Valleywag
CLAY SHIRKY — Second Life released a bunch of figures last Friday, including the cumulative number of users, as part of their "effort to drive toward complete transparency and openness", as they put it. I've been critical of Linden Lab's population figures in the past. And it turns out I was right, about all of it.
Now that Linden is publishing actual user numbers, we can see that the Residents figure, as expected, is a big overcount over actual people (about 50% inflation, in fact, accounting for over a million ersatz users). Second Life doesn't have two million users. They have had two million users over the life of the service, and they've lost most of them. Of those users, the majority — something like 5 out of 6 — bailed in the first month. What we don't know is what the other sixth are up to, but after Friday's post, we can guess the answer is "Not much." As John Zdanowski, the Linden employee who posted the figures, notes, "Approximately 10% of unique users have logged in for 40 hours or more."
He doesn't caveat this — it isn't current users, or 40 hours per month. The plain meaning of that sentence is that fewer than 200,000 people have given Second Life even a cumulative work week of their time, over the history of the platform. (After revealing this figure, Zdanowski immediately offers two separate rationales for having so few committed users, and two separate analogies for why poor adoption is no big deal, in a single paragraph.)
As any illusionist will tell you, the trick is mainly in getting the audience to look at the wrong thing. In Linden's case, they want you to think that cumulative users matters when it doesn't. A new user won't care one whit that, as of last year, 1,422,846 people had tried Second Life. What they want to know is how many of those people will still be around to interact with now?
This is the question the press should be asking — "How many of those users from 2006 have logged in recently?" Linden won't answer, of course, but it might be interesting to hear how they square the invisibility of the one population number that actually affects user experience with their stated goal of transparency and openness.
Comments
Great work Clay.
Using the more detailed LL provided data and rationalizing that with your analysis, it appears the SL economy resembles those structures standing behind the Sphinx. Taking the cumulative seigniorage enjoyed by LL, and then the net L$ for $USD over time, the entire shootin' match depends solely upon clearly unsustainable growth rates.
How many here really believe LL will actually start buying your L$ back when the growth subsides? Raise your hands.
Good publicity requires knowing how to abuse statistics.
In one three-month period in 1996, AOL lost 1.7 million members. But they carpet-bombed America with floppy disks, and brought in 2.1 million new trial accounts in that same period. Then they issued a press release saying "AOL adds 400,000 members; growth continues."
Ten years later, that trick stopped working. AOL's net loss last quarter was nearly 1 million members. (That is, every nine seconds someone left AOL.) And since that's a net figure, the total cancellations must be much higher.
But maybe they're all leaving AOL for Second Life.
I think the same could be said about any site that attempts to brag about its numbers. No method of tracking is perfect, and the number of people who try SL speaks highly of SL's marketing efforts and of the intriguing nature of the idea. Plus, SL is likely to be the catalyst that makes teledildonics mainstream.
I've done a bit of analysis on the SL numbers. It's a whole lot worse than AOL's situation. Here's a teaser: in order for LL to not have to start buying back L$ (instead of selling them for free revenues) to stabilize the exchange rate, as they claim they do so benevolently, they'll have to have around 20,500,000 new users by YE 2007. By December 2010, they'll need only 104,800,000,000 new users.
I'd say what that type of economy resembles geometrically, but it seems to send ruffle lots of virtual feathers.
Clay
Excellent thoughts on Second Life... I've had my own concerns about the world and have expressed them as well.
http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/thechangingfaceofmedia/arc...
Not only do the numbers cause concern (and the changing sand surrounding them), but the content, how major brands can actually make money from the site, etc.
Scott
I used it once or twice and I have to say it's a big pile of shite. It lags too much and it's just not fun. And with bandwagon stories like IBM building a base there and BBC, that just makes me think "sheesh what an asshole service full of a load of assholes."
Too much of the game requires you to put real money into it. I'd just use World of Warcraft if I was desperate enough for an online life.
I am currently working on a couple of ventures within second life. The number of people logging in and staying in does not worry me.
For my business all I need is the user to log in once, try out what I have to offer, if they come back great if not then there will be other new user's trying it out. If they don't come back then that's fine because as the reports suggests people will log in a couple of times, perhaps get bored, disturbed by the experience or both and leave.
My business model just need user's to get into second life a couple of times. Be it though just stumbling into SL and finding out what we are doing, or going through a user base that I already have outside SL.
Speaking as a potential business within SL then this is the only way to go. Lets face it your not really going to have regular come again and again customer's.
Sigma, the problem is your business model can never grow on that model. You are making a hidden assumption of perpetual growth of new-users, especially since each marginal user represents a smaller portion of total real-money spend. In very short order, the number of new users signing up each month will exceed the total population of all internet-connected individuals on earth. We have a name for such models: it begins with a "P".
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