SECOND LIFE UN-SLUMPS, GROWS MORE ASIAN, LATIN: 560K ACTIVE; BRAZILIAN, JAPANESE RESIDENTS SURPASS EUROPE

Couple months ago, a giant Linden spider confirmed that Second Life's active user base had stopped growing for a time, slumping from its 507K+ height in May, down 2.53% to 494K in June.  Few days ago, Meta Linden finally released the world's demographic figures as of July, and I half-expected the growth to still be stalled, or even declining further.  Instead, July's active citizenry is up around 67,000 from June, to 560K plus change.  As many also noticed, concurrency over the Labor Day weekend went over 50,000 for a time (see inset image).  All this happened, it's worth mentioning, despite the Lindens' prohibition of gambling in the last week of July, and constant downtimes.

The second important demographic shift, in my view?  In May, the most active Residents by nation after the US were from Germany and France.  In July, they're from Brazil and Japan, with the Brazilian population jumping from 36K to 48K, and the Japanese citizenry nearly doubling, leaping from 27K to 48K.  Anyone who's seen Iris Ophelia's' coverage of the Japan-made fashion explosion would not be surprised by this rapid growth.  (See inset figure.)

This strikes me as a seismic shift, for during the last couple years at least, the US and the EU have dominated the top five ranks by country; now, nations from Asia and South America are part of that upper handful, too.

Comments

[Dirk Singer]

Two things that jumped out at me from the figures. Brazil has 6 million broadband connections, and the US 54 million. If SL had the same penetration in the US as Brazil, then the number of Americans regularly logging in would be over four million, as opposed to 150k!

Secondly, closer to home for me, it's encouraging to see that the number of regular UK residents is up 30% over the past two months.

[Hamlet Au]

Very good point on broadband in Brazil!

[rikomatic]

You know what that tells me? Never take off your babbler!

[justin bovington]

Hey Hamlet,

You do know that Europe is a country, therefore we should be adding all the Euro countries together?

best

[justin bovington]

just to add one more thing:

Do we all think that we've crossed over from the USA being 'early adopters' to Brazil, Europe and Asia potentially being 'adopters'?

Also, if this is the case how long before the USA is just a part of the whole?

[Hamlet Au]

That's a good question, though I'm not sure if it ultimately makes sense to analyze demographics by country, anyway. Perhaps *language usage* would be more meaningful, as many (most?) Europeans Residents still seem to use English most often. (Though we're also seeing non-English regions become very popular.) Dirk has a very good point, though-- if we're looking at broadband use-to-SL adoption, then proportionately, *Brazilians* as a whole are probably the real early adopters over the US et. al.

If I had more room for the headline, Fiz, I'd have written have "BRAZILIAN, JAPANESE RESIDENTS SURPASS ALL INDIVIDUAL EU-STATE NATIONALS". In any case, whether the EU should be described as a "country" or a "supranational union" (Wikipedia's term) is way outta my jurisdiction.

[Elle Pollack]

Another point about Brazil: it's the location of LL's first member of the "Global Provider Program" a.k.a international affiliate is Kaizen Games in Brazil and they've been up and running for at least a month now.

With due respect to all Japanese users in SL (and I'm personally highly encouraged by Japan's massive adoption of SL — they will be the ones "not letting SL die" due to their unique ability to be early adopters with a mind to change everything and make it perfect, and we're already seeing that with the tremendously high-quality content they're placing in SL), the headline "Japan residents surpass Europe" should actually read "Japan has more residents than any European country", which, indeed, would be rather surprising if it were not true, since Japan by far has a larger number of inhabitants than any European country (except for Russia).

In any case, this encouraged me to write a bit about the multi-cultural Babel Tower of Second Life :)