Second Life Residents logged nearly 400 million hours in 2008, growing 61% over 2007

Blog text copied below from original post:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2009/01/15/q42008

Second Life Residents logged nearly 400 million hours in 2008, growing 61% over 2007
Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 12:33 PM by: Zee Linden

Linden Lab is pleased to announce results for Q4 and 2008. User hours increased by 61% over 2007, highlighting the tremendous growth rate in user engagement that Second Life maintained throughout 2008. User hours increased steadily each quarter, culminating in a record-setting 112 million user hours in Q4. In addition:

• Peak concurrent users were up 31% over 2007
• Land owned by Residents increased 82% over 2007
• Exchange Volume increased 33% over 2007
• User-to-user transactions in Q4 increased 54% over Q4 of 2007.

Financially 2008 was an outstanding year for the company from a profitability and cash flow perspective. We are in a strong position to weather the economic downturn while continuing to invest in the Second Life platform.

Looking at Q4 in more detail:

Q4 user hours grew 47% from the same quarter last year. In Q4, Residents spent 112 million hours in Second Life which was an increase of 9% from Q3. Peak concurrent users of 76,000 grew 6.7% over Q3 and approximately 30% over Q4 of last year.

Second Life land mass increased 82% over 2007. At the end of 2008, Residents owned 1.76 billion square meters of land. Our revised policy of Openspaces pricing and the introduction of Homesteads, as announced in late October, resulted in a land mass contraction of approximately 10% from Q3, as expected. The rollout of our Homestead product proceeded as we planned. Based on Resident feedback and the resulting purchases, conversions and cancellations, we believe the changes we made to the product line incorporated the concerns of the majority of our Residents and will provide a better experience for all.

Approximately 2,700 Openspace regions were combined to convert into a quarter of the number of full regions. We added 675 full regions and approximately 9,250 Homesteads. Only about 300 or 2% of the original Openspaces remained Openspaces, conforming to the limits that the Openspace product was originally intended to support. Just under 1,200 Openspace regions were returned to Linden Lab. Due to the impact of the conversions (four Openspaces for one full region) and the returns, Openspaces decreased by 3,900 which will reduce the overall landmass in Q1, as anticipated when we made the product change. Upgrades more than offset the decrease in unit count. (Note that some of the conversions occurred in January and are not fully reflected in the year-end numbers.)

Full regions will provide the best Resident experience, and we think that the expanded product line, which now includes Openspaces, Homesteads and full regions, provides a better product mix and end-user experience for Residents. As we continue to refine our land offerings, we look forward to being able to support a lower priced full region offering along with a premium full region for higher load situations.

User-to-user transactions increased 54% from Q4 2007. In Q4, Residents again spent more than $100 million USD on virtual goods and services in Second Life. After extraordinary growth in Q3 (transactions increased by more than 21% over Q2), we saw a slight decline (1%) in Q4. Volume on the LindeX, our virtual currency exchange where users can buy and sell our inworld micro-payment currency, grew 22% from the same quarter in 2007 to $27 million USD but is also a slight decline from Q3. It’s possible that the decline in Q4 was driven by uncertainty in the land market created by the pricing and configuration changes or simply that the economy overheated slightly in September when we saw significant growth in volume.


Thanks to all of our Residents for another successful year. Given the state of the real world economy, we are pleased with our results in 2008. We look forward to continued expansion and development of Second Life in 2009. I will be available in the forum discussion and answering questions there as I have in the past. I look forward to discussing the numbers and these changes with you.

Zee Linden will be available to answer your questions about his recent post in this forum thread.

I won't be able to be in the forums for a couple of hours. But I'll catch up late in the day and tomorrow morning.

the link is broken.
And I am getting dizzy from the spin.

the link from the blog points to /352/c8/302580/1.html#post2288000

not sure what staging.forums.secondlife.com is....


anywho what I would really like to know....

is how much of those hours logged in are real people and how much is logged via bots (be they traffic bots, group join bots, model bots, camping bots, etc)


how many hours are logged by real people, not just a machine


will anything ever be done to limit bot usage, or do the bots make for these great numbers?

Apologies for the busted link - I've fixed it in the blog.

Which great numbers? user hours are up, transactions are up, but when you look at one against the other, as we all know, sales are way down, and the only people making money here are LL, $1000 free from me alone, when I bought open space sims, to be used as they were advertised, and then had to abandon them because they changed the rules, yet again.
More and more spin.
this forim post has been up for a hour now, and nobody here, do you remember when we used to care?

Lots of problems with this spun PR piece.

Due to the widespread, heavy use of bots, concurrency is a near-useless metric, and logged hours even moreso. They

are decoupled from actual customer use of SL.

Exchange volume is useless economic metric without additional information, as is user-to-user transactions; alone, they say _nothing whatsoever_ because there's other factors in play that influence economic growth.

Furthermore, the comments about profits and openspaces are a slap in the face to SL's users. If you didn't notice, the "revised policy" was _not_ deemed widely acceptable by the majority of your users. The 1,200 returned openspaces represents _people so fed up with the policy that they acted irrationally against their own interests and returned the land_. They could have sold off their openspaces for some return, but did not.

Also, the "revised" openspace policy is nothing more than a LIE based in semantics. Definition of openspace prior to the policy: 3750 prims. Definition of Homestead after the policy: 3750 prims. Homesteads are not a "new" product, but simply renamed. The NEW product is the post-policy "openspaces" which have a mere 750 prims- a new product never before seen in SL. This is so blatantly a lie that one wonders what LL's PR department (which must have much sway) was thinking.

Zee, the last time you posted, I noticed a large disparity between your blog post, and the forum thread about it. The last blog post was filled with distortion, whereas the posts in the forum thread were very honest and had relevant details. And again with this post we see dishonesty. One wonders if the blog posts are written by you, or edited significantly by the marketing department.

Spin machine in full effect here, please stop it. You damaged your reputation with many residents, that's what you need to address, not spinning your way out of it. Any chance of a reality check over there?



Openspaces are rubbish, the 2% retention should tell you this, they're a rubbish product. Homesteads are going to be heinously overpriced if you drop island pricing and in all reality it's tier that needs to come down, not the upfront cost.

I too, would love to know how many of those hours are from the idle time (24/7) spent by the plague of "traffic-rating boosting" bots?

Whether we're talking about those in sky-high hidden bot-corrals on some sims or just the fake campers/dancers/etc. on others.

I earned 2200 L$ per week in 2007. In 2008 it was 1200 L$.
Now I closed almost all my inworld-shops.

And I don't buy anything anymore because I don't like grey stuff.

Sorry, I think SL is going DOWN, not up.

Quite right, and thank you for saying it much more calmly and succinctly than I would have been able to.

"Based on Resident feedback"

LIES.

I didn't read that to mean they'd be dropping any prices, just that they'd have the current full sims and some new, more expensive super-sims, possibly running on beefier hardware.

I read it to mean they'll be introducing a lower priced full sim product, but maybe you're right, the blog post is so full of spin that's it's hard to know what to make of it.

Would it be possible to get a figure for the number of islands added Nov-Current?

I just have to say it was rather childish to delete the comments off the blog.

It really makes it hard to take anyone at LL seriously when such immature games are played.

Would it have seriously hurt anything to leave them, or for gods sake, allow commets there for a change?

I will state my comment again, although with less enthusiasm:

I suspect they decided to move discussion here because it allows volunteer moderators to do some of the dirty work for them, and because fewer people will comment -- which is why they often wait a bit to add the forum link to the end of the blog posts. No excuse for deleting the comments that had already been posted there, though.

QFT!

And furthermore, when will anonymous accounts be eliminated, resulting in numbers reflecting ACTUAL users, not just created avatars?

Yeah, I agree about that. I get really tired of these vague little hints they drop into posts weeks or months before they make any real announcement. I'm not sure why they bother...is it to whet my appetite for a new product? I really can't imagine anything that would convince me to buy any more land in SL at this point.

Just how disconnected from reality are you, LL? People don't trust your company anymore, you backstabbed some of your most loyal customers who sent you big money month after month, you destroyed homes, businesses and dreams for thousands and thousands of residents (of the people who pay YOUR wages) - and you DARE to come up with such PR *selfcensored*?

Simply unbelievable. You destroy our dreams and now you smile into our faces, telling us how everything is in great shape and going the way you want it to go?

Zee you know I'm pretty easy going, but I have to echo the other sentiments stated above.

I'm about as committed to the platform as they come, but with eyes wide open.

Look around the map, we have more bots than ever before - the user hours stats simply cannot be taken seriously. One 24/7 bot is worth a dozen casual 2-hours-a-night residents.

Same with the land stats after the openspace mess.

Credibility and resident goodwill is taking a major hit here. I'm saying this in the most positive, friendly and constructive way that I know how.

What needs to be told is the real story of Q4 08 - massive resident financial losses due to the openspace debacle, a winter 'high season' peak lost due to fed up residents, causing flagging inworld sales *in additon to* the 'real' recession - and a silent spring coming unless you've got something really, really shiny to release in March.

Sorry about that, I accidentally left the comments on. For a while now we've turned off comments because we find we can have a better discussion in the forums.

I agree with your comments about the numbers - gains in stability have helped a lot. In the first half of the year we lost about 1.6 million hours to outages. In the second half we only lost 540k.

Sorry, in the first post I indicated that I'd be away for lunch and a few meetings. I'll have to step away again here in a minute, but I'll respond to just about everything through tomorrow morning. Thanks!