my own back). The message is simple: balance. If you love SL, fine. But don’t throw away your RL in the process. Or if you do, realize that not many people are going to consider that a worthwhile pursuit. SL is fine. It’s fun. It can be profitable even. It’s not all there is. Not telling you how to live your life, but I do recommend expanding your options a little.
October 5th, 2007 at 2:34 PM
LOL oops. Correction: 33 statistics per category. I should know better than to try to do math in my head when I’m tired.
October 5th, 2007 at 2:34 PM
Oman - the yanks are coming - the yanks are coming!
Run and hide heheh
October 5th, 2007 at 2:40 PM
Wasn’t it P.T. Barnum who said, “I don’t care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right.”? More and more articles and statistics are published every day about SL, and each one of them knows how to spell “Second Life.”
Now, let me get back to my “Second Life.” If I am only allowed 12 minutes, I need to rush.
Thanks, ginsulinden - I needed a laugh.
October 5th, 2007 at 2:41 PM
lol talking statistics….when it’s a blog in support of use of SL we can magically post beyond 100…..when it’s something anti SL like performance or VAT, posts are either disabled or restricted…even playing field…allow unlimited comments on ALL blogs, not just those supporting how long we spend in SL trying to get our VAT monies worth….
October 5th, 2007 at 2:44 PM
HEAR HEAR Storyof. We have to wonder how much it’s really “Our world” when COMMENTS are CLOSED on 50% of the blog entries, or as you say, capped at 100 (unless LL wants it otherwise).
Come on, if it’s our world, let US speak! (Which BTW, this particular blog contains some refreshingly diversified comments on both sides of the issue. That’s what “our” world is all about).