Questions about the number of SL residents...

How many total users are there in SL?

How many, on average, are online at any given time?

How many of these users, both total and active, have a membership beyond the basic membership?

Thank you for the stats.

I've never heard any usage stats from LL, that doesn't mean they don't release them, you could try doing a search in the forums, or hope a L responds

Total population is an estimated 10,000-15,000 accounts. More than that I don' t know.

In most recent news reports like this one they usually mention the number 10,000 active residents.

How many are ACTIVE?

I know a few who have accounts and haven't logged in for months.

The economic and land-usage stats imply that there are 15,000 +/-1,000 users. I don't know if that's active or total. The only way to find out how many are online at a given time is to bring up the world map and start counting green dots.

I also would agree on the 10.000-15.000 figure from available stats. Yes, there are a lot of newbies here, but most of them don't stay for long (I'm a newbie too). After a few weeks one sees the same people all over the place.

What is an "active member" according to your definition? Someone who logs in every day and goes to most events? Someone who just logs once a week but does an amazing contribution in architecture/texturing/clothing/animation/scripting? It's very hard to measure "activity" in the context frame of SL.

I would agree that from those 10-15.000 residents, there are always 300-3000 logged in at the same time (yeah, counting green dots on an average basis with a large margin of error, lol)

Just for the sake of curiosity, Tinker, why do you ask? Have you tried to get in touch with PR of LL? They would probably be able to provide you with concrete data.

I've made some statistics available here.

Some more data from my collectors (read the Info section on the above page first):

Since 2004-06-12 I've counted 12588 unique users in Second Life.

7823 of them have been spotted in world in the last 30 days.

O my.. my avi is the only one born on 2003-08-28...

It would be interesting to see if certain lastnames have more players with certain skills. Like, do we pick a name because we think in a similar way?

Just a thought. No idea how you would do that

Well, we could set up a poll in one of the many free poll servers. People would select their family name, and click on checkboxes for their skills, like "scriptor", "builder", "texturer", "event hoster", "animator", "clothes designer", "land baron", etc...

if we get some statistically significant number of people voting at the poll, we could try to extrapolate.

Personally I'm a little skeptic on that approach:

1. People can answer what they want and assign it to any family name
   
2. Multiple choices will certainly be possible. In that case, so many people would check almost all checkboxes making it very hard to clearly separate skills
   
3. You could create subcategories for each skill, say, male/female clothing. Still this wouldn't be perfect - I mostly do female clothing, but I did a few male items. Which checkbox should I click?
   
4. If you use slide bars (0-100%) instead of checkboxes, statistics will show that most people will, on average, have 50% of all skills! Also difficult to separate...
   
5. How can we guarantee that we have not only a fair proportion of total residents, but also a fair proportion for each family name? That is, in the overall survey there may be 5-7% answers, but some family names would be left out completely, or just represented by 1 or 2 members, which would not be statistically significative.
   [/list=1]
   
   So I guess this would be a very hard survey to do. Still it's an interesting question!
   
   - Gwyneth (who has met two Llewelyns so far sharing absolutely no skills with her... that's also a statistical anomaly!)