Monthly Users, Or User Hours? Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon On Counting Second Life Activity

Yesterday Second Life reached another peak concurrency: 71,159 users in-world, Massively's Tateru Nino tells me, up from last week's peak of 70,911.  But has this consistent rise of in-world activity translated into growth in SL's active monthly user base?  After a couple e-mails with Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon (M.Linden in-world), I'm not sure.

There's an industry rule of thumb that active users are about 10x the peak concurrency, which would suggest a recurring SL user base of 710K+.  As of last week, the company users stats counted 870,619 Residents who'd logged in during the last 30 days. 

But hold on: that number includes people who created a new SL account and logged in for the first time within that period, Kingdon told me.  Which increases the mystery.  Ms. Nino has been tracking new user sign-ups on her blog, and they average roughly 12,000 a day; i.e., about 360,000 new users a month.  So subtracting 360K from 870,619, we're left with around 510,000 monthly recurring users. 

In other words, while concurrency is growing, the number of active monthly users still seems to be stuck at around 500-550K+-- a plateau that's existed since last year.

I checked that number with Kingdon:  "I looked at our data," he told me, "and you are partially right, but not completely. Both our active user base and active user hours have been growing nicely since the beginning of the Summer.  We have some good momentum going in the fourth quarter."

So how many recurring active monthly users are there in SL now?  I put that follow-up question to M. Linden, and will post that number here, when/if I get it.  In any case, Kingdon argues that it's more important to track total user hours and concurrency numbers:

"The 'active' user number was an early metric," he wrote me, "and over the years we found it less useful to distinguish between Residents who spent a certain amount of time in-world and those who may have spent somewhat less. Both could be considered 'active,' depending on what they were doing, and the metric wasn't accurately reflecting that. Total user hours and concurrency are more inclusive of the range of uses of Second Life that we're seeing, and better show the usage of Second Life." 

I understand this from the perspective of a Second Life user; many Residents only log in several times a year to attend occasional events, for example, while still remaining engaged in the world through blogs and outside media coverage.  The industry standard metric of monthly active users wouldn't count them.  At the same time, you also want to track aggregate user hours, to account for the broad spectrum of usage behavior.

At the same time, having written for GigaOM so long, I also understand why Silicon Valley is so obsessed with monthly active users.  It's the best way to track mass adoption, and in that regard, while its activity growth among hardcore users is impressive, Second Life still hasn't demonstrated its ability to do that.  As I've written before, until recurring active monthly users passes a million, I suspect the Internet industry will maintain its skepticism over SL

Still, there does seem to be some growth on that metric.  Mark added that last Thursday "was a record breaking day for most unique users ever logging in during a single day at 238K."

Comments

[BJ Tabor]

That kind of implies the Lidens have smoothed out that one hour drop out.

[Christophe Hugo]

The picture of Mark Kingdon you posted probably dates back from the 20th Century.

Eating in plush San Francisco restaurants on a daily basis makes you gain weight more quickly than one can say "Second Life".

[Jago Constantine]

71,768 right now

[Jago Constantine]

73,196 now

[Hamlet Au]

Thanks Jago! Can you watch for when the concurrency peaks?

[Jago Constantine]

Sorry ... RL called :P

[Jago Constantine]

By the way ... since I installed the latest version of SL, I keep getting a bug where peoples *hair* vanishes when I cam around them from certain angles ... have you heard anything about that?

[Hamlet Au]

Heh, no idea. Thanks for keeping an eye on concurrency awhile!