Second Life Economy Snapshot: 100,000 "Heavy Users", 20,000 Heavy xStreetSL Shoppers

During my interview over the Lindens' purchase of virtual e-tail sites xStreetSL and onRez, T Linden offered some related usage stats that are worth spotlighting:

While Second Life has about 500,000 monthly active users, T. Linden told me the company estimates that there are just 100,000 "heavy Second Life users", defined as Residents who run SL businesses, own land, or otherwise spend significant amounts of Linden Dollars in-world.  Of those heavy users, just 20% (i.e. 20,000) regularly shop on xStreetSL. (Participation on onRez is much smaller, he added.)  The Lindens estimate a million Residents on average spend L$ on a lighter basis monthly.  (Personal interjection: and it's very likely those aren't the same million Residents from month to month, surely comprising many of the 400K or so new SL accounts created every month, most of whom churn out after the first log-in.)

This data provides some much needed context for the Lindens' acquisition of SL users' two leading web-based e-tailing sites.  Half a million people are in-world about 50 hours a month on average, but only 20% of them are regular participants in the economic system, and only 20% of them carry over that experience onto the web. Presumably, integrating e-tail website into the official Second Life experience will grow this activity-- and consequently, encourage SL content creators and entrepeneurs to grow and expand their activity, too. 

One more point about this 100,000 stat shot: metaverse developer Gwyneth Llewellyn called it three months ago in one of her typically epic economic analyses.

Comments

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Very, very interesting numbers, Hammie! It seems that my old Crystal Ball (bought at XStreetSL, of course ;) ) still works...

[faerie]

There is another aspect of XLStreet and OnRez that is being overlooked - many people (and I am one of them) use these services as a sort of online catalogue before going inworld to make our actual purchases.

The ability to type in a keyword and then browse through pages of pictures is sadly lacking from SL at the moment. Classified advertisements are very slow and cumbersome compared to XLStreet and OnRez.

In December I was recently looking for a large airship as a Christmas present and I used XLStreet to make a short list of ones to look at inworld and we then visited the stores/sims and made our purchase there in the sim.

So although the seller didn't make the sale through XLStreet they did make it because of XLStreet and I hope that if anything, the Lindens keep and improve on this ability to browse through a catalogue without being logged in. Perhaps with things like better SLURL integration?

Wouldn't it be nice if sellers could automatically add something to XLStreet at the same time that they set it for sale inworld?

[faerie]

Oops, I forgot to make my original point clearly.

The statistic that ..."and only 20% of them carry over that experience onto the web."... is misleading and understated because many people browse on the web but go inword to make our actual purchase.

[Iggy O]

New source of revenue for LL: it makes perfect sense from that perspective. I know many small companies that would be giddy at the prospect of 20,000 paying customers.

I am weary of all the doom-saying about this (I save my doom-saying for other SL topics). I will miss the OnRez interface, which I find more intuitive than xStreetSL's. But that is a quibble.

xStreetSL has a larger variety of items for sale, so maybe we'll see the best of both worlds.