Linden Lab late last week released their user metrics and Second Life economy analysis for the first quarter of 2011. Every time I cover this I’m reminded of how much more substantive these statistics used to be, but here’s what we’ve got to work with now:
New user registrations: stagnant to a minor decline. Although, as Tateru Nino notes, if you don’t read the graph carefully you’ll miss that they’ve included April in the stats to show the surge in registrations since the new registration process was launched. Beside that, the 10K signups per day is still something a lot of companies would love to have.
Average monthly repeats logins: unchanged at just under 800K i.e. nearly 800 thousand people logged into Second Life more than once during each month.
User hours: At 105 million hours per month it’s down on the previous year. Looking at each month within the quarter it’s stable at 104 million.
Linden Dollar value: an improvement here, the exchange rate has been the most positive in a while and the overall dollar value of Linden Dollars held by Second Life residents is up to US$29.3 million.
World size: Stable at just over two thousand square kilometres – equivalent to the Maritius as we stated last time.
So overall? The somewhat limited picture provided shows positive signs. If the peak in user registrations shown for April continues during May and June, and converts to users who continue to log in, then Q2 stats might be very interesting indeed.
how is 12 million user hours less than last Q1 called steady???
That metric’s definitely not too stable Ener, true 😉
In order to see if the New User metric is reality or existing user alts, you would need to see two comparisons – (1) Ratio of New Users to downloads of Viewer 2 software, since a true “new user” would only know about and use the SL-supplied viewer, and (2) a comparison of numbers of New Users to the number of new Premium Users over time. ANother important stat that rarely gets full shrift is the increase in the amount of abandoned land is SL, which is ever-increasing.
Totally agree Heidi, that’s why my constant gripe on how little metrics are released now compared to a couple of years back.
Does anybody know, offhand, when the last creation of new mainland was? Certainly that woudl be an indication of true SL economy/life or its morbidity.
I am very optimistic about the future of SL, and would like to spread the word that there are successful businesses and ventures still going on. I run a virtual stock exchange simulation game within Second Life called Capital Exchange (slcapex.com). While things aren’t booming like they were in 2008-2009, SL is still by far the best virtual world out there. Thank you.
Skip Oceanlane
CEO and Majority Shareholder
Capital Exchange