'Seasonal dip' will go on in April

[Madeliefste Oh]

In one of her posts Brooke wrote about an expected seasonal dip in March. According to stats about user currency I found on Tateru Nino's blog, I must conclude that the sales dip in March is (at least not only) a matter of expected seasonals differences. You can see an overal decline in concurrency since february this year. 

Next statistic chard shows the median daily user-concurrency, charted by day, from last year.

source: Dwell on it

The less residents that are active in SL, the less need to buy virtual goods.

I hear other people talking about an average of 10.000 people who sign up for a SL account on daily base. But this chard  shows that there are more people who stop using SL, than there are people that start using SL.

According to these figures we cannot expect that April will be a good sales month again...

 

 

[Pamela Galli]

Yes, hard to think of any way to deal with lower concurrency. Oh, except slash prices, etc. I won't go there.

[Vick Forcella]

See my reply on that blog (2nd page) and the same graph.

[Josh Susanto]

To try to be fair to LL, I should point out that changes in user concurrency presumably also reflect whether or not someone is using alt accounts, and how often.

Alt accounts are common enough that their use or disuse, alone, could explain, theoretically, in principle, most of the variation in the stats as shown...  IF multiple accounts have not been resolved as representing single users prior to producing the graph.

Has user data been consolidated across accounts for the purposes of the graph?

What are some variables we might choose to associate with alt use, and when should we expect them to be reflected in such a graph?

[Josh Susanto]

My apologies.

I somewhat misunderstood the graph after having had it incorrectly explained by some of the pertinent text.

If I understand correctly (?), the graph does not show either how many users or how many avatars use SL in the course of a day, as the accompanying analysis seems to suggest.

What is shows is merely the "average" (median) number of people logged on over the courses of the individual dates graphed.

That is: it is not necessarily any more a reflection of the number of daily users than it is a reflection of the number of hours of daily use by the average user.

Moreover: it does not show that fewer people are using SL; it only shows that SL is receiving less total use, which is not necessarily inconsistent with an increase in total number of daily users. People don't need to stop using SL to produce this graphic result; they only need to spend less time logged in...

... and time logged in could mean anything from building and buying to simply not bothering to log out.

The graph means SOMETHING.

But what, exactly?

When we eliminate what it does not (necessarily) mean, what is left?

[Darrius Gothly]

 

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Josh Susanto wrote:

...

When we eliminate what it does not (necessarily) mean, what is left?

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Oooohhh .. shiny!

 

[Josh Susanto]

[Oooohhh .. shiny!]

AND - hey- I've got fudge for ...

OH, look... there goes a squirrel!