Second Life Exploding
In Unlikely Segments
Second Life—the self-described 3-dimensional online digital world imagined, created, and owned by its residents—is a community in nearly every sense of the word.
With the addition of an estimated 20,000 residents a day, Second Life is booming. Measured in Linden dollars, its virtual economy— up more than nine times in the last year—would be one of the fastest growing in the real world.
Think only GenMe millenials hang out in virtual worlds? Think again. As the pie chart shows, about one-third, or over one million of January’s 3.1 million participants are 35 and older; nearly 360,000 of them are over 45.
The following figures are taken from Second Life Statistics* for January 2007:
- Virtual Economy: The number of user-to-user transactions increased 37% to 6.1 billion
- Virtual Area: Land mass expanded 23% to 361 square kilometers
- Real Time: Logged user hours increased 47% from 7.3 million the previous month to 10.8 million
- Real Trade: Buyers and sellers traded goods and services worth just under USD $5 million
- Real Citizens:
United States 31%
France 12%
Germany 10%
United Kingdom 8%
Netherlands 6%
Fortune reports many large corporations are investing a portion of their 2007 budget on marketing in Second Life. IBM holds meetings there.
Still think it’s a virtual world?
*Source: Second Life.
March 1st, 2007 at 4:15 am
Surely most of the older people are there because (like me) they have a professional interest in keeping on top of stuff like this?
I’d be more interested in a profile of the frequenct users rather than those who register. I think it would paint a rather different picture.
March 1st, 2007 at 10:24 am
You’re confusing “population” and “participants” with “total number of registrations.”
As a handful of bloggers have reported and discussed over the years, registrants cannot reasonably be called “participants.” Most registrants never come back to Second Life after their first visit. Some who register never log in. Not all registrants are unique users.
March 1st, 2007 at 2:38 pm
This is a new twist on an ancient facet of human life, in my opinion. Humans have always “lived” vicariously or within their own minds which makes us unique… or we like to think we are unique?
Creative people have always retreated into their own minds, utilizing their surroundings coincidentally. Writers, musicians, artists, economists, politicial leaders, and of course those with an emphasis on the spiritual aspects of their lives depend on this departure from reality. It could, however, become a major problem if everyone retreats from human contact. Let’s hope it can be kept in perspective.
March 1st, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Lee:
Great point. I can only speak from personal experience. I have encountered many intellectually proficient people in SL. Programmers developing products and services for corporations, University researchers, etc. I, like you, would be interested in deeper profile statistics. Perhaps another .think article idea. Thank you for that as well as your comment.
Tony.:
Thanks! Excellent semantic catch. I love semantics. Our use of the word participants was inadvertent, statistically speaking. But in fact those were technically registration numbers (based on SL defs/data anyway).
However, our overriding point, i.e., that the sharp up-tick aggregate growth across wide ranging age groups, remains remarkable based on the overwhelming increase in numbers. Coupled with deepening corporate and education-oriented marketing and research involvement, all the more so. See below for definitions and year over year number comparisons.
“Registrations? is the number of people who registered on Secondlife, including ALT’s (Alternate accounts). These numbers are generated the same way the secondlife.com homepage displays “Total Residents?
SL Registration number January 2006: 124,175
SL Registration number January 2007: 3.1 million
“Unique” is the count of residents that excludes Alt’s matching users by payment information and/or email address. The calculation also excludes individuals that have not logged in:
SL “Unique” number in January 2006: 95,769
SL “Unique” number in January 2006: 2 Million
Again, source for the above: Second Life
Mary Ellen:
Your philosophical viewpoint adds a nice reflective aspect to all our analytical bent.
March 1st, 2007 at 7:00 pm
If you have day dreamed, ever, you have lived in second life. I read in the comments about demographics of registrants, participants etc etc. But the fact is, SL is growing, managing the pains. Answer to the last question;
Not so virtual any more! I can check out next BMW over at SL. I hate those sales people at BMW!
March 1st, 2007 at 9:27 pm
illig, while we’re on the subject of semantics, you are still referring to 3,117,287 registrants as Second Life’s “population.” It isn’t a population in any meaningful sense of the word, for the reasons I earlier described. Even Linden Lab doesn’t call it “population,” they call it “residents.” Another misleading term given the data.
Thanks for trying to explain how you got your numbers, but I’m well aware of the data and its sources, having written regularly about Second Life for the last 3 years. I’m a bit surprised you seem to have missed Clay Shirky’s high-profile deconstruction of Linden Lab’s data reporting, and what the “population” of Second Life might actually be.
Second Life’s population–that is, people actually “living” in-world–at any given time is in the 20k-30k range. That data, as I’m sure you know, can be sampled at any time from the Second Life home page.