Population rise

Has anyone been tracking the rise in the SL population recently. It's gone up by about 150 000 in the last month. It seems to rise by 5000 to 10 000 daily. At this rate it will reach a million in two months!

Is this good or bad? Good news for designers and vendors? What is attracting them? Do they all turn up asking where the guns are?

Albion

Yep, and then they ask how they can make money in SL, or more often, they ask you to give them money.

Good/Bad: *shrugs* Looks good on paper, but really has no actual impact on the world.

Designers/Vendors: No impact. Most of the numbers are Alts or "one dayers" who come in cause it's free, look around, and leave never to return.

Attraction: For the Alts-Freedom. LL put out Open Enrollment when they don't have the means to track Alts to Mains. Cart, Horse, any questions? *use the "Second Dumbest Management Decision" stamp here*
For the Teens-Less hassle than the Teen Grid. Teen Grid requires Payment Information to create an account, the Main Grid does not. If you were a teen, which would you go for? *use the "THE Dumbest Management Decision" stamp here*

Guns: Nope. Most of the griefers know where to find them when they create thier Alts. The ones asking for guns are usually true newbies, or those intrested in combat within SL. The last catagory is trolls on the forums just being trolls.

The real numbers come from how many are active, and how many are in-world at any given time. If you believe the numbers. After the use of Open Enrollment to boost population numbers in the first place (more numbers looks better for ads), I will never believe a single word from LL about how many Residents we have. The current system is a bold lie to anyone who looks at the numbers and has been here long enough to know better. It's only used to suck in new people. Just like any other slimeball used car salesman.

Quite frank, I believe LL really needs to fire thier PR department and start over there.

~Jessy

When I started a little under a year ago, the population was 68,000.

...and we walked to school. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways.

...ask me sometime about how I invented the belt!

Uh, you're not serious, are you? Have you even looked at the numbers? Out of the 500,000+ users, there have been 250,000+ unique accounts logged in within the past 60 days. When we did SLCC1 last October (9.5 months ago - way less than a year), there were 50,000 accounts TOTAL on the front page. That is what's known as a hidden indicator that they're not all "one dayers" or alts.

Unless you have some stats to back up your claims that I'm missing?

More here:
https://secondlife.com/currency/economy.php

Regards,

-Flip

Oh no.....and I know where they are all coming from too...

No numbers to back it up. As I said, they lie.

I base my statement on talking with many of my firends who run stores in SL. Most say there as been really no change. A slight steady climb is all, but nothing out of the ordinary that wasn't happening before Open Registration. Wether people are comming in or not doesn't really matter. New Basics have no money. How can they spend? So it's still not an impact on buisnesses. (yes they can buy the L$, but are they?).

Figures don't mean a thing to me over reality (or cyber-reality as it were). That front page can list any number LL wants to put there.

~Jessy

I don't see how the surge in new residents can be purely down to alts, especially as I understand that you have to pay now for new accounts. And hearsay is hardly more reliable than statistics. As for 'new basics' having no money, many will become paying residents. It took me two days to upgrade.

Albion

yah, sorry. I was bored. I'll stop making accounts now

I've come across quite a few unverifieds who're actually adults that have simply opted, given the option, not to give CC information. If I had been given the same choice when I joined, I may have done the same thing. Whenever I come across someone who's unverified and they dont seem lik there relly yung lik 14 lolz!!!!111111 I tell them about what's going on right now, and many of them, given that info, have said they plan on verifying. Some that I've seen a second time I know have done so. I probably have this conversation more frequently because I work somewhere that, based on past experience with unverifieds when they were first allowed in, only hires verified residents. And people new to the game don't always understand what that means, stop by anyway.

I think it's fair to say that allowing anyone to join without any of the really personal information up front makes SL a lot more attractive, not just to people under 18. And getting them on the grid is, as I see it, just LL getting their foot in the door. For people who are old enough to be able to verify easily, once having a full grasp of the situation, I don't think there's much that's going to stop a lot of them.

So imo, some of it is good. It's growth. Some of it is bad, too, of course. But hopefully the updates will continue to bring new tools for managing the bad.

The good is I think going to be good for everybody in the long run. It'll only mean more diversity and a more active economy, hopefully more pressure on LL to find ways to reduce lag and clean up the client more. The bad's pretty crappy, but that's been said often enough.

I think they're coming because the accounts are free now, and because of all of the recent press. I think the past 3 issues of Wired all had at least some mention of SL, not that Wired is really getting too far out of the current SL demographic.

--Mal

Nope. Basic accounts are free. Period. Just made one.

And yes, my knowledge is hearsay to everyone else. The statistis are hearsay to me. Here's why:

IF LL could track unique accounts, then there would be no possibility of a banned griefer making an Alt and returning to grief (and they do. Ask around).

So either LL is lieing that they can track unique accounts, or they don't give a damn about policing the ToS CC violations enough to expand to include the unique IDs they already have.

A ban/suspention that hits the unique account would ban the Main and any Alts. LL does this and griefing would drop like a rock in a deep lake. Right now griefers laugh at LL.

Things that make you go "hmmmm".

~Jessy

"There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." -- Mark Twain

Probally the number of "real" active accounts is less than 100k. The 500k number is counting every account that was ever made. It is a great ploy when selling Second Life but meaningless.
We are being overrun by children, perverts, alts, the banned, griefers and other pests in general while Phillip plays his fiddle!
Oh I forgot to include police pretending to be children in hopes of luring perverts to the site of their arrest.
Welcome to the land of the fee!

Even if this is true the real active accounts must have been considerably less than that a month ago. It's an odd attitude some people have that the only 'real' residents in SL arrived here months ago.

Albion

I have a store near one of the remaining Info Hubs and there are many newbes visiting my store everyday, many of whom have "account info on file" (I check randomly). They also leave bunches of newbe prims at my store that needs to be cleaned out daily. I always check the profile of owners of these prims which turn out to always be newbes (of course).

So I would say that there are a fair number (20%?) of newbes that are paying residents here to stay for at least a while.

Well, that's not the meaning of my statement about the population. Sorry if it came across that way. The population IS increasing, although quite a bit slower than stats amke it appear, imo. Old accounts are leaving (always), new accounts come, stay for a bit, and then leave (always), some are banned (always). The stats do not point to the slow steady rise that is, in fact, the influx of new Residents who come in and make this world a bit better, bit by bit.

I just don't think it's as rapid a boom as the statistics suggest. IMO, all the stats are, is a marketing ad ploy. Others may feel otherwise.

~Jessy

I really think you're over-simplifying. SLBoutique has seen a steady increase in the number of accounts, total sales, and so forth ever since we started. We also have enough data that our figures *do* mean something, most definitely. Another thing I have noticed recently - since verification by CC was removed - is a lot more zero cost accounts have been added. The amount of traffic at the GNUbie freebie store in Indigo has skyrocketed, as has the amount of freebie transactions on SLBoutique. Just because they're not buying goods that cost L$ doesn't make them alts or "one dayers" as you suggest. Neither does talking with friends who run stores.

Regards,

-Flip

You're absolutely incorrect, and I have proof.

When the number on the front page was 35,000, I had over 60,000 unique avatar name/key pairs in my database! Where's your proof? Got none? I thought so... as usual, you make wild statements as if they were fact, with NOTHING to back it up.

Over 250,000 unique accounts have logged in in the past 60 days. Are you seriously trying to say, that with less than 100,000 accounts, that over 150,000 of those accounts are alts? That 400,000 of the total amount are alts? If you're truly making that statement, then there's no point in even having a debate, as logic has clearly passed you by. But don't let these pesky little facts get in the way of your typically negative diatribes or claims of being griefed around the clock.

Regards,

-Flip

Yet another reason that storekeepers might not be seeing more business, even with population growth: the number of MERCHANTS also continues to increase. So the bulk of the increase may be more sellers, each of whom are selling about as much stuff as before, rather than the existing sellers moving more stuff.

Clearly, some existing merchants HAVE done welll we have seen lots of existing stores upgrade their holdings recently. (A few off the top of my head: BareRose, Simone's, GURL 6, Textures R Us; apologies to the many more that I surely missed.) If you continue to produce new designs, so that you get both new residents and repeat business, your business can grow. Business that sit still on their existing product line, however, will at best see steady sales; newcomers may buy their things, but older residents will already have everything that they want from that store and not come back to buy more.

I've noticed a slight increase in sales, despite my recent laziness regarding new products Also, outside a few dedicated oldbie hangs, most residents I encounter joined this summer. I've also noticed more "foot traffic" at my home and store, again mostly new users. And yet, I could count on one had the number of times I've encountered griefing in 2 years (that is, if I consider the period when I lived next to the Sandbox Space Marines as a single, prolonged grief).

Ditto to this.

Hi Flip,

I did not say all of the extra accounts are alts just not really active residents.

Lets look at their numbers and do some basic math. Their total is 568, 856 as of the writing of this message. 254,449 have logged on within the last 60 days. That means 314,407 accounts that have not logged on within 60 days. I think it would be safe to assume that the vast majority of these accounts will never log on again.
The question is how many of these are alts, one day users, the banned returning, etc. I think an active rate of 50 percent is a fair one for the sixty day users. This leaves us with a number of 127, 225 active users. This is not far from my number of 100k.
Question how did you aquire the names in your datebase?

How does the teen grid population play into these numbers? Or do they?