Second Life September metrics: Mostly falls

by Tateru Nino on Oct 23rd 2008 9:00PM

The published, key metrics for Second Life for the month of September are now available as both an Open Document Spreadsheet and in Excel format.

Your key takeaways this month are an increasing fall in total premium accounts, a fall in total user hours, zero mainland (Linden owned estate) growth (but a 7% increase in privately owned estates), and a reduction in economic activity. A more detailed summary follows after the jump.

The gains were:

PMLF is up (accounts with a positive monthly Linden Dollar flow) by 3.03% bringing the figure to a record 62,633 and more than making up for August's fall.
User-to-user transactions are up 10.53% -- but Linden Lab has informed us in the past that this figure does not constitute a significant economic indicator, and that we cannot infer anything from the state of the economy from it.
Private estates increased by 113 million square metres (7.01%), which seems to indicate an urge for land in the absence of growth in mainland supply for the last six months.

The losses:

Premium accounts keep falling at an accelerating rate. Down 1.94% in September to 83,230. Linden Lab tells us that this is not a significant indicator and that we should, instead, look at user-hours.
User-hours fell by 4.59% (1.6 million hours) to 33.24 million user hours for the month.
The amount of USD exchanged during September fell for the second month running, falling a further 3.97% (US$378,000) to 9.12 million USD.

September closed with the L$:USD exchange rate unchanged from August's close, at L$266.8:US$1.

Basically, while August didn't represent a good month, September seems to represent a more significant decline overall.

Demographically there seems to be little change. Second Life is still firmly in the hands of Baby Boomers and Generation X as far as active users go, and younger users statistically remaining unengaged with the platform with only 15.54% of user-hours being accrued by users under 25.

Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Tags: demographics, economy, linden-dollars, linden-lab, lindex, second-life, statistics, world-metrics

Reader Comments (3)

I've been mostly absent for the last few months from SL so I've noticed a big decrease in the numbers of people in world. It's hard to find a crowd now. Reminds me of what it was like when I joined in mid-2006.

It's really odd that user hours are down and it's becoming increasingly difficult to find a crowd of users to interact with, but the concurrency continues to increase even if only slightly. Does anyone have a good explanation for this beyond the usual rants about bots?

if you look at second life as a reg mmo you would see that second life has no lore that strong enough to keep people inside.

got plenty of loot of course since second life is a virtual platform then it would seem that the people, groups etc are not provide a reason too stay and play in second life.