1. That's a cool graph....

Chris

Posted at 10:03AM on Apr 20th 2007 by Chris

2. I don't see how companies would drool at that result.

That's about 15% of 5 millions users... They could have done better.

Posted at 10:16AM on Apr 20th 2007 by Nacon

3. Nacon, that's 15% per month, not per year. Annualize that and you do have a growth rate most companies would drool over.

Posted at 11:23AM on Apr 20th 2007 by Ronin

4. To compare, World of Warcraft had an annual growth rate of subscriptions of about 21%.

The back of my envelope says that's about 1.61% growth per month.

Posted at 11:07AM on Apr 20th 2007 by Tateru Nino

5. How much of all that ends up becoming turnover? Someone told me yesterday that about 50% of new signups give up at Orientation Island. I really doubt that the 1.61% of Warcraft users ditch out virtually instantly (probably because they have to pay to get there). Secondly, they have to pay to get there (WC), making SL's growth rate higher, of course. I think it is more interesting to see retention rate personally. Do people who buy WC and then buy the monthly subscription stay with it for longer than 3 months? That same person took a sample of over 2000 users and found that something like 50% had a birth date of less than 3 months, with 6% of that being over 1 year. Is there any way to get turnover/retention statistics?

Posted at 2:09PM on Apr 20th 2007 by rp

6. The growth rate (13%) we're referring to here, is only for paid Second Life accounts, not for the freebie ones. Overall retention for both paid and non-paid accounts out of total signups is 10% for SL (to 90 days). I don't know the comparable retention figure would be for WoW.

Posted at 2:11PM on Apr 20th 2007 by Tateru Nino

7. How many of the users on Second Life are premium users? This CNet article posted on Jan. 3rd (and mentions you btw, how exciting!) says that there are about 43k premium users. So I assume that the total is now somewhere around 60k (43k + 15%) = roughly 50k + 13% = roughly 57k + April's signups. So 60k is probably about right.. right?

Posted at 2:41PM on Apr 20th 2007 by rp

8. Jan 31: 57.6K
February 28: 66.8K
March 31: 75.7K

Posted at 2:36PM on Apr 20th 2007 by Tateru Nino

9. The data in the post we link to gives the breakdown month by month back to February 2005.

Posted at 2:38PM on Apr 20th 2007 by Tateru Nino

10. Math makes me sleepy.

Posted at 2:42PM on Apr 20th 2007 by akela.talamasca

11. Ahh, beat me to it. Thanks for the info.

Posted at 2:43PM on Apr 20th 2007 by rp

12. I like how in the interview they say, if they can't scale then SL is done for.

Posted at 4:01PM on Apr 20th 2007 by ShockWave Plasma

13. Also interesting to notice is that the overall growth of SL outside the US. US residents are about 1 in 4 — the rest comes from the rest of the world (over 50% from Europe).

It will be fascinating to see the "orkutisation" of Second Life as SL Brazil launches in June. This will mean, if the current trend continues, that very likely US residents will be a small minority by the year's end, with close to 10% of all users, and very likely overtaken by Brazil, France, Germany, and possibly even the UK. This is rather intriguing, and I wonder if it's just a momentary trend, as new content is being developed on national areas, using their respective language for all interaction and content. "English not spoken here", something which would be unthinkable in 2005, is currently a reality over several dozens of sims, which will be hundreds by the end of the year.

It's normal that "the rest of the world" trails after the US when a new technology is introduced, and thus this growth on the international side might be just "temporary" (as the "rest of the world" catches up). However, this also means that Linden Lab needs to seriously start thinking on how to address the international market in, say, 2008 or 2009.

Ah, the joys of exponential growth :)

I was very glad to see that LL is now a profitable company. This really cheered me up!

Posted at 10:20PM on Apr 21st 2007 by Gwyneth Llewelyn

14. I think it might be because the US residents don't get nearly as much time for vacation that other countries get. Or, it could be because the US has a much stricter policy regarding available content and people are somewhat offended by what they see on SL (i.e. nudity and hardcore drug use is not common or banned on most TV channels aside from premiums like HBO, only violence which is of course perfectly acceptable). Also, there is much less of an electronic music club culture in the US, which I sense is a large part of SL's draw (at least for me it is because I can DJ live to a bunch of stoned ravers). There's a lot of reasons why US residents don't use SL, and one of them is probably because the media isn't covering it that much. After talking to some Germans in SL (because I speak some deutsch very badly), it seems like the coverage over there is a lot more extensive and generally positive, while the coverage in the media here is generally very little and mostly negative (the sex and drugs issue; won't somebody PLEASE think of the children?). I wouldn't be surprised if and when SL does get more popular in the US, US legislators attack the shit out of it as much as possible. Video games have a really bad rap sheet in this country due to all the random acts of violence by crazy people here and if anyone remembers when they found the secret sex stuff in Grand Theft Auto... well, SL will not be received well.

Posted at 9:16PM on Apr 24th 2007 by rp