How fast SL is growing?

Im actually looking for some 'indicator' that would describe the growing rate of SL. My objective would be to know how fast our world is spreading. There is few values on the main page of SL (total population, inworld population, $$$ transactions). What would be interesting is to know the history of those indicator to predict how fast SL is expending.

Is there someone having informations about the growing rate of SL?

Do you think SL is expending at a constant rate (like steady 3% every month) or or its following an exponential curve?

How much resident do you predict in 1 year from now? 5 years?

Depends on what your agenda is I think.

Do you want an accurate number for financial planning?
Do you want a positive number?
Do you want something that shows the promise of SL?
Do you want something that shows that SL isn't growing?


The best place to go is:

http://planet0.planet-zero.org/~chromal/slpop/

However,

http://secondlife.com/community/economy.php

is pretty interesting as well.


Frankly, I keep my eye on how many sims have been auctioned(http://secondlife.com/auctions/closed.php) because that includes the best guesses of people who are spending a lot of money, and I'd like to think that they probably spend some time thinking through their purchasing decisions.



If you go by how many sims are being auctioned in the economy report (above), then the growth has exploded amazing in the last couple of months, however, someone may have spiked the punch and killing telehubs might have been a sign of the party crashing for the night.

There's always next weekend though, so you never know.

In terms of future predictions, that's a tough one.

I honestly think that depends more on people like you Jimmy, then it does on LL.

The fact is, LL has done a pretty good job. With the creation of

- HUD,
- Direct to Parcel referrals

LL has really put a lot of tools in our hands to *make it happen*.

I think the burden has shifted to us (and bedazzled for being a leader) to start building something and advertising outside of SecondLife rather than simply cannabalizing each others customers.

So far, I've only met one group inside of SL that is really attempting this. I think the education / modelling / training industry has moved in a bit, but that's a different kettle of fish and you wonder how much of that is just grant money.

Respectfully,

SL Population Regression

Yeah, except those numbers miss all the main land rentals / island renters.

If you've got more descriptive data, I'll crunch the numbers. =)

I think it's a bit dangerous to predict growth.

LL isn't going to grow simply for the sake of growing .. it will grow because we feed it a nutritious diet of yummy, compelling content.

If you want to know how much it's going to grow, I suggest you come up with an idea and go buy some adwords off of Google and advertise it and bring in new users. That's how much it will grow.

Nice! Question (from one "data junkie" to another): What is the source for this data?

I only ask because I am looking for such a source for quite some while now.

Ooops, I really should read before I comment Just saw that is was some sort of heuristics formula based on DI that Lordfly set up.

On the other hand: I would like to suggest that the number of landowners - while very interesting for the structure of the SL society - does not tell us that much about the size of this society or the size of the economy. Much more relevant indicators for that are

1. the number of sims auctioned off (because that is the source of all land)
   
2. the absolute weekly turnover (total sales) in the SL economy (data has not been updated for over a month now)
   
3. the number of residents; basic accounts are interesting customers, too
   
4. the number of concurrent users (peak and/or average)
   

And if you look at these numbers you will see that all of indicators talk about a monthly growth of no less than 10%. There are phases where the numbers are much higher. After the introduction of free basic accounts, the number of residents grew some 20%/month for a while (and currently the number of concurrent users grows some 20%/month), But its back to around 10% now.

To come back to the initial question: These are all short term trends! What this means for the timespan of a year or five years is hard to specify. No one would predict a five year trend in such a business seriously

But I am fairly sure, that we will reach 100.000 residents this year, more than 250.000 next year and, that the monthly turnover in the SL economy will top 1,000 Million L$ at the end of 2006. These are conservative estimates...