Second Life...those avatars are even more virtual than I thought

I have been to two talks in the last 6 months where people claimed 1.0m and then 2.0m users of Second Life. Both times I blogged afterwards that I had never seen more than about 10,000 on when I was there, but being a trusting soul I took the PR guys at their word

Well, turns out I was not the only one scratching my head as to where all the avatars had gone.

Clay Shirky did a bit of analysis and wrote a very sharp piece about all this on Tuesday.

Turns out that Linden claims 2.0m *residents*, where a resident is defined as the avatar, not the user. However it is very unlikely that the ratio is 1:1.....many people have more than one avatar. Also, apparently Linden’s own numbers suggest that the Residents figure includes even failed attempts to use the service. They were adding their second million Residents between mid-October and December 14th, but they also reported just shy of 810 thousand logins for the same period.

In addition, this figure is gross of churn, and I have seen figures as high as 85% bandied about, that may also include inactive avatars though.

Thus at its worst, assuming say a ratio of 1.5 : 1 of avatars to users, 1.8m gross avatar logins and say a 66% churn, Second Life would be on something like 400,000 actual users in reality. An "industry standard" 33% churn puts them at about 800,000 users.

Pity they felt the need to do this really, it just makes it worse when it all comes out and I do think they are doing something very interestng.

(Addendum...great article comparing Virtual Reality's (broken) promises 10 years ago with Second Life today over at Valleywag. I played with VR. the economics and computer power are very different today, but it is a sobering lesson)

Now to do some digging to see if its so lonely at Habbo Hotel