Trends within Second Life
The full article is on Massively here, which is a great news site on MMOGs. (I originally saw this article in Charles Hudson‘s Google shares, thanks Charles!)
The article goes on to summarize a number of trends within Second Life:
Total signups increased by 529,224 (4.73%) in December compared to a
growth of 605,095 (5.72%) in November. New-user retention to 90 days is still about 10% according to Linden Lab, having apparently remained more or less unchanged over the last 12 months.
Overall age demographics continue to trend towards us crusty oldies.
74.17% of the population is 25 years and older – a slight gain from
November, and the older users spend far more time in Second Life
than younger users with those over 44 years old continuing to be the
heaviest users on average, and teens and under-25’s spending the least
time.
Definitely worth reading.
What’s the right activity metric?
Over time, the # of registered users has become a pretty meaningless metric to me – I mean, big is good, but given that some sites can generate users but churn them right away, it’s not so useful. Similarly, the proliferation of Facebook apps and MySpace sites makes it so that large numbers of "uniques" can be generated without effort also, but these users are not worth the same as the others.
Peak concurrency is something I read a lot about in the MMOG world, yet it seems very much rooted on capacity planning :) It is certainly a different view though, and one that has its usefulness.
Probably worth writing another blog post one day, about different user activity metrics…