Population Numbers

Many of us have asked (including myself) as to how many active SL'ers there are currently.

It's hard to get a straight answer to this from the Lindens.

I think we can all understand why they wouldn't be exactly forthcoming with the numbers. This is no slight towards the Lindens. They are doing a fine job.

While they can't necessarily reveal exact numbers until things settle down a bit, that doesn't mean we can't make educated guesstimates.

Basically, I'm starting this thread to hear your opinions, based on your observations in game of some of the population numbers.

How many surscribers do you think in total?

How many active?

How many active at one given time on average?

How quickly are the numbers for people trying the game growing?

How many of those are staying?

If you can, back your answers up with your reasoning.

I do have my own opinions on these answers, but I'll let someone else start.

Once again, just general educated guesses based on observations. Maybe we can reach a consensus without having to organise a census.

I have no clue on the numbers.

The total is clearly growing though. It is hard to tell that from the builds, since the beta population did such a good job of grabbing up land, I think we will now see smaller builds as old timers eat through their savings and then give up land that will be used by the newbies. Some of the land that remains vacant I think is vacant because it isn't attractive. Already developed areas are both cheaper to build on and more interesting to begin with.

New users coming in isn't necessarily a sign of growth either, because there could be equal numbers leaving.

It would be nice if you could at least see how many users are on-line at a given time. I've often wondered what the peak number is. You can however, tell when there are at least 100 users on, or some number lower than that. If you open up the search dialog and don't select any criteria you will get a list of on-line users, but it only lists the first 100 that it finds. It started topping out at 100 during the beta but often fell off to the 70's or less as the night wore on. These days though I've seen it still at 100 at 2AM on the east coast. I'm guessing that it won't be too long before there are always at least 100 users on.

After that I suppose you could come up with some arbitrary criteria that brings the search results down below 100 for a particular time of day and then just monitor that going up or down.

One thing is for sure, the number are up now, and there hasn't been another MAJOR media event (like the Time or Wall Street Journal articles) that would cause a huge influx. In a way this is good. Having a thousand new users show up on a single day would probably be a mess. Slow steady growth is the best thing.

5-600 subscribers, going by my newbie rankings.

Thanks Mac. Exactly the kind of thing I was looking for

Liz, are you considering that people can have equal ranks on the leaderboards?

I mean, if you're at number 512 or something starting out, there would be lots of others at 512 as well.

I didn't start this thread with pessimistic intent.

I too think that SL is growing by leaps and bounds.

My rough estimates would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 current subscribers with it growing every day.

I'm basing this on my own movement through the leader boards, my current calling cards, and just the general "feel" I get from being in game.

Early morning of course tends to have the lowest activity, with 40 to 50 people playing, but usually by lunch (East Coast) we hit the "at least 100" mark and stick with that thru late night/early morning the next day. This is up from multiple under 100 periods throughout the day just a few weeks ago when I started.

Some people I've talked to in game seem fairly disheartened as to population numbers. People! We're doing well. Continue to bring in the friends who have good enough PC's, and talk the ones who don't into gettng one.

Growth will cause growth will cause growth. Have faith. Assuming failure will only cause it

Thanks Mac and Liz. Anyone else?

I concur with the 600-1000 numbers posted by others already. Like you, it's more of a "feeling" of the world, rather than any hard numbers or empirical data.

Although I will say that I feel the 1000 would only be accurate if you're including trial accounts that are actively exploring (haven't already decided not to pay).

I check every so often how many people are on at one time and most of the time there are 90-100 people on at one time.

be dreadful if there was all the people on at once and they had a town meeting. I wonder if that ever does happen and almost all of them want to attend, how will they accomodate all those people? All I think of is server crash, but this will be in the far distant future lol. I think they shoould allow shouts to be global, at least for the Lindens and maybe turn it on when they have a town meeting only for everyone so this would prevent the server from crashing. There could be a feature to turn off global shouts, hearing wise, for people that have no interest in hearing the meeting.

the lindens have an exact number, they just wont tell us, ive seen muiltple user counters around lindens owned sims ( dore, rizel ect)

do we get a prize if we guess the closest to the real number?

300K



6K ( # of people who login after at least 1ce a week over a two week period)

Active subscribers I would know how to guess. 15K ?



300 ( average 300/hour over a 24 hour period)
1100 peak



200+/day



5/day

I picked 300K off the top of my head assuming SL has been around for about a year (I'm new so I don't know the history).

I work for a community type website in RL so the rest of the numbers are just guesses loosly based on patterns in our user-base.

mac users even though they represent 20% of the pc market would probably pull in big numbers. i sit next to 3 mac users who would sign up for this game if there was a mac version.

http://secondlife.com/mac

It's coming.

I've got a line on at least one Mac friend once he gets a better machine.

Thanks for posting that link Nergal, I haven't been keeping up. I have a "MAC" friend who wants to try SL, I gave him the referral link for when he was able. I am also sending him the link you posted.

I see it is going to be Beta test, does that mean we get no referral? And how long will Beta last?

Friends don't let friends use Macs.

I know Grim! But I guess the are great for people heavily into graphics production. At least that is the excuse he gave me!!!

SL launched on June 23rd.

I think apple owners are more like 6-8% of the market, but SL really appeals to all the ones Ive directed to it - many of them in design fields - so I think we could count on at least a 20% mac user membership in SL.