Another thing I noticed in the August user stats, though it's difficult to explain: back in May, the top spot in terms of total user hours by country was held by the tiny Cayman Islands. Now, the Caymans no longer even register in the 100 listed nations at all. I checked back, and realized this dropoff actually happened between May and June's tally. My initial guess was that it had something to do with the Lindens' ending of in-world gambling, but the first salvo of that policy wasn't announced until late July. So the mystery continues.
According to the CIA World Factbook, there are 46,600 people living on the Cayman Islands. So if they are like the Dutch and have one promille (1/1000) of inhabitants active in SL, that would mean 46.6 people. But they haven't, since the Dutch have the top spot in that list. The list of the first four you provided doesn't include the Caymans - instead it has the UK on the fourth spot with 0.06 percent. In Cayman terms that would be barely 28 users.
Apparently it is less than that even, and with such low numbers it takes but one person's behaviour to skew the metrics heavily in any direction.
In other words, a handful of Cayman newbs grew up and gave up camping with an anti-idle script, perhaps.
Posted by: Laetizia Coronet | Wednesday, September 26, 2007 at 03:18 PM