Statistics on Retention

Just for laughs and for the 3 people who actually would be interested in this information, I present the results of my 9 month Infohub experiement.

Background: many people know that I created my own Infohub at The Botanical Gardens for people who wanted to set their home there. Part of my interest in doing so was to test a theory that "homing" residents someplace with like-minded individuals would increase retention as they made friends are felt a sense of "place."

In 9 months, approximately 990 people have joined the group, which averages out to 110 people a month.

Looking at the last login dates, I count approx 17 people every month who leave SL never to return.

So, for every 110 people who join the Friends of the Botanical Gardens group, 17 leave SL altogether.

14.5% loss rate each month.

This is, of course, relatively meaningless without knowing what the loss rate is for residents homed at regular Linden Infohubs and (god forbid) places like Waterhead and the WA. But the information is there JUST IN CASE anyone who has a burning desire to study retention rates wants to file it away someplace.

That's the inverse of what the normal rate is, though. I believe the retention rate overall is about 10%.

sounds like people who join that group have a pretty good retention rate.

Good experiment. But it could be somewhat misleading. What is the retention rate for all the people who did not join the group? We'll never know.

One other point. I think even the regular retention rates are contaminated by the high threshold in 3d graphics. I bet that a lot of people who never come back try for a couple of hours, never get better than 2fps, and give up before they get hooked.

Cool study, Isablan. See, this sort of proves what I've been saying about putting newbies through the welcome portals, instead of allowing them to join SL without coming through a portal. If people have a place to instantly call "home" and hang out with like-minded people, they're probably more likely to stay in SL. We've all been saying that the newbie experience (aka the standard LL new avatar OI) is crap, sort of scary, and really boring and confusing. Sigh. When will LL catch a clue?

You seem to have done a worthwhile experiment. One has to assume, though, that a significant proportion of dropouts are because people leave to create a new alt, perhaps simply because they want a better name or whatever. Also a lot of people probably have group-sitter alts, created just to keep group membership at the minimum level and then take no further part in SL.