Feb

9

Second Life Data vs. The Hype

February 9, 2007 |

Linden Labs released an excel spreadsheet today which gives us some insights into actual user behavior versus the hype around Second Life we have seen in the past.

Basically, it comes down to the simple fact that Second Life has about 57.000 paying customers with premium accounts and about 2.000.000 users overall, with a 40 to 60 split between males and females (would be interesting if they broke that down for paying customers as well).

Information weeks breaks down the hype nicely:

Today, Linden Lab divulged more sensible usage statistics:

  • Premium accounts, which people have to pay $9.95 per month to get, increased 16% month-over-month last month, to more than 57.7 thousand.
  • Unique users represent 64% of total residents.
  • Perhaps most interesting of all: About 10% of unique users have logged in 40 hours or more. “Interestingly, it appears that blogging has a similar ratio of committed users to registrations as indicated by Live Journal,” said Zee Linden of Linden Lab, writing on the official Linden Lab Second Life blog.

Those 10% are an interesting number. Basically, people check out Second Life and leave. Very few people have the time and energy to hang around in a virtual world. I, for one, am one of the 90% that weren’t interested. I registered, walked around a bit, and went on with my real life.

The comparison to blogging in the last bullet is interesting, but even those who stop writing blogs still often continue reading them and the time and energy invested is far less. As such, I would argue that Second Life is far less sticky than blogging.

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