Camping Stats For Your Consumption!

Some Camping Stats

Another venture in to the mad bad world of stats crunching in SL!
Being a curious stats minded sort of geek I did some digging
Ok the maths aren't perfect but here goes!

First I looked at the "Popular Places" list. Jotted down the traffic numbers and checked on map for how many campers they has on each one. Two of them crashed while I was looking (Ha!). So I discarded two results as they weren't fully populated. Now dividing the traffic by the people on each island gives a rough guide to traffic per camper...

I took the average across the entire "Popular Places" list minus the 2 crashes and got 1,399 as the average traffic per camper.

This also told me that the most popular 18 places hold around 1,460 campers between them. I'll come to the adjustment for non-camping people later but it's a small %.

Next I did a search for places with "camping" and got a nice fat list of high traffic sims which you can reasonably expect a lot of camping on.

Being bored on a Saturday I actually copied across the first bunch of traffic figures. 57 of them excluding the ones I already picked up giving 75 sims in the list. For this bunch I divided the traffic figure by the 1,399 average to give me the number of campers (91090 traffic / 1,399 = 65 Campers for example), rather than check the map for each one. I did random spot checks though to see if the numbers look roughly right.

Then I got more determined and checked the next 100 matches in the list ranging from 17815 to 10350 traffic. Figured out the average decrease between each one (interpolated) and filled out the table with 100 more. Seeing as that didn't hurt too much I did the same with the next 100 And note... I check the odd map while I'm doing this to see if the figures match up. Generally it looks ok. And by this time we are down to about 4 campers so time to quit.

So now I have a list with 275 popular camping spots.
This gives a figure of 4,603 campers in those sims.
Lets be generous and allow for scooping up 5% of non-campers so 4,373 campers.

Now I only searched for sims with "camping" in the title. There are plenty of camping spots out there you can find (some very popular) using "camp" or other words to search which I haven't picked up. I also skipped nearly half of the first page of high traffic "camping" sims. So I guess I missed at least 25% of the available camping spots. I'm going to take it that I missed a third of all those available. Which would equal 367 main camping sims with 5,830 campers at any one time.

Now check out the main traffic stats on the SecondLife website.
When I wrote this there were 33,194 in world. By my reckoning at least 18% of that figure is camping.
Now watch this...

Residents Logged In During Last:
7 Days = 379,139
14 Days = 553,397
30 Days = 876,756
60 Days = 1,439,292

Campers Logged In During Last:
7 Days = 40,811 = 10.8% of the total
14 Days = 81,622 = 14.7% of the total
30 Days = 174,904 = 19.9% of the total
60 Days = 349,809 = 24.3% of the total

Ouch! I actually think my estimates are conservative. I reckon there's well over 6,000 campers in world at any one time. But given that 25% of LL's wonderful high traffic 60 day figure is people sitting on their asses doing nothing and probably not even at the computer ... you can see why there's no rush to sort it out.

Now it gets even more fun. Take an average of 2L$ per 10 minutes for camping. Some pay more, others less. That's 12$L per hour, or 288L$ in 24 hours.

5,830 campers will shift around 70,000 L$ per hour! 1,680,000 L$ in 24 hours! Seems to be at least 6,250 USD being shifted through camping per day! Woooo!

[ Yeah ok ... I admit it. I'm a geek ]

-=Added later =-

So if your looking to set up shop somewhere

Get the traffic count.
Divide by 1400 = campers.
Check the map and hover your mouse over the region.
If there are more people than your camping figure you might be looking at a sim with non-campers (potential shoppers! yay!)

Now THAT is cool! Heh ... now I'm off to check sims without leaving my pad!

[Sadly I you can't get a number of people in a region figure using LSL. So I can't make a HUD that checks for you as you rez in to a region. I can make one you can click then say the traffic figure to, but you'd still have to check the map.]

Very Interesting.

Thank you for taking the time to figure that out. Quite a project!!

Perhaps
But there 'geek' and there's 'impressive geek'.

That's amazing...

I'm interested in knowing the percentage of those campers who have Payment Info USED, or how many have their profile filled in... or some other indicator of whether they do anything other than camp...

Nice data! *bows to your supreme geekitude*

At least this makes it easier to understand why LL won't do anything about the ridiculously gamed "traffic" numbers.

Very insightful! Well done!

And definitely something to think about.

I wonder if there is any other way to 'cross check' - look at the campers in some entirely different way, and see if we get the same numbers.

I figured camping concurrency was high, but, that's very high... and disappointing, in many ways.

O.O

I am so bad at math...I could never sit down and do something like this. Amazing figures.

Yup I share the disappointment. Seems a waste of a creative multi user 3D high tech virtual world to me as well, even with all it's bugs and quirks.

I'll have a think about how to cross check, but you can do simple spot check. If you find a sim with a traffic figure around 14,000 it should have about 10 campers on it at any one time. 28,000 should have about 20 campers. Campers tend to be the stacked dots on the map. The single spaced out dots are generally non-campers having a look around.

Heh. Having actually just done a quick check on that with 4 random sims, it seems to work even without allowing for the 5% non-campers I used in my original figures. Probably because my original sample concentrated on camping areas.

So if your looking to set up shop somewhere

Get the traffic count.
Divide by 1400 = campers.
Check the map and hover your mouse over the region.
If there are more people than your camping figure you might be looking at a sim with non-campers (potential shoppers! yay!)

Now THAT is cool! Heh ... now I'm off to check sims without leaving my pad!

That's a really useful way of checking the real traffic of those areas. May I suggest you make some HUD that can scan a region and do the math automatically, and output the results in a nice easy to read format.

LOL! What am I a market researcher? Heh .. ok I am a bit! You know ... I might just go check that payment info used bit out

What I do know though is that if I set up a stall in a camping area I tend to get zero sales.
If I set up a stall in a "genuine traffic" area. I get sales.

I would so buy that.

Of course in order to market it effectively, you'll have to set up a shop with a few camping chairs.

LOL, I almost dropped my laptop!

I swear to God, this thread just made me remember my dream last night: I was in SL and I came upon ten ladders with avatars washing windows. I was so excited to see one was open and I could make L$17 by taking my position there. My first RL SL dream and I'm a camper!

LOL! Love it! Don't worry. If I do make a HUD for it, I'll give it away for 1L$ No camping chairs involved!

Wow, great work. Would it be possible to automatically acquire traffic numbers for a list of sims, programmatically? This screen-scraping method is so labor intensive. That way it would be really easy to find the exact number of campers in a sim, in fact grid-wide, assuming all camp chairs are full at all times.

p.s. er, not that i'm implying the OP should spend his time coding such a thing up ... just wondering if it would be possible!

I always feel guilty shopping in high-traffic areas: I hate to take up sim resources that were clearly intended for the comfort of campers.

A very interesting read, it clears up a lot of things for me. Your post should be reprinted on the blog. I'll add my own stats too:

5,830 campers X 250 watts per computer per hour / 1000 = 1457.5 kilowatt hours

1457.5 kw/h X 24 hours X 365 days per year = 12767700 kw/h per year

Which is by the US energy star web site http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=energy_awareness.bus_energy_use :

19789935 lbs , 9895 tons CO2.

Divided by 5,830 campers, thats 1.7 tons a piece per year per camper of CO2 produced.

Thank you LL!

KaiLastOfTheBrunnenG Macdonald

Your avatar name is a very interesting read as well.

ummm ... getting at the number of computers that are camping is harder. Campbots are everywhere, and no longer so easy to detect by appearance or name. I spoke to a bot owner who said she was running 10 bots/computer. So, mitigate that somewhat to compensate for the fact that some campers are actually individuals ... perhaps 6 campers/computer would be a good number?

that's fantastic initial research. good job.

wanted to note that 2/10 is L$12/hr not 6, which makes a potential L$288 in 24 hours... times 6000 in a 24 hour period is L$1,728,000. you'll have to convert that to USD. i dunno the rate today.

but other than that, you are very inspired. we bow to your geekness, your majesty.

Nope ... but I have just finished a really basic HUD that does the maths for you. Will start putting it out in world later today for 1L$ Full copy and transfer enabled.

Feck! Darn! Ooops! Ok ... will adjust later Thanks!

ah heck, that's a minor issue compared to the real research you did. fantastic calculations. how long did that take to do? hours an dhours, i predict.

and, you said there is going to be a HUD available. i don't really understand its purpose. can you give more info on that?

I like survey of actually how many real people are actually being used and money given from camping because of my own informal experience few pay or majority use bots.
Last time I camped regular was actually paid was months ago my electric bill was actually pretty low and has remained low.
Last time I camped for any length of time over summer I recieved 20L for 8 hours yet the camping device said it owed me 100L.
Majority of those places don't pay anyone which means they just exploiting the system and not generating income for anyone to do uploads, shop or pay rent its all being used towards creating fake sense of popularity.
Less money earned means less money used for services, shopping and putting into the economy.
I predict those who put money in economy will be less.
If Linden Labs wasn't get paid I bet they close shop, but luckily their are enough to keep the doors open who do.