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More Second Life stats

November 17th, 2006 (Visited 3819 times) Tags:

Yeah, the post over at Electric Sheep is actually about CopyBot, and the meeting that Philip Linden held yesterday. But there were stats dropped, and as we all know, this blog likes stats.

There are some economic stats there, but by and large, there’s no other worlds to compare them to, so there’s little point in reprinting them as they mostly just come across as breathless numbers. More interesting are the ones that we have a basis for comparison:

Over 75,000 unique users log in each day
They spend over 250,000 hours per day
With an average 3 hour session per person
The overall user growth is still 23% month-on-month
60-day user login number is 591,546
Weekly uniques appears to be 201,522

If you have experience with typical VW population ratios for these figures, your immediate thought is “healthy growth, real numbers there, but something doesn’t add up” — the numbers just “look wrong.” I’ve been working on figuring out why, and I think it relates to play patterns. But that is for another post.

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Faith wrote on November 17th, 2006 at 12:08 pm:

[...] Comments [...]

¥á¥¿¥Ð¡¼¥¹-metaverse information wrote on November 18th, 2006 at 3:59 am:

Morning coffee: Nov. 3 (USA Today) (Feedster on: second life) 11/18 03:18 Speaking at PodCamp West this Sunday, SF (Feedster on: second life) 11/18 03:10 radio station (Feedster on: second life) 11/18 01:21 More Second Life stats (Feedster on: second life) 11/18 01:14 Playstation 3 strategy: user-created (Feedster on: second life) 11/17 13:42 Close Encounter UFO Museum (Feedster on: metaverse) 11/17 13:31

KnowProSE.com - Where One Line Can Make A Difference wrote on November 19th, 2006 at 7:02 pm:

Raph Koster has some good thoughts on the numbers game of accounts in SecondLife. I was writing a comment that ended up being pretty long, so I’m rephrasing it here. From my perspective, there are different ways to look at the numbers. The number of accounts in SecondLife and the number of actual humans involved are obviously

CPCC 3D Campus / SLC3 wrote on November 25th, 2006 at 10:45 pm:

So where was I? Ok, the NPR article: This was from JANUARY, decades ago in SL time… http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4488103 but still not the one i heard… But i found this interesting bit about stats: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/11/17/more-second-life-stats/ And evidently On the Media covered this before: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/09/on_the_media_on.html Still looking… OK, so it wasn’t On the Media, it was Here and Now… progress… AHA! http://www.here-now.org/shows/2006/11/20061124_1.asp

MMODIG - Massively Multiplayer Online Dysfunctionaly Interactive Games » Ohhhh perty. wrote on December 9th, 2006 at 3:11 am:

[...] Anyways, asides from the stupidity of this blog being present in there thereby completely discrediting the entire bloody thing, what I find interesting is how segregated the second life community is from the MMO blogsphere. I mean, we all talk, bitch, rant, complain about it all the goddamned fucking blasted wanking time but damned if any of us are going to link to it in our blogroll. Then again, none of us endorse second lifechild pornography, well, with the exception of lum none of us do, but he’s a dirty old man. [...]

people on club penguin per day: Web Search Results from Answers.com wrote on April 5th, 2007 at 10:29 am:

[...] 3: Return to Club Penguin, especially looking for instances of …mgolding.wordpress.com/tag/k12/Raph’s Website » More Second Life statsI have a website that maybe gets 500 users per day tops, and yet makes me 3000 a month. … [...]

Second Life Herald: wrote on November 10th, 2007 at 6:22 am:

[...] residents of Second Life and talk about two million users being just around the corner. But, in a recent blog post, Raph Koster takes a look at the recent population stats released at the most recent Linden Town [...]

Tide said on November 17th, 2006 at 8:57 am:

well, if there’s 75k uniques/day over 60 days that should 4.5M. The 591k over the same period is much lower than that. You can tee off from there.

Raph said on November 17th, 2006 at 9:00 am:

No, that’s not how it works. You can’t multiply the 75k times 60. Instead, the 75k * 2 should be close to the 30 day figure (”half your base logs in every day”).

Steven "PlayNoEvil" Davis said on November 17th, 2006 at 10:24 am:

The other way to look at this would be like the Asian games - peak concurrent users (PCU) and average concurrent users… this is certainly a better metric for a “virtual asset purchase” / free-to-play game.

Given that the total daily numbers are only 75K, the PCU and ACU metrics have got to be grim (unless everyone is on PST ).

They probably don’t know user growth, based on the discussions of alts counting as additional users, so th 23% is not so impressive. Matt Mihaly reports distinct IPs, which would give some approximation of actual users vs. accounts (and should be easy to extract). Or they could measure distinct client downloads per month.

One always fears with SL that they pick the metric to make the VCs happiest.

Also, a potential metric of online game / virtual world utilization or viability is average users per server. Based on the 1000+ servers that we have heard previously for SL, then we would expect that the average server is handling , what, 10 users at most, probably a lot less?

Brent Michael Krupp said on November 17th, 2006 at 12:42 pm:

How many of those 60-day logins are people falling for the insane hype, logging in once, and giving up on the crappy interface and never coming back?

Raph said on November 17th, 2006 at 12:44 pm:

That’s what I am trying to analyze, Brent.

My estimate says that there are 100-150k regular SL users, and a huge amount of folks who are trials.

Raph said on November 17th, 2006 at 12:45 pm:

Steven, PCU is in the 8-11k range.

MikeRozak said on November 17th, 2006 at 1:43 pm:

I posted a simple linear algebra equation on Raph’s blog the last time he mentioned this a month or two ago. It came up with around 80K real players, so 100K-120K would seem possible now.

Steven "PlayNoEvil" Davis said on November 17th, 2006 at 2:21 pm:

Raph - Thanks for the update.

If SL reported 8-11k PCU, no one would care about the service at all… a lot of modest MMOs hit those numbers (I think Matt M. could give them a run for their money - on a single server).

Michelle Readman said on November 17th, 2006 at 3:08 pm:

This isn’t relating to the stats, I’m afraid, but more the copybot issue again, or rather the general issue of exploiting the system (yes, I know copybot isn’t, really, but…)…

All VWs with rules suffer to some degree exploits and avoidances of those rules. Traditionally the people running the VW deal with their troublemakers alone, banning just them. However I’m willing to bet that those abusing one game will do so again in another. Will the time come where seperate VW managements share details of those who break their ToS, resulting in “banned in one, banned in all”?

blaze@blaze.com said on November 18th, 2006 at 10:50 pm:

It’s quality, not quantity folks.

I have a website that maybe gets 500 users per day tops, and yet makes me 3000 a month. Some people have websites that get them 50,000 and they’re lucky if they make 1000 a month.

Wagner James Au said on November 19th, 2006 at 12:55 am:

Raph, Philip gave out a retention percentage for a NWN article written by Tateru Nino:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/11/new_world_numbe.html

It’s unknown how many new residents we’re retaining. A range of guesses from volunteers average a little under 1 in 50. As you may expect this is a highly subjective number, as every resident has a very partial and personal view of the world of Second Life.

Philip Rosedale, when presented with this consensus, gave something a little firmer to work with.

“Actually, it is much higher than that,” he said. “Although Second Life is still challenging to get used to, about 10% of newly created residents are still logging into Second Life weekly, 3 months later. 10% is pretty good given the computer requirements and steep learning curve”

Surprisingly, he added, “That percentage hasn’t changed much with the much higher rate of new users.”

Raph said on November 19th, 2006 at 6:49 am:

Conversion numbers don’t tend to change very much, actually, so it’s not that surprising.

A net 10% conversion is pretty good for this sort of business model. I have been running numbers, and I had arrived at more like 5%, which means this is a useful data point… it suggests even more about how regular users tend to play. Thanks for the pointer.

Lordfly Digeridoo said on November 19th, 2006 at 11:04 am:

I’m scarcely a genius at math, but I did some of my own number-crunching, mostly based from SL’s Economic Statistics page.

I came up with around 43,000 actual involved users. By involved, I mean they’ve been in SL more than two weeks and have some sort of a stake in-world (friends, business, land, etc.)

Then again, it’s mostly guesswork. But if you take out all of the new accounts coming in, you’d probably get around 40-50,000 uniques per day.

In my experience in SL (3.5 years), people seem to either “get” SL and embrace it whole-heartedly, or they don’t. There isn’t much of a middle ground/casual userbase. You’re either there for long hours or you’re never there at all.

Allen said on November 19th, 2006 at 12:30 pm:

I still have the link up at the blog related to the numbers from the post about 2 months ago if anyone still interested

blog.gamemarketmetrics.net

Tom said on November 20th, 2006 at 10:42 am:

You can easily calculate the daily uniques yourself given the info Linden publishes. Their usage follows roughly a square-root growth, so if you divide the 7-day uniques by sqrt(7), you find the daily uniques hovering in around the 65k-75k range.

Now, if you subtract new users from that (remember, SL is registering 12k-20k accounts per day on average), you’ll find roughly 60k-65k accounts that aren’t new sign-ups logging in daily.

I agree with Lordfly in that those who stay with Second Life will stick around a long time and remain frequently active. Those who don’t “get it”, will be gone within a week.

My estimate is 70k — 120k total honest-to-goodness “users”.

Prokofy Neva said on November 21st, 2006 at 5:11 am:

Eyeballing it, without any math formulas, just looking at the realness inworld of new people coming and staying and going, and the figures put up on the website, I am going to say there are 100,000 real people really logging in. There are a lot more alts than people really want to give credit for, and a lot more people going through 90 day or 365 day burnout who leave for awhile then come back than people want to admit, either. Still, growth is climing steadily, and I keep pointing out that GNP, the actual amount of money spent (another artificial but still interesting figure) would be a more reliable way to understand this world, not just population — this was argued on these pages before.

A tekkie I know used this formula:

V=Vapour numbers
R=Real numbers

logged-in-past-7-days = V + R
logged-in-past-14-days = 2*V + R

He then got V = 80,000 and R = 90,000.

I have no idea how he justified this formula.

I think some serious analysis is needed on the retention problems which I believe have to do with the continual default to look at SL as a beta-test, crowdsourcing effort to recruit programmers and designers to build the world, and an inability of those people, who run the recruiting groups (the thousands of mentors, greeters, helpers hand-picked and blessed by the Lindens) and try to steer newbies toward what they view as productive activities like learning to build and script.

They have not been willing to turn the care and feeding of newbies to market forces both within non-profits competing with each other with better services or with profit-making ventues. There is an unreasonable fear and infantalizing of newbies (just DSL and computer users like ourselves) and reluctance to expose these vulnerable fragile souls to anything as crass as a billboard that might take them to a club, themed community like furries, or customized orientation — for free or a small price. Instead, newbies pile up and flail around while some earnest type tries to answer their question, “How do I get a job?” with the reply “Well, like RL, you will have to go study how to build and texture, then you may enter the economy under our tutelage”.

More Second Life stats

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