Linden Labs has just published a “preliminary” version of some interesting statistics regarding the who, what, and how of their synthetic space, available as an .XLS [Microsoft Excel] spreadsheet. Read the February 2007 SL Virtual Economy Metrics.
Some interesting, accessible statistics:
- 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.
- Unique users represent approximately 63% of Total Residents.
- Approximately 10% of unique users have logged in for 40 hours or more.
- The top five countries are the US, France, Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands.
- 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.
1 response so far ↓
1 Alyssa // Feb 10, 2007 at 3:03 pm
I noticed this report yesterday and am glad to see you’d posted it here on Play’s Republic. A few things that caught my attention:
The first you already mentioned, which is that only 10% of users have logged 40 hours or more. Consider that 40 hours is really not that much time to log within a virtual world like SL, where you can quickly use up 5 straight hours on building a basic object (like a picture frame), touring a destination, or just fiddling with your avatar’s appearance. You do that 8 times and you’re already up to 40 hours. Just interesting to think that 90% (a whoppingly huge majority) have NOT spent that much (that little?) time in SL. Which leads us to a “Big Question” - what can Linden Labs do to encourage longer or more frequent visits among this 90%?
Also interesting is the statistic that 16% of users have Premium Accounts, so we can easily deduce that 84% of users are Basic users, i.e. do not own land. Given how central to the SL experience it can be to own land, does this number seem low? Yet looking at it some more, wouldn’t those Premium Accounts typically be contained within the 10% discussed above? Who owns land yet has spent less than 40 hours in SL? (Other than speculators.) Now what I would like to know is what % of the 40-hour users are Premium users; I imagine it would be significantly higher than 16%! Can we deduce anything meaningful? Perhaps that investing $L in land leads people to invest more time - or investing time leads to investing $L - but this is a pretty obvious conclusion. I wonder how the Lindens are analyzing these numbers, and for what purpose. One major issue I see is the question of whether to pour more energy into encouraging people to invest time; or encouraging people to invest money; since both are important, but marketing campaigns must have narrow foci if they are to work.
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