As is so common with this kind of data analysis – the analysts need to go back to school and study inferential statistics. The demographics are actually quite similar to the general population statistics for the SL usage figures. The posting above by Tiessa Montgolfier makes it fairly clear that the population usage of SL is fairly close to the distribution of the various age groups within the general US population (for 2004).

I think it is also important to remember that 18-24 year olds are disproportionately buried in immersive social environments outside of online time (college life), and are not yet as mature a group of consumers over-all as the older groupings are (having left home for the first time) and are not mature in SL (although SL is only five years old there are mature users in terms of history with the virtual world. Teens under 18 are forbidden SL access and teen usage is very small – so they will have had by necessity more experience with highly structured gaming worlds, and, therefore, more comfort with those environments. The more mature SL users are NOT going to be in the younger group by the numbers – a no-brainer).

I don’t think we have yet to see where or what the various demographic groups will do with SL – SL and all virtual worlds are at the infancy stage in development – very much like Compuserve was in the early days of the internet and WWW.

But the internet was here to stay and so are virtual worlds, and so is, many of us believe, SL. Because, like the internet, SL is user created and user driven, and because it is going slowly but inexorably towards shared central processing, as did the internet, I have high hopes that it will survive and thrive through these years of change.

2 cents thrown in.