New Web Resource Tracks Second Life Region Visitors - Think comScore for Second Life Sims!

Region Info is an astoundingly valuable new web-based service from Metaverse Business, the Second Life user data research firm of Louis Platini (his avatar name), who does great data gathering on SL groups, SL land prices, and much more. As the name suggests, Region Info gives you a snapshot of average unique visitors on a given Second Life sim during a given day, week, or month. Above for example are recent daily visits to Waterhead, where I keep my office, which is also the site of an official Welcome Area -- at any given moment, the average is 20-25 avatars, quite busy. (Many regions I've fed into Region Statistics average a handful or less.) Basically, this is like comScore, the web-tracking service, but for virtual land instead of websites.

Louis gathers this data from Metaverse Business bots which regularly and silently move through the world, counting avatars. And to answer the next inevitable question: Yes, Metaverse Business' bots also count other bots, and include them in Region Info stats, so this is not a perfect measurement of actual users. (Then again, what is?) However, I suspect you could use Region Info to deduce which sims are likely to have bots, since those will probably have a uniform base level of visitors.

Comments

[Tinsel Silvera]

I plugged in the sims where I have shops (with visitor counters) and the figures I show are much higher than being reflected in these graphs. And this doesn't even count the surrounding businesses that are getting visitors that I am not. How often are these bots visiting and counting?

[Hitomi Tiponi]

I agree with Tinsel - my own visitor counter shows completely different stats. Of course that could be because the sim I am monitoring stops others using scripts, like many do. In other words Region Info is completely worthless. And if I find out what Metaverse Business bots are called I will ban them just to be safe :).

[Sunn Thunders]

Considering that I log into my own region daily, I don't understand how my region's average number of visitors per day can be zero. (And no snarky comments about what that says about me...)

[Ann Otoole]

I had to remove a prim from my land. Not owned by a Linden. Owned by a resident. And it got there with group only build on and that resident is not in my group. Why is LL granting god mode to residents for the purpose of planting spyware?

[Adric Antfarm]

Meaningless charts are Tater Tot's area. Keep it up and the kanga mob will have beef with ya, bra.

[Metacam Oh]

It's the same kind of inaccurate traffic data that say Alexa.com gives. They give out a few toolbars, measure the percent of traffic and assume that everyone who uses an Alexa toolbar have the same visiting habits as the real web which just isn't true, same with this odd bot counter, the stats are purely unreliable and frankly a bit irresponsible to pass off like this bot system gives accurate results.

[Anya Ristow]

This is almost certainly done by periodically scanning map data. It does not require scripted devices or visits from a bot. It will miss visits that are shorter than the scan interval.

[Little Lost Linden]

This sounds interesting. I've been trying to find out actual bot counts for the longest time, but no one seems to be able to track that information accurately.

I've used Gridsurvey.com before for tracking some items, and Tyche mentions that it is possible to have a survey bot that could detect other bots but it's against his morals to create such a bot. I'm hoping to corrupt his morals a bit so he can write a survey bot that we could all use to get the real bot numbers. Somebody must know them.

I do find it interesting that over the past few months the Communitiy Standards: Gaming Traffic Violation reports have come down over the past 3 months. Perhaps due to less bots, or less enforcement. Not sure which. June went down to only 35 reports. Previous months were as high as 77 or more.

http://www.gridsurvey.com/incidentsummary.php

[Earth Primbee]

Looks to me like this is an average of the number of people in the region at the time it was scanned rather than the number of visitors in a given day. Gives an interesting perspective though. I like it.

[Frans Charming]

I agree with Anya and Earth, it just seems to be periodical map scanning. The stats as whole are more interesting than for individual sims.

You could find out what type of sims are more active, general/moderate/adult or shops/residential/community-hubs.

A other thing you could discover if the data was shifted correctly, is what sims are used by which timezone.

[Louis Platini]

Some background information:
- average number of visitors is shown in the charts, not the unique number of visitors
- no bot is visiting the region. No need to ban bots
- the bot counts the number of visitors on a region twice a day. If you have an important event when the bot is not scanning the results shown on the website can be very wrong.
- more information about the data collection methodology is available at http://www.metaverse-business.com/regioninfofaq.php