[...] 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 [...]

[...] 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. … [...]

[...] 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. [...]

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”.

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”.

blog.gamemarketmetrics.net

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.

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.

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.”

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.