Statistics of September 2007

On October 2nd, we posted the resident statistics of August 2007 (or, the SL Metrics as Linden Lab calls it) in a handy format. This time, I will just give you an update on the most important changes.

Usercount:

Number of 'unique' residents: + 571,881 (+ 9.3%)
Number of residents: + 343,961 (+ 3.7%)
Number of premium accounts: + 454 (+ 0.5%)

What does this mean? Well, the number of accounts is ever increasing. But that's not so strange with all the alts and increasing popularity of Second Life. The number of 'unique' (as LL calls it) residents seems to increase more than the total number. This could indicate that less people have extra accounts (alts), at least legal alts. That's alts that are linked to primary accounts. The group of people that have more alts than average, are griefers. So we suspect that the amount of griefing has been decreased, maybe because in September the Summer holidays came to an end, so less bored teens on the grid.

However, the number of premium accounts lags badly, compared to the resident count. This could have to do with the introduction of VAT for European Union based residents. We can probably safely say that the growth of premium accounts in the rest of the world would approximately go ahead as normal. And that would mean that more EU residents actually have gone back to basic accounts. However, Linden Lab does not provide numbers of premium accounts per country, so this is not exact science.

Activity of residents:

Number of active residents: - 24,002 (- 4.4%)
Number of hours online: + 699,996 (+ 3.0%)
Average hours online per month: 45.9 (42.7 in August, + 3.2%)

Obviously, the number of residents who logged into SL at least once a month decreased, but the total number of hours increased. If you look at the number of hours per user per month, spent in-world, increased quite a lot. Again, this could have to do with the Summer holidays being over, but nonetheless it seems that there is a shift from quantity to quality.

Origin of active residents:

It seems that there are only minor shifts between EU residents, USA/Canada residents and residents in the rest of the world. EU residents have broken through the 40% barrier though, looking only at active residents. And residents outside EU/USA/Canada have increased a bit more in hours online than residents within EU/USA/Canada.

Top 10 of countries:

America is still leader, although the market share of active users has gone down a bit. Japan is down by 2 places, from 2nd to 4th. Germany is up by 2 places, from 4th to 2nd. That's a swap and can be called a substantial shift. In the lower ranks, the Netherlands have dropped from 8th to 9th and swapped with Spain. Other than that, no significant changes took place.

Overall conclusion:

The most important difference between September and August is that the average numbers of hours online have increase quite a bit. Other than that, it's mostly minor shifts.

Source: official Linden Lab blog