Research Firm Doesn’t Buy the SL Hype
Sorry Second Life evangelists. The Yankee Group’s just not buying the hype surrounding SL and other virtual worlds. Today, in a “group note” called Wither Second Life?, the research firm revealed that despite near-continuous media coverage, SL and other metaverses are actually in the midst of a continued slow down in growth and limited impact because of “the tethered nature of their virtual world experience.” (more)
On October 5, 2007, Linden Lab responded to the results on the Yankee Group’s findings. My reply to that: This isn’t second grade. There’s actually a lot more to the numbers than dividing hours by users. I use a main account and 4 alts in SL. The 4 alts haven’t been logged in for months. My main account is logged on for maybe 5 minutes, every other day. That’s about 15 minutes a month, if you divide between my alts.
How many users never logged in in August? 9.3 million minus 974,000 “user logins” (whatever that means) is 8,326,000 users that never logged in. Actually, what if that “user logins” means the number of actual logins, rather than “unique user logins”? That means even if you logged in once a day, you would be counted at 30 “user logins”, yourself.
Average concurrency around 32,467?? Yes, it’s in the math, but you might need a little higher than 2nd grade level to figure that out. Hmmm… That would mean (using the 9.3 total registered accounts) that 9,267,533 users never logged in during the month of August.
All things that I’ve done, so far gives us an average of 23.8 minutes per user, per month. Now, factor in campers that are logged in doing nothing but bringing that average up, which I’m just throwing a number out of 50%. Looking around, it might be a good estimate to say that half the people logged into SL at any given time are camping. Guess what that leaves us with…
12 minutes per month! I didn’t even have to think ahead and plan that one out. All of you SL fanboys (and fangirls) need to take a little step back. I mean it… you NEED to take a step back!! Supporting something because somebody “says” that you should?? Think for yourself instead of supporting (in more ways than your words) a company that does everything they can to keep their users in the dark.
Malignant Narcissist @ October 1, 2007
A lot of this depends on what Linden Lab defines as an “user logins” and the numbers that the Yankee Group used. I have no way of knowing that, of course. I know that “user logins” does not mean the same thing as “active avatar count”, since the numbers don’t match.