Number of Residents in SL

I thought I would post here since this forum is significantly more active than the Linden Answers forum.

I just became a resident along with all the others who pushed the numbers up to over a 1,000,000 recently. I believe it's possible for each user to have more than one avatar inworld. Are SL residents counted when they become paying members or is every avater inworld counted? What if someone has 100 avatars in world and only 1 or 2 are used frequently? What if someone creates an avatar and runs around for a while and just stops playing? What happens to these "extra" avatars? Do they contribute to performance issues?

Linden Labs counts the number of accounts. So if someone has 100 alts that gets counted as 100 accounts. AFAIK, dormant accounts are included in the 'magic million' tally as well. Yes, it's pure hype.

Every avatar ever created is counted in that one million accounts figure. This includes evryone who ever quit playing voluntarily, and never logs in any more. I believe it also includes every troublemaker that ever created an account, caused trouble, and got banned for it, even if they only logged in with that account once.

If one person lies on the entry application and obtains 100 accounts, then they show up 100 times in that figure for total accounts. Technically, you are limited to a maximum of 5 accounts per household and 2 per person. In reality, it is often higher per person, on average.

The best guess I have heard, from active residents who have some knowledge of how many people have multiple accounts, and who have analyzed published login stats, is that there are between 50,000 and 100,000 real people actively playing in Second Life today. Those figures are based on statistics from just prior to the most recent publicity, which caused a huge surge in new accounts over the last several days.

That figure does not take into account the roughly 50,000 new accounts that were created in just the last two days because of recent media attention, on Yahoo's main page and elsewhere. No one knows how many of that 50,000 are actually multiple accounts held by the same person, but the average in SL seems to be about 4 accounts per real person. No one knows for sure how many of the brand new accounts will stick around, and how many will look once and leave. Only time will tell.

Accounts that are not in use do not actively contribute much, if anything, to lag or other in-world issues. But 'dormant' accounts do contrubute to the load on the asset servers, as they still need to track all the items the dormant accounts may have in-world or in their inventory, even if that person never comes back, or has been banned and never *will* come back. When someone is banned, their in-world content remains in-world, until the rent expires on the land that they may have held, or until the land-owner returns of deletes their items, if not on land owned by the banned player. When an account is inactive, their assets in inventory remain in the asset servers, in case they come back. If someone walks away from SL and comes back later, land that they own may have defaulted on rent in their absence, and may have been reclaimed, but their account and inventory will still be there. Even a cancelled account, where the Player tells LL to eliminate the account, will remain 'in the system' for something like 90 days, in case they change their mind and want to reactivate it.

The "one million" number includes every account ever registered. It's a far cry from the number of active users, that's for sure.

LL graciously supplies us with the raw data we can use to calculate active users. If you check the economic stats page you'll see unique login stats. Tracking this for a couple of weeks (along with the total population numbers available here), we can derive such interesting bits of information as:

o Around 40% of the users who log in over a certain week will also log in over the next.

o If we assume 10% of new accounts won't log in at all, we find that roughly 4.2% (22,000) of accounts that existed as of 60 days ago have logged in since then.

o On this past Monday, roughly 53,000 distinct accounts logged in. Of these, around 40,000 were existing accounts and 13,000 were new sign-ups.

The standard rule of thumb for MMORPG population statistics is that roughly half the dedicated userbase will log in each day, with most of the population logging in over the course of a week. If you go back 30 days, you should count pretty much everyone who hasn't forgotten to cancel their account. With the stats we have, I concur with Ceera, and estimate the number of active accounts to be around 80,000 - 100,000. Of course, Philip has publicly said that around 20% of all registered accounts are alts. Given that, the number of "people behind the screen" could be more like 65,000 - 80,000.

I sure hope all this NEW lagg starts running off those who just showed up to check it out and has no plans in staying long.... I want our bandwith back soooooon.

Big thanks to you all for taking the time and effort to reply.
So on the SL home page, we can see that over 400,000 users have logged in in the past 60 days, which means about 6650 users per day have logged in. But we see also that over $400,000 (US dollars) have been spent in-world within the past 24 hours. If this is an average number, that means we can infer that each user spends, on average, $60 US dollars per day in-world. Is this really true, or is my math wrong??

It is my understanding that $60 changed hands. Its a volume indicator.

Your arithmetic is correct, but your math is wrong.

From the economic stats page:
Residents Logged-In During Last 7 Days 176,349
Residents Logged-In During Last 14 Days 225,333
Residents Logged-In During Last 30 Days 303,400
Residents Logged-In During Last 60 Days 437,414

We can plot this up, and find that it follows a nice curve. At t=1 day, the curve has a value of roughly 58,000. That is the number of unique accounts that will log in over the course of a given day. Now, with 58,000 accounts and $400,000 changing hands, that means each user exchanges around $6.90 to another user each day.

Adz is correct. The $400,000 (roughly L$110,000,000) number is the total amount of currency changing hands. This is not really a meaningful indicator of true economic activity. For example, consider a Tringo game. 10 players, each of which contributes L$100 to the pot, with one winner receiving L$1,000 at the end of the round is a total of L$2,000 (roughly $7.27) in "activity", but that isn't really a terribly meaningful measurement of the value (i.e. entertainment value to participants) has been added to the SL economy.

Similarly, I could spend an hour testing a vendor script and pass that much or more between myself and an alt. Still counts toward that "$400,000", yet I've added *nothing* of worth to the economy.

Wow, thanks for the info, guys.
BTW, I Love Toronto... the Steam Whistle is awesome, too.