But there is no pub­lished met­ric of “Reg­is­tered Users” — the Res­i­dents fig­ure includes peo­ple who signed up but never logged in, as well as alts. “Res­i­dents” rep­re­sents a 50% infla­tion over actual peo­ple, and most of them bail after the first month.

David Kirk­patrick of For­tune just got some real fig­ures out of Lin­den, and only 1.5M peo­ple have ever logged in (the gap between 2.3M Res­i­dents and 1.5M peo­ple is from the alts and sign up/no login peo­ple), and of that fig­ure, only 250K have logged in more than 30 days later.

In other words, the high­est pos­si­ble fig­ure for active users is 250K — the actual num­ber is lower, but we don’t know how much lower. It also means that only a minor­ity of the Last 60 Days logins are active users.

http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/01/04/real_second_life_numbers_thanks_to_david_kirkpatrick.php

We should of course look at the other num­bers, and there’s no rea­son to “com­pletely dis­miss” Sec­ond Life — there are thou­sands of active users, which means it obvi­ously has some value. Its just a dif­fer­ent value, cal­cu­lated via social proof, than hav­ing mil­lions of users.

To take your ques­tions in reverse order, we don’t know what per­cent­age of users in any given month have accounts that are more than a month old. In Decem­ber, the high­est that num­ber could have been is 250K (which is a mea­sure of any­one who has _ever_ logged in in two months, even if it was last July and August and they never came back.)

The actual num­ber of cur­rent users with a month of expe­ri­ence — call it X — is smaller than 250K, but we don’t know by how much. This unknown num­ber mat­ters because it is the pop­u­la­tion mea­sure of active users a new­bie or busi­ness could expect to encounter in SL and estab­lish any sort of rela­tion­ship with.

One pos­si­bil­ity is that once some­one comes back twice in two months, they’re hooked, so growth in the “ever logged in twice” fig­ure tracks X closely. This is Kirkpatrick’s hypothesis.

Another view is that aban­don­ment con­tin­ues after the first month, at lower than the 85% one-month rate, but high enough to make a dif­fer­ence. (At a guess, the 3 month activ­ity fig­ure is a third lower than the 1 month figure.)

So Kirk­patrick got us a snap­shot of growth in poten­tial active user base — we do not yet have a sec­ond data point to mea­sure change in growth (the 23% fig­ure he quoted was from the month of the Busi­ness Week cover) and we do not know how closely active user base tracks poten­tial user base.

To your sec­ond point, about eco­nom­ics, since cur­rency is a big per­cent­age of the trans­ac­tions in SL, and since aban­don­ing avatars leave their $Ls in-world, some of the eco­nomic activ­ity may be a trans­fer of in-world cur­rency from the absent to the present. (I’ve been talk­ing to some­one run­ning a bank in SL, where a chunk of their rev­enue comes from just such abandonment.)

If you are look­ing at eco­nom­ics, drop me a line — [Tristan’s note: Email address has been removed to avoid spam­ming] — and I’ll intro­duce you to some of the folks I’m talk­ing to.

Lin­den Labs num­bers are being bloated by the use of res­i­dent cre­ated bots. I own just one sim and have banned over 150. If this is any indi­ca­tion of the *num­bers* then every­one is being fooled.

Appar­ently LL doesn’t allow it because they did delete over 100 bots with greek first names in Decem­ber. Now the bots have pro­files and group names and are hard to dis­tin­guish from other residents.

I would rather see on Lin­den Labs front page the actual num­ber of pay­ing res­i­dents or res­i­dents with pay­ment info on file. All this hype over their grow­ing num­bers is hilarious…but then Lin­den Lab is laugh­ing all the way to the bank…

So, am I mis­taken in think­ing that the $50–60 is just a mea­sure of liq­uid­ity? I give $5 to you, you spend it, that per­son spends it, the next per­son spends it, and it looks like $20 in trans­ac­tions. That’s what those fig­ures are mea­sur­ing. It in no way means that all of that is rev­enue flow­ing into Lin­den or (net) into the hands of users. It’s veloc­ity, not quantity.