HALF A MILLION, PLUS CHANGE

It's the number that stands out for me most, in the Lindens' latest publicly released demographic figures: 507,844.  That's how many active Residents there were last month, "active" defined as a Resident who went in-world for more than an hour.  It conforms to an industry thumb rule, that an online world's active users are ten times the maximum concurrency-- which in May was reaching close to 50K.

Less than six months ago, it's worth noting, active Residents were around 250,000.  At the time, Tateru projected that active users so defined would total over a million by the end of 2007.  How likely is she to be proven right?

Comments

[Dirk Singer]

Personally I think the million goal is partially dependant on LL revamping the orientation process and cutting down on the high rate of user churn.

It's well known that most people unfortunately give up on SL after their first attempt and I'd be interested to know how many of those 500,000 residents are one-time visits.

Case in-point, here in an office of 35 people, five of us have Second Life accounts. However, only two are really active and the fact that we have a professional interest in SL gave us an incentive to stick with it.

The other three never made it past orientation island and have largely given up due to a lack of patience and time.

Last time I was in Orientation island I was greeted with a) club promoters and b) a few new residents asking "where is the sex?"

As a result, as part of the process of developing our own island, like a few other organisations we'll be looking to bring any new avs of clients of ours direct to us, bypassing the standard help and orientation areas.

[Trevor F. Smith]

I've watched a couple of people with fast computers and reasonable amounts of patience bounce off of Orientation Island after a few minutes. The lag and spam was too much for them.

Frustrating for them and annoying for me, the person who convinced them that SL is interesting.

[Dirk Singer]

As a suggestion to keep people coming after signing up, why not dismantle the giant orientiation islands completely?

They are crowded, as Trevor said laggy, and the weight of numbers I think encourages people who tend towards anti-social behaviour to play to the gallery.

Instead, install 50 or so mini orientation stations dotted around SL. You have a 10 min or so induction process and you are in.

In a sense residents would have fewer tutorials but then again how much do you take in anyway? How many of us for instance read the manual of a game or piece of software, preferring just to get stuck in to discover it for ourselves?

A larger number of stations means less people there at any one time, resulting in (I think) a greater chance of striking friendships with AVs created the same time as you.

The fact is that SL is riding on an awful lot of media goodwill at the moment with journalists being willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and not dig too deeply behind the numbers.

That won't last and if LL is going to do one thing it should be to cut down on the churn and build up a larger core of loyal users willing to talk up SL to their RL friends and colleagues.

[Laetizia Coronet]

Dirk, with welcome islands being run by corporate sims already, I guess what you're advising is already in the works.