SL population called "misleading", says CNET

Might as well discuss:

http://news.com.com/2100-1043_3-6146943.html

Agree? Disagree?

-peekay

Interesting, but we're not supposed to discuss.

coco

Neither agree nor disagree. Mostly could care less. All I know is that when 20,000 people are on at the same time, there are times the lag is unbearable (depending on where you are).

Other than that, pth.

They're only saying what most of us have been saying for a long, long time. Time to wipe out residents that haven't logged in after 60 days, each month, and then let's see what the figures show.

It's unfortunate that deliberately misleading people by artificially inflating the number of people here is used as part of its publicity; because when people find out they've been lied to about one thing, they'll begin to wonder what else is misleading, and perhaps not hang around long enough to find out the good stuff that's here.

Broccoli

I don't disagree that there is some debate and contoversey about how Linden Lab determines it's player base size, but using language like "deliberately misleading", "artificially inflating", and "lied" is a bad habit to get into. Soon you won't have any language left to label real deception.

Misleading it is, Deliberately my opinion is yes, Lying technically no. Artificially inflated, yes, it's called remove all real hurdles to registering as many times as you want... Now I couldn't tell you how much of an inflation that causes... but then again neither can LL.

Now, for the record, I don't have a problem with any of that. I would probably do the same in their position, and It's their stress, they can do what they like. The more of a user base they actually have (and doing the above gets them publicity which increases their actual user base), the more incentive they have to keep working on it. Go for it.

I agree completely...


and also, it is disgusting that the premium users pay for everything and for all the free accounts.

I am constantly surprised at how many 'people' I meet in-game are within their first week. Free trials at least must be continued in order to catch the customer but how many of these free account holders are renting and hence still puting something in?

I regularly see the number of in-game participants at the 20,000 mark. It was only half that when I joined in October so the ratio at least is right even if the 'total' is inaccurate.

Just marketing, innit?

Second Life is also 0% fat and kind to your skin.*


Chellonia Regent

* Well you're out of the sun, aren't you? See how this works?

... and nine out of every ten account holders when asked, said their avatars prefer it!

An attitude like yours, now that's truly disgusting.

I am "a free account". Verified, with payment info used, but yet a free account and I don't feel inferior or a parasite either, like some comments about "us free accounts" may hint.

I am a free account because LL allows me that. I'm not interested in the weekly stipend I could get being a premium account, nor I'm interested in buying land from LL.

I know I'm (in the eyes of some people) in the same boat with free, unverified residents (and free, unverified griefers); yet, I feel good being a free account "you pay for".

I give my contribution to SL making it a more lively and nice place. I do interact with residents (all the ones I meet) in 5 different languages; I have a job in SL, I go shopping, I dance and hang out, I rent an house, I recommend the places I like, I help newbies and friends both with SL issues and giving them shopping advice (best shops, sales, how to look good).

Sure, nothing more than everyone else could do, but my point is that people like me, while not paying a dime to LL, make up for a more robust and nice userbase, the kind of userbase that may give someone a reason more to be a premium account.

Anyway, it must be noted that so far nobody inworld ever accused me to be a free account, or told me to get lost because of that. Actually, some premium accounts do really like to have me around.

Ridiculous. But maybe it makes sense to ask you to clarify: Are you specifically talking about non-premium players (those that choose not to pay $10 US to LL each month)? Or are you talking about unverified players?

If you're talking about "free" as in non-premium (which is BASIC), you have absolutely no way of telling which players are basic or premium if they have been verified/payment info used.

Either way, that's such an oversimplified response that far too many seem to share.

Yep, that's true.

Anyway, it's an issue that can sometimes come up in chatting and all the "premium" residents I met had no problems with me being a "free" one.

I would also like to stress out that as a verified/payment info used account I don't think to be any better than any other free account, the same way I don't feel inferior compared to a "premium" one.

To me, there are good and bad residents (and all shades of gray). Period. And a resident may not give his/her money to LL, but still he/she can be a SL valuable asset (hence a good asset for LL too).

Ultimately I guess all that really matter is that SL has once again found a way to get into the press.

Good, bad, or muted, any press is good press.

Bad is good press? hmm, didn't do Richard Nixon a lot of good.



Lots of grey .. especially after teleporting!
but joking aside, SL brings us all a level playing field as I so often cry from my soapbox; race, religion, gender .. we are equal. It brings the barriers down.
Any snobbishness around "I'm premuim, I'm better than you" is merely puting them up again .. very sad.

Right, home time .... Second Life time!!!!

I'd love to reply to Bilbo, but that would be discussing.

coco

LL publishes more data about signups, concurrency, economic activity, land ownership, etc, than any other virtual world or social networking site. I've never seen anyone get up in arms about MySpace account statistics which are no doubt far more unreliable and nebulous than SL's. Even if a percentage of the second million is from existing users creating additional accounts, and even if most of the people who try SL never come back, the number of new people trying SL for the first time, considering that it's almost four years old, is incredibly impressive, and also unprecedented in the MMO space. All of which leads me to wonder why Clay Shirky has such an enormous bug up his ass about SL's numbers.

Very poor comparison.

MySpace inked a $900 million deal with Google recently in guaranteed revenues.

Any questions?

-peekay

Yes, I have a question. What does that have to do with the accuracy of usage statistics?

Would people like Page & Brin commit $900m to MySpace if their numbers were -- as you put it -- "more unreliable and nebulous than SL's." ?

Ever thought why Murdoch paid $580m to buy MySpace?

Think about it.

-peekay

Uh, yes, they would, obviously, because they have. Does MySpace publish data about how many people sign up for a MySpace account and then never use it and never return to the site again? Nope. Do they publish figures for how many MySpace accounts are created by people who already have existing accounts? Nope. Do they even publish figures about how many unique IP's log in the MySpace daily, weekly, or monthly? Not that I've ever seen. That all means that the number of users they claim is every bit as nebulous and unreliable as SL's. Your argument is no more meaninful than saying "would IBM, Sun Microsystems, Starpoint Hotels, Dell, and all the other large and monied corporations get involved in SL if their numbers were unreliable and nebulous?" The answer is obvious. Yes.

I have no idea how to respond to that, since:

1) Obviously MySpace has and does publish its data. After all, it is part of a publicly traded company now, and was trying to attract a buyer before. For example, in their Q4 2006 audited financial statement, News Corp reported MySpace as having 100 million registered users.

2) Unlike SL, MySpace traffic is easily verifiable by third parties. It doesn't take a genius, for example, to figure out that Google noticed 8% of its traffic were referred by MySpace by looking at their own logs.

3) Numerous third-party analysis from Nielsen / NetRatings, Media Metrics, etc., provide independent assessments into MySpace's traffic.

4) Dell and IBM buying some sims at $1500 a piece is a bit different from Mudoch investing $580m into MySpace and immediately signing a $900m deal, don't you think? Comparing MySpace to SL is perplexing at best.

-peekay

Here's some picture proof of how skewed usage statistics may be:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/135/345623718_bd3f420605_b.jpg

I found this while wandering around the other day. No less than about a dozen camper zombies that obviously are the same person. Doesn't even bother hiding it. They are all dressed in suits with random hair and faces.

That's great. How many of those 100 million accounts are used daily, weekly, or monthly, and how many were created, logged into once, and never used again? How many were created by people who already had a MySpace account? Feel free to post those figures.

Unlike SL accounts, all MySpace accounts are publicly accessible and show the last time the account holder logged in. This allows anyone -- even you or I -- to gather a statistical sample of what percentage of MySpace accounts were used today, in the past week, in the past month, etc.

Anyone could pick, say, 10000 random MySpace accounts, then track their activity over a period of 60 days or 180 days or whatever.

And because MySpace traffic is http based, more sophisticated outfits can detect how many of those accounts are alts, etc. Also third parties can cross-reference such data with their own referrer logs.

These are some reasons why we have good confidence in MySpace traffic numbers.

Can we do any of this traffic verification with SL? No, because unlike the so called "nebulous" MySpace, LL does not make SL accounts publicly accessible to 3rd parties, nor do they publish the last login dates for those accounts.

In any case, on a moving average about 45% of all MySpace accounts logged in at least once within the past 30 days, which is very high by industry standards.

-peekay