October metrics for Linden Lab's virtual environment, Second Life are not yet formally available, but Lab CFO John Zdanowski wound up giving out a link to the information in advance, so we have the figures to work with. September was not a good month by these metrics, and we were interested to see how October panned out.
Your key takeaways for October are a continuing plunge in premium accounts, and a reduction in overall economic activity. User hours, however were up. A more detailed summary follows after the jump.
The gains were:
- User hours rose in October after their fall in September, rising 11% to 37 million user-hours for the month.
- Private estates increased by only 3.6% in October, and Linden Mainland by 1.3%. The total at the end of the month was 2.013 billion square metres.
The losses:
- PMLF (accounts with a positive monthly Linden Dollar flow) is down by 1.86% to 61,467, canceling out most of the gain this figure had in September. The figure is now on a par with July 2008.
- User-to-user transactions are down 10.83%, more than wiping out the gains of September, but this figure does not appear to provide any useful measure of economic activity, and Linden Lab cautions us against inferring any such activity from it.
- The amount of USD exchanged during October fell for the third month running, falling an additional 0.7% (US$66,000) to 9.05 million USD. Across the three months, that's a fall of 4.8% (US$459,000) from its peak in July 2008.
- Premium accounts continue their accelerating decline. Another fall this month, this time 2.1% (1,751 accounts) bringing the new figure to 81,479. Linden Lab's new CEO, Mark Kingdon says that 'Premium subscriptions are immaterial in our overall business.'
October closed with the L$:USD exchange rate gaining fractionally from September's close, at L$266.3:US$1.
Basically while September was essentially a decline, October didn't seem to fare much better, except in user-hours.
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. The percentage of user-hours consumed by users under 25 fell during October to 14.96% (including Teen Second Life).
 |
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. |
