Woohoo!!! 80,000!!!

Seeing as how no one else seems to have commented on it, I thought I'd mention that just now when I pulled up the SL website for the first time today, the population of Second Life stood at 80,313.

Yay!

P2

WoW!

And how many of these are active individual accounts...?

Doesn´t matter, does it?

Mel

woot... asset servers aren't quite smoking yet but the cases are softening nicely.

Uh... 17. The rest are alts.



P2

It does. If 80,000 people made accounts but most of those thought SL was crap, then we are getting negative publicity that may prevent some people from joining in the future, who would otherwise enjoy SL.

WoW = i heard 1 million active hehe

OMG thats crazy but good

But surely, as we're growing pretty damn fast, a large proportion of it must be good publicity?

It does. It also matters how many of those account are premium and how many are land owners beyond their premum tierage. A graph of upgrade percentages will show either an upward or downward trend in advertising costs. That would be interesting to see.

What matters most is the retention of accounts that are logging in on a weekly basis indicating that an individual is using the product. Retention percentage, graphed over the last two years, is the most telling trend when considering how successful an online product is.

LL sharing this data with us is highly unlikely. They don't have a penchant for tapping the vast human resources at their disposal. I imagine that hundreds of residents would work to recruit new users if they were shown a downward trend. But that ranks right up there with adding users to feature development teams. That ain't gonna happen either.

The blog world is lighting up about SL and most of it is favorable. I have a persistant google blog search for the words "Second Life", and new people are blogging about SL everyday.

There are also a lot of tragedies that occur that "take a second life"... I wish people would start dieing in 1's or 3's. If a car crash "takes a third life", I wouldn't have to read about it :/

Dont forget meatbags, that doesnt JUST take into account for mature grid, i head the teen grid jumped to about 8000 in past 2 weeks, so they add to this monotony

11 if you include the Linden staff person.

Rofl!

*raises hand* OOO OOOO put me in the 11. *pokes* I'm an individual lol

Well, there's at least 5500 land holders, if we extrapolate that from the Dev Incentive awards given out (which are always the top two percent of dwell-getters).

So we're growing. I think last I checked (few months ago?) We stood at either 3900 or 4400 landholders.

A steady growth.

LF

This offers far more information and encouragement than a flat number of open accounts.

No one disputes the fact that we are growing. But we are not growing fast enough, and certainly not by the insane amounts that number seems to indicate.

Guests don't count.

LMAO !!!! i'm a registered user but the USER CP doesn't update the info i save yet another problem not being fixed *sigh*

Of course not. No company ever grows as fast as they say they are. That would be bad business.

Instead, you inflate your customer numbers and let the marketing/word of mouth snowball effect kick in.

The important thing is that the landowner number is growing. As long as it steadily grows, SL is alright.

LF

edit: as an example... the original Lineage MMORPG out of Asia claimed something like 4-5 million players, well before there were even that many people playing MMORPGs as a total market... obviously they were counting all expired trial accounts too. But it sounds impressive, doesn't it?

LF

Hmmm, 'sounds impressive' doesn't pay the bills...

Well the population increase continues to pick up. 50,000 residents was reached on September 16th. 60,000 soon after on October 5th. It took 21 days to reach 70,000. But this time it only took 15 days to jump another 10,000 to 80,000. With 52 days remaining in 2005 we are clearly still on pace to reach 100,000 residents by New Years Eve.

Actually, that 5,500 is comprised of those residents paying tier fees (over 512-sq.m of land). That's _almost_ 9-percent more tier fee-paying residents than in September: 5,050.

An increase of 9-percent is healthy, isn't it? Not when compared as a percentage to the population as a whole (more than 80,000 total residents, as of today). Those same 5,500-tier fee-paying residents make up 6.875-percent of the total population.

I looked at this number a few months back (not more than 6-months ago) and at the time approximately 12-percent of the total population was paying tier fees.

That's a _stiff_ 57-percent decline in the percent of residents paying tier fees when compared to the population as a whole. (And this decline was happening prior to the release of version 1.7, though that may still exacerbate the situation.)

Yes, there has been a slight increase in the total number of residents paying tier. Yes, there has been an increase in the total size of the resident population. But, no, this is not a sign of "steady growth" as tier fee-paying residents are "bread and butter" accounts. (The largest portion of revenue for Second Life is derived from tier fees.)

Fundamentally, the problem Second Life faces _right now_ is converting Basic accounts to Premium accounts ("getting people to put down roots" and then moving up into tier ("expanding their roots".

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

A few months ago we also didn't have free basic accounts. A few months ago there were a lot less private sims and mainland sims (we get on average about one a day, I think).

A few months ago we weren't on Fox News.

The more people try out SL and use it on a daily basis, the more people are likely to "settle down", as it were.

Furthermore, there are those without land that are driving LLab's sales.

How, you say?

Well, every time someone buys money on the Lindex to fund their bling habit, they're paying money to content creators. Content creators then take this money and usually re-invest it into SL, paying more in tier. More tier can mean more content, which means more bling customers, which means more Lindex purchases, etc. Thus the cycle continues. It's a very nice circle.

So we might have less percentage of tier holders, but last I checked, 100% of tierable land was held.

I'll worry when the average concurrent max user count slips, and when the amount of landholders slips.

LF