facotaco Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 Hi everyone! I have been a bit of a Roamer in Second Life since 2013, and what I mean by that is I dropped in a few times every few months for about an hour, explored by myself and then left. Needless to say I was extremely shy and I was severely underdeveloped in Second Life. However recently I got back int Second Life, but this time full force, I'm ready to make it my daily hobby. Now I hear a lot of users, which I'm always uncertain when they really started using Second Life, say that SL's prime in popularity was 2008/2009 or 2013. So for those of you who have been around for that long, is it true? And if any of you can make a guess, about how many still use Second Life today? Have I missed out on the giant user numbers? Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, I felt this was the most related to making friends, since the greater the numbers in people the more likely it is for me to meet people and establish my Second Life! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cindy Evanier Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 1 minute ago, facotaco said: SL's prime in popularity was 2008/2009 1 minute ago, facotaco said: Have I missed out on the giant user numbers? Yep 3 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
facotaco Posted October 8, 2018 Author Share Posted October 8, 2018 oof, thank you for the instant response though! I see your creation date is 2009, this also helps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cindy Evanier Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 5 minutes ago, facotaco said: oof, thank you for the instant response though! I see your creation date is 2009, this also helps. SL is different now in many ways to 2009. Personally back then it was all about clubbing and making loads of friends. These days I prefer a small group of close friends and different activities. It depends what you want to do on SL, if you want large crowds follow the green dots on the map. Loads of people doesn't mean your personal experience of SL will be any better 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BelindaN Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 ^^^^ Very true, and the crowded clubs are also usually very laggy, which gets annoying. My closest friends all came about on sims which I visit regularly, and maybe no more than 15 Avis, often a lot less. When I started in SL I chatted to anybody I came across, but lately I haven't done so much of that..........not sure why.......*thinking*........ 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChinRey Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 3 hours ago, facotaco said: And if any of you can make a guess, about how many still use Second Life today? It depends on how you count. But the number of RL human beings who log on to SL at least once a month over some time is probably around 100,000, almost certainly no more than 200,000 or less than 50,000. I'm not sure if I should go into detail how I got to those numbers, I've posted the background info a few times already and people may get tired of seeing me repeting myself. The number seems to be fairly stable. Very few SL users leave, and even fewer necomers join. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Love Zhaoying Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 1 hour ago, ChinRey said: and even fewer necomers join I wonder how LL plans to increase signup / retention besides new 1024 homes, new signup page, and all the recent tweaks (greater LI, etc.)? Recent tweaks seem mostly geared to retention, not recruitment. Don't forget, every year a new crop of young adults turns old enough to use Second Life.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rhonda Huntress Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 Count the number of unique posters on all of these forums for the past 30 days. Multiply that number by 15. Multiply that by 15 again. That will give you a ballpark figure for the actual SL users not counting alts and bots. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChinRey Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 12 minutes ago, Rhonda Huntress said: Count the number of unique posters on all of these forums for the past 30 days. How unique do you have to be to count? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Love Zhaoying Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 I get it, # forum posters is a stable % of actual users that login to SL. 35 minutes ago, Rhonda Huntress said: Count the number of unique posters on all of these forums for the past 30 days. Multiply that number by 15. Multiply that by 15 again. That will give you a ballpark figure for the actual SL users not counting alts and bots. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madelaine McMasters Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 23 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said: I get it, # forum posters is a stable % of actual users that login to SL. You think we're the stable ones? 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rhonda Huntress Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 34 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said: I get it, # forum posters is a stable % of actual users that login to SL. It works for virtually anything but is carved in stone for MMORPGs. 6 to 8% of the user base read online forums. Also, 6 to 8% of forum readers will post. Count the posts, do the math and there you have it. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Love Zhaoying Posted October 8, 2018 Share Posted October 8, 2018 33 minutes ago, Rhonda Huntress said: It works for virtually anything but is carved in stone for MMORPGs. 6 to 8% of the user base read online forums. Also, 6 to 8% of forum readers will post. Count the posts, do the math and there you have it. Posts per user can vary widely, I suspect! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madelaine McMasters Posted October 9, 2018 Share Posted October 9, 2018 6 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said: Posts per user can vary widely, I suspect! As can posters per user. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Love Zhaoying Posted October 9, 2018 Share Posted October 9, 2018 19 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said: As can posters per user. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lindal Kidd Posted October 9, 2018 Share Posted October 9, 2018 I hadn't heard about the "forum posters metric"...although it might take a lot of effort to actually COUNT all those "unique posters." My concurrency meters show that there is a fairly constant 35-45,000 users in world at any given moment (not definitive, as I only check these when I happen to walk by one of them and am not distracted by something else). This compares to an all-time high of something like 75,000 back in 2008-09. The "traffic bot takeover" didn't happen until well after that, so that figure was most likely (mostly) unique, live persons. That is a large decrease, but remember that that high point was a pretty brief spike. SL has soldiered on with a pretty large and devoted bunch of users, despite a (comparatively) creaky technology, and despite endless predictions of its imminent demise. Not to mention the articles like "Whatever Happened to Second Life?" Besides, 35,000 people is still an awful lot of potential friends! We're still here. Still having fun, still making money (some of us), still causing Drama (another some of us). Welcome back! 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nalates Urriah Posted October 11, 2018 Share Posted October 11, 2018 I kept monthly stats from 10-minutes checks of the Linden the min and max concurrent users values. This year it was running 21,000 to 56,000. The API is currently broken. They are working on it. I may be able to get my numbers again in a couple of months. In 2012 the numbers were 28,000 to 71,000. However, the rate of decrease has been slowing each year. There are no good user numbers coming from the Lab on any regular basis. Ebbe tosses out some numbers but they are fuzzy... about a million unique users in a year, 600k+ a month... is that a peak month? Average? And signups... are those still in the 10k per month range? Last I heard... yes. But, LL does provide financial information. In 2017 users took out US$60,000,000+/- per website and Ebbe. If there are 100k users that is $600/user. I'm waiting on my check... So, ChinRey's numbers are plausible. The hype in the media hit its peak about 2007-2008. I recall seeing concurrent user numbers in the mid 80k in late 2008, my first year, and early 2009. It has been decreasing ever since. But, the user numbers on their own are misleading. It is like saying my gas mileage went from 50 miles per gallon to 8... It should probably be mentioned I traded my Prius in on an big H3 SUV. It is sort of the same with SL, things we are measuring change. Many that play/work in SL now spend more time working in Blender and Photoshop than they do in-world. So, mesh clothing and stuff have made a dent in concurrency numbers. Have you seen Flickr lately? YouTube? People producing and editing are not likely logged into SL. Will animesh take more time away from SL as people do more animating? Did the marketplace hurt in-world rentals when the Magic-Boxes went away? Probably. But how much? We don't know. The shift to out-of-world design has had an effect. We just have no good way to know how much of an effect. But, a change from 80k to 56k in concurrency over 6 years with all the changes that take people participating in SL out-of-world... I suspect the decrease in concurrency seemingly indicates a bigger loss of users than there actually is. On an empirical basis we hear people saying they meet fewer new people. Yet, I meet more new people now than I have in some time. I think that is a matter of where one is and what they are doing more than it is a data point about SL. I think often what people say about SL is actually more about them and what they are doing than objective reality. 9 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Misty Selentiak Posted November 13, 2018 Share Posted November 13, 2018 I joined SL in 2007 (on a different avi) I remember a lot of people joined around that time, and i used to go to DDU (Duran Duran Universe) Was really great in it's hay day, now sadly you can go there and no one there at all. I know a lot from 2007 -2009 still log on, some every day , others now and then. A lot have new avis (like me updated this avi, and chose to make her my main) but a lot of the time you find out 'new' avi's aren't new at all, and maybe been floating around 10+ years I don't really take much notice of statistics, it depends where you go now, but i agree back then it was more about making friends, i had a hubby on here and we had lands so had fun working on that, but now a days it is more sexual orientated, might have always been rumbling under the surface, but now a days you can't type in beach without a ton of sex/bdsm places coming up hahaha I tend to explore lands, then when my SL BF gets on we go clubs/bars/ see live music. There are a lot of Blues/rock/80's places that are always packed then others that sadly have no one. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SecretarySherry Posted November 20, 2018 Share Posted November 20, 2018 I just signed up a couple hours ago. Hopefully more people will too... 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fionalein Posted November 21, 2018 Share Posted November 21, 2018 3 hours ago, SecretarySherry said: I just signed up a couple hours ago. Hopefully more people will too... Welcome to SL, there is a constant stream of folks logging in for the first time - sadly not many stay as you have to invest a bit into understadning SL before it gives back to you 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Saravendi Posted November 23, 2018 Share Posted November 23, 2018 On 10/11/2018 at 12:41 AM, Nalates Urriah said: On an empirical basis we hear people saying they meet fewer new people. Yet, I meet more new people now than I have in some time. I think that is a matter of where one is and what they are doing more than it is a data point about SL. I think often what people say about SL is actually more about them and what they are doing than objective reality. Agree, agree. Only like to add this perspective... I seem to meet fewer and fewer new people, as I become more experienced in SL and as I refine my avatars image, mesh shapes, clothing etc... Maybe I’m more intimidating looking or seem unapproachable??? I hope not, but people make assumptions that change their behavior just like in rl. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fionalein Posted November 23, 2018 Share Posted November 23, 2018 (edited) I also found out I meet less new people because I hang out less in Newbie regions =^.^= Whenever I go there though, there is still new folks en masse Edited November 23, 2018 by Fionalein 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theresa Tennyson Posted November 23, 2018 Share Posted November 23, 2018 On 10/8/2018 at 5:58 AM, facotaco said: Now I hear a lot of users, which I'm always uncertain when they really started using Second Life, say that SL's prime in popularity was 2008/2009 or 2013. So for those of you who have been around for that long, is it true? And if any of you can make a guess, about how many still use Second Life today? Have I missed out on the giant user numbers? The user numbers never were giant. At its absolute height the number of people in Second Life at any given time was less than the number of people at your average large-college football game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Selene Gregoire Posted November 24, 2018 Share Posted November 24, 2018 On 11/23/2018 at 2:47 AM, Theresa Tennyson said: The user numbers never were giant. At its absolute height the number of people in Second Life at any given time was less than the number of people at your average large-college football game. What college stadiums hold up to 80,000 people? https://www.collegexpress.com/lists/list/the-25-largest-college-football-stadiums/527/ More than I had thought. Problem is in those stadiums, you'll likely need a pair of binoculars to see the game with unless you like craning your neck to watch the screens... with the binoculars. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zharfan Posted November 24, 2018 Share Posted November 24, 2018 i plan to come back to SL soon. anything new? might needed new friends. lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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