Running the Numbers on Second Life
There’s been discussion lately about Second Life and how its reported numbers seem to be off. Clay Shirky, on Valleywag, has been deconstructing the numbers claiming that the emperor wore no clothes. The funny thing is that this was coinciding with some research I’ve been doing to better understand whether SecondLife is a flash in the pan of whether it holds real meat. Since October, I’ve been tabulating the numbers listed on their front page, once a week, on Mondays. From there, I ended up with the following spreadsheet: Date Total Residents Logged in last 60 days US$ spent in last 24 hours Lindex Activity last 24 hours 11-Aug-06 493,563 225,028 Â Â 22-Oct-06 1,082,664 446,153 $460,979.00 Â 24-Oct-06 1,110,224 459,062 $519,914.00 Â 31-Oct-06 1,203,213 499,223 $531,768.00 Â 6-Nov-06 1,269,019 515,907 $613,793.00 Â 14-Nov-06 1,391,715 533,825 $548,912.00 $86,659.00 20-Nov-06 1,517,480 611,793 $656,020.00 $91,508.00 27-Nov-06 1,653,272 667,645 $624,537.00 $99,675.00 4-Dec-06 1,791,247 700,303 $654,750.00 $116,785.00 11-Dec-06 1,932,418 701,287 $626,187.00 $132,005.00 18-Dec-06 2,002,617 720,010 $696,210.00 $120,198.00 25-Dec-06 2,107,321 831,653 $721,341.00 $124,723.00 1-Jan-07 2,287,108 844,317 $803,790.00 $116,425.00 But the data itself wasn’t that interesting when it came to raw form. So I started thinking about some of the things I could do with it….