Second Life Hourly Traffic Patterns

I decided to create a bar graph of hourly traffic patterns in Second Life for those seeking this information to help them plan events, employment opportunities, or business strategy.

The graph was created by averaging out the number of unique avatars seen every hour over the period of 2 months throughout over 95 different sims.



Rathe Underthorn
MetaAdverse
http://www.metaadverse.com

Thanks Rathe -- I enjoy learning about stuff like this.

excellent. when it comes to geeky stats i like that, i wanna see as many as yer willing to put up

l.

Okay, since you liked that one. Here it is grouped by weekdays where 0 = Sunday and 6 = Saturday in PST. Clearly Mondays are not fun days.



Rathe Underthorn
MetaAdverse
http://www.metaadverse.com

Interesting. It'd be fun (and potentially useful) to see this broken down on the basis of various attributes of the avatars/users being measured. For example, how it relates to people's time zone, or what they do on SL, or how long they stay on or stay in one place.

Perhaps there could be a way to relate this sort of measurement to survey results.

Is there a way for you to make a similar graph that shows how long each avatar stays on?

I anticipate that some people would be opposed to specific information about their activities being collected (or especially shared), so it'd probably be necessary to get permission from people to do an in-depth analysis and presentation of trends. But it's great to learn more about how SL is used and how people would like to use it.

This is very cool, Rathe. Thank you.

Well here is the hourly one based on impressions rather than uniques. This refers to a 15-second or longer viewing by a unique avatar and thus reflects hours in which people are more likely to linger in one area. It actually is very similiar to the unique hourly one with the exception of the interesting lingering that happens at high noon.



Rathe Underthorn
MetaAdverse
http://www.metaadverse.com

If someone is an experienced statition who would like to further aggregate this large set of traffic data for the shared knowledge of the community I may be willing to provide this data set (anonymized).

Though due to the work involved of putting together and anonymizing the data you must prove that you are indeed capable of complex analyzation involving multiple depths beyond the scope of the graphs provided in this thread.

'It actually is very similiar to the unique hourly one with the exception of the interesting lingering that happens at high noon. '


nooners in front of the metaadverse signs? heeheehee

Well done, Rathe.

must......have......more......data......

OMG, Rathe.... great stuff!

Thanks!!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I've been desperate for this very data for a project I'm working on.

Regarding further analysis, IRL I'm a doctoral student in an educational research program, with stats classes running out of my ears. Is there anything in particular you had in mind to do with this data, statistically? I've got a couple of term papers to write for a multivariate statistics course and a very understanding prof who seems intrigued by SL. He and I have discussed trying to do a factor analysis to determine the real "categories" of players in SL. It would depend on what kind of data you have, though.

As an easy addition to your current graphs, it would be nice to see the results as the percentage of "active" users, e.g. what percent of the users who logged in all week were logged in on Mondays? This can be determined from your graphs (sort of), but I'm a bit lazy, and besides that, I don't know how many impressions are overlaps between days. I think the number of actives over a recent span of two months is somewhere between 4000 and 5000?

neko

Find your research and graphs so helpful Rathe. Keep up the good work!!!!

Sumar Morgan

Rathe is the virtual "Man".

Just to be clear, the graphs represent the number of unique users seen by metaadverse's sesors in the relevant time periods and those sensors exist in "over 95 sims"? What does that tell me about how many users the whole of SL sees? Is it possible to interpolate - clearly some sims see a lot more traffic than others.

While it's true that some sims see more traffic than others you could probably safely assume that its a good average representation since it represents about 97 of 692 sims, or 14%. Using those estimates you could divide each figure by 0.14 to get an estimate of the total world.

I do have a method of tracking the exact amount of users online at any given time but haven't bothered to log it over a long enough period to graph the traffic patterns. I may get around to doing this some day if it would be useful enough.

Very usefull infomation, Thanks

These are really helpful, Rathe. Much appreciated.

-- Neal Stewart

This is great stuff. It would be wonderful to have actual sim names so we could see which sims/businesses/residences, etc. are attracting the traffick and the "stickiness".

Just a study of telehubs and malls alone would be interesting to check all the impressions and anecdotal experiences that people have about malls against the reality of traffic.

Can you break it down by telehub sim?

As many others have said, that's cool, and thanks for posting it here




~Olympia

My clock only goes to 12.

Prok is right, it would be interisting to see it based on sims as well.

Actualy I'd be interested in seeing sim traffic graphed for all sims, perhaps through the Alt-1 (uhh... ctrl-alt-shift-1? or whatever the hell it is (stupid Macs)) window. Or something like how Chromal had/has the sim FPS page.

Getting the traffic for all sims would actualy help advertisers (fortunatly/unfortantly depending on how you look at it) in placing ads in good locations.

Good work thusfar.

Totally Cool! Thanks, Rathe!