Second Life Usage Now Higher Than Its 2007 Hype Level Period?

Interesting comment from Amanda Dallin, reflecting on SL's recently reported "pandemic boost": 

If the definition of a monthly active user has remained the same then the comparison to the peak in 2007 is valid. Actually there were likely more than 350,000 new registered users a month in 2007 when SL hit the peak of 1.1 million MAU so the number of returning users could be about the same or higher than in 2007 using your math and logic.

This sounds right. 2007 saw a lot more churn due to massively promoted events like a cross-over experience for the television show CSI, mostly from people who were unable to install the program or get past the orientation. However, the definition of a monthly active user has definitely changed since 2007 -- back then, Linden Lab would mainly refer to "Total Residents", i.e. anyone who signed up for an account, whether or not they even installed the program and went in-world.

The definition that hasn't changed is the amount of concurrent users, and that is indisputably much larger now than it was in 2007:

On the right, for example, is a typical concurrency rate for SL users in December 2006: Just over 19,000. Peak concurrency rate nearly tripled that number in 2007, going over 60,000, but much of that was attributed to traffic-generating bots, not to mention waves upon waves of "one try then bye bye" visitors.

Since the pandemic, SL concurrency has been growing to just about that number and possibly even higher -- checking with Tyche Shepherd on that. But to Amanda's point, SL's monthly active users are probably at 2007 Gold Rush-era levels of 1 million+.

To put that in perspective, however, this still makes SL a niche (if an interesting one). For example, Electronic Arts just reported that Sims 4 is seeing monthly active users over 10 million.

Comments

[Alicia]

Now, how many of those are alt accounts?

[Fay]

Does this count the sheer amount of bots? Because whenever I visit a club or place with high traffic there are no real people around...

[Adeon Writer]

Surely there's a graph somewhere showing this? I can't find one.