Running the Numbers on Second Life

Posted on January 5, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized |

There has been a lot of debate lately about how many people are actually using Second Life on a regular basis, along with a fair amount of criticism of Linden Labs for not being very transparent about the population numbers. This is only important from the perspective that SL is being pitched as a place, virtual or not that’s what it is, that companies should establish a presence in, an example of this is the Second Life Reuters Bureau.

As for me, my First Life takes up enough time that I have precious little for Second Life. I tend to try everything so I do have a Second LIfe profile but the curve to get up and going was sufficiently steep (meaning I had to read something) that I never bothered to get past signing up.

The link below has an interesting analysis of the SL numbers and how much money people are spending in the virtual world.

The TNL.net weblog » Running the Numbers on Second Life: So, it looks that, under the most conservative growth rate, we will see 3.5 million users registered and over 600,000 using the service by the end of April 2007. Under a liberal interpretation of the data, those numbers would shift to 9.6 million and just under 7 million. However, in the most likely case, it is probable that there will be 7.2 million users registered with 1.6 million logging in over the previous sixty days. Not too shabby. For the sake of planning, I would advise my readers to go with the most conservative estimate because my data set is still relatively small. Even then, this type of growth mirrors some of the growth patterns we’ve seen in the early days of the commercial web and seem to support the contention that LindenLab is going to be a very strong player in the future.

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