Poll: Why has population been so stagnant?

what makes things worse is the link to sl should have been monitored for correct viewer no? ................ mades you wonder

Serious question: SpankMe: Have you seen sales go flat as well? Or even dropping off a bit?

Going way out on a limb, here, but I think Linden$'s taken in by your business(es), per active account (60 day active), per month is a good measure of what is going on. You (and other established product line providers) have the long-established product lines and market credibility to argue, one way or the other, whether SPENDING ACTIVITY per avatar is up, flat or down...which I believe would be a far more accurate reflection of ACTUAL *account-holder activity* than is any index of avatars-logged-in. If you want to know how things truly are, follow the amount of money changing hands (and the real number of hands) OUTSIDE the Infinite Money Machine of Happiness (errr, sorry, I mean LindEx, LOL).

"Active account" statistics are a terrible indicator of business trends, without subscriber-identity verification, and no better of customer satisfaction or subscriber base size, though we (and the Fortune 500) would be led by PR to believe otherwise? (Another topic, but me-thinks THIS drives the effort to verify all of us...If I'm a large corp. my people know these "fuzzy numbers" will spell my doom, and if I work at LL, I know I can't convince astute CEO's to take my leap of faith without HARD numbers, heh?)

It's kind of my impression the number of Lindens changing hands per day has not really changed since the big PR surge that brought me here in October 2006...and that would mean there is not a true growth in *subscriber* base, and perhaps never really was regardless how many avatars are climbing into the system...money in the pocket available to buy Lindens ends up being the limiting factor for SL economy, and its best indication of activity, not how many avatars are spending it.

If I am guessing even close to right, I've a feeling we are all sitting atop a bubble, really nothing more than a dilution of the Linden$ pool across an ever-enlarging set of dummy accounts designed to perpetuate the myth of a vital economy...not too unlike all the "SL realtors" who are selling land back and forth between dummy accounts at ridiculous prices to keep the "Second Life Average Price Per Meter" artificially inflated for the occassional sucker wandering by...

Hmmm, by cross-talking with other long-term marketers, it might also be possible to use changes in product sales, indexed to account activity, to assess changes in the "typical" account-holder, too??? Gotta think all these things, along with Doc's ideas...*sigh*...very complicated...

Also, I am guessing again, but isn't a slump in account retention (or increasing levels of first-glance dissatisfaction) inevitable on the back side of any peak in activity created by a product-hype marketing strategy? Especially if the hype is not backed up by continued marketing and/or rapidly-improving product performance? (A real reason we keep seeing new generations of game machines released every holiday season...???)

Oh, and on the 3 million actives....you're serious, hmmm? My vote: 4 days after Second Life, Virt-3D Edition is touted...errrr, I mean released (-:

I can't?

Damn.

Oh well, I'll continue with my current plan anyway. I'm up to almost L$2000 a day, including the interest I get from Ginko.

@ Parsimony

Yes, during 2007 my sales have dropped a bit. Retention is a big issue for me because most of my products are complex and expensive so most of my customers are experienced players with money, club construction plans, complex landscaping needs etc. A 5 day old player is unlikely to buy a 5,500 L$ programmable dance floor or a race game that requires a quarter sim of land. (Though a few new players do go all out, this being an exception to the general rule.) So if players come and leave within a few weeks I would be less likely to see any of their business compared to say a clothing dealer.

@ All

On a separate note: I noticed yesterday that the logged in over past 60 days figure on the splash screen has dropped from the once very steady 1.7 million to 1.55 million! This is not a good sign. I don't understand how so much new land is still selling.

Other. I'm bored with it.

Voice has also ruined the illusory aspect that made my first year so special (those other-worldly characters require much more suspension of disbelief when there's a human voice behind them), but that's more of a contributory factor than the main reason. I'm not shy of using voice.

Boredom is my main reason anyway. I just wish UKP sterling wasn't so bloody strong at the moment because it's not worth cashing out if you're a Brit.

My partner left after around nine months for all kinds of personal reasons, but can't get back on with his super-dooper new Vista machine, despite it having an Nvidia card. Makes me wonder how many are in a similar situation...and how that is affecting retention figures.

oh how terrible to be forced to be in SL because it is sooo lucrative...

Who said I was "forced to be in SL"? With UKP Sterling at a 26 year high against the dollar, I simply indicated that it's not worth cashing out right now.

Then spend it, and contribute to the thriving SL economy. Or give it to me.

Well I logged in for the first time in about a month yesterday and tried to buy ANOTHER skin (why do I keep doing that?), but the vendor barfed, and I was afraid to click buy again. Then I sent a snapshot to snapzilla, but I'm still waiting for it to appear 18 hours later. Oh then I got humped at a welcome area, right before my client crashed. The welcome area humper made that suggestion too!

Hmm....
/rubs chin.

yeah, when the vendors go belly up it s frustrating. And as far as your second point, I'm a bit insulted you would equate me to a Welcome Area Humper!
I definitely dress better.

LOL. My humper didn't dress at all!

I think that the growth will be slow but steady until 'critical mass' is achieved - i.e. the point at which so many have joined that people who haven't yet joined start to panic that they will be left out, and rush to sign up.

I wonder though, what online population can be sustained at once without making the lag so bad that the whole experience becomes a misery? In UK mornings it is around 25,000 and pleasant, but UK evenings it's up to 45,000 and the difference is noticeable.

What population have the Lindens budgeted for, before they have to invest in new servers?

Tid, its just going to get worse and worse...........what they are expecting over 75,000 + online at one time!

IMO, a confusing user interface contributes to the newbie problem - that being, if a newbie can't figure out how to do things, it's still a bad experience.

The poll should have an additional option:
[[]] -- LL's payment processor is rejected by paypal/cc/my bank/etc. every month

'cause that definitely doesn't help retention either.

I can attest to this. My boss and a coworker decided to log on and see our college's island (I work at my university right now) and my boss couldn't figure out how to get off Help Island. Even by following the directions under my guidance and completing the four basic "keys" that get you a landmark to the Welcome Areas didn't do it.

I had to send him a landmark from my own collection.

They of course then proceeded to make fools of themselves driving go karts around the university's sim, but....we have established that the five of us could be replaced by monkies with only one down side: the poo throwing.

SL's interface confusing??

I skipped the Help/Orientation part. Not much to figure out I thought anyways. At least till you get into the building/scripting stuff.

I can figure out buttons that say Map, Search, Build, etc. Menu's weren't any trouble to figure out either. You'd have to be brain dead not to figure out the meaning of Camera Controls, Preferences, Appearance, and so forth.

Can't most people think these things through themselves? Or is everybody a helpless computer-illiterate Noob?

If you couldnt figure out what something does, when it states it in plain English or other language (for most things), how'd you manage to turn on a computer in the first place?

I have to agree with you. I'm far from a Silicon Head, but I didn't have any trouble figuring the basics. Then it was just a case of finding quiet spots and playing with all the controls. I still do. Open up debug, see what happens. The Vaunted Learning Curve is a bunch of hype. It just takes a little time and patience, and I think that's the problem, the I want it now crowd. Part of the fun is the learning.

This is my first post ever.

I thought I'd provide an outlook on the topic, since I'm a statistic in the population growth. I'd consider myself similar to Brenda -- no Silicon head, but no trouble figuring out the basics.

I'd never heard of Second Life before the big news story in June (I think it was the one on MSN that sort of panned it, saying it was "difficult, deserted" etc.)

I used to build for Sim City 4 (some might say I became "famous" for it in some circles, but that's another story). I logged into SL and never stopped. Quickly learned to build, bought some land (okay almost 1/4 of the "Auschnar Run" Sim), built a big house, parked my zeppelins out front and moved into it. It's still pretty empty while I shop for furniture!

I told 2 RL friends about SL, and they're both hooked on it now too. Neither of them are hardly into gaming as much as I've always been. Neither of them have paid any money yet (especially since I took them to a freebie mall). None of us have had much technical trouble. One RL friend says his Mac is slower, and simply more difficult to use than my 1 yr old "high end" PC. But he likes SL so much, he's considering buying a new computer! He's also the one talking about buying land. I never helped either of them find their way out of Orientation Land.

So the point of all this rambling is that in my tiny little 3-person sample of the universe, 3 out of 3 people try out SL and stay. How's that for scientific?

Anyway, not sure if that 1000-person example was supposed to represent 1000 failures, or just 1000 general people trying it out? If the latter, then you're certainly leaving out the segment of people who stay. Because we can't be the ONLY 3 "successes" in the past month.

Thanks for listening. Hope I didn't make any huge n00b mistakes! --Avion

Yes, according to many newbies I've talked to.

Their comments usually stem along the

"it's complicated"
"too many options"
"How can anyone learn all this stuff?"

lines. Though, in retrospect...perhaps most of them are teens trying to sneak onto the main grid. I've been inquiring about age of the more "dense" ones a lot more lately...

*nod* But (based on your profile) it seems you earn that from scripting. *If* you can do content creation, then that's a great way to get an incremental improvement experience in Second Life, because you're developing RL skills as well - I'm sure it's not for nothing that the users who develop this way seem to be happiest with SL.

But the problem is, this can't be depended on as a way to support new folks, simply because SL is a capitalist economy now, and capitalist economies just aren't designed to stay friendly to start-ups all the time. I'm sure it's obvious to everyone that as SL evolves, if it was to stay at the point where just any average Joe or Jane from a street corner could produce competitive content given enough learning, its evolution in terms of content quality would be crippled.

Sure, I script too, but I get scant few jobs. And even less RL time to actually work on them.
As for developing RL skills: I was a CS student before I joined SL. I took what I knew about C++ and applied it to LSL.

Since SL I've done some Flash ActionScripting as well (couple games (only one of which was done properly--Educational Game Design was a train wreck of a class) and two other "applications".

With all that said, my nagging question what the long term for SL ? Im realy wanting to but a island, but I cant help to think the whole think is going to collapse when the next big 3d enviroment comes along.

It's very unlikely that SL would collapse in this way, simply because even if another virtual environment offered the same features of SL, it would be very hard for it to compete because it would be way behind in terms of number of participants and amount of available content. If someone wanted to become a content creator, it would be hard to convince them to go to the new world (where there are fewer people and thus fewer customers) rather than SL.

If SL does collapse, I believe the most likely way in which it will happen will be that pressure from the money-making market and the influence of professional creators together lead to role-playing or content creation becoming unviable for any but a handful of users, so that for the majority SL just becomes a graphical talker with fixed content, just the same as IMVU, PSHome or There, and thus loses its competitive advantage.

I think there is the whole social chat experience thing to consider as well. SL is a 3D chat environment. If someone joins that isn’t prepared to communicate with others then their SL experience will become quite lonely. So I voted negative newbie experience, for those who had no clue people actually talked to each other here.

Maybe if they fix the bug issues and concentrate on building the product they have on hand right now making it the best it can be.. but they bring on more continents and they cant even make the ones they have now work.
People are also probably tired of losing things constantly, you pay REAL money for products that just disappear from your inventory.