Second Life - some Real Numbers for a Virtual World

An update on Second Life numbers.............

Clay Shirky points to journalist David Kirkpatrick (see comment section here) numbers from Second Life CEO Philip Rosedale:

As of January 1st, 2.3m avatars created

Actual users who have entered Second Life - 1,525,670 unique email addresses have logged into SL at least once. This is not IP addresses, which would be expected to be less as some people create avatars from multiple email addresses.

Of these, 252,284 people have logged in more than 30 days after their account creation date. Percent of registrants still active after 30 days was 45% in early 2004, now running at c 15%.

About 40,000 users are paying members (I assume mostly, if not all, landowners - though ownership is of course on a leasehold basis).

So the "active" user base would seem to be (roughly) that 250,000, plus some % of people who visit much more occasionally - if that were about another 10% of all email addresses that gives a number of about 400,000. As an "order of magnitude" that tallies far more with my experience - the most people I have seen online is about 14,000 at any one time over the Xmas period.

This is useful...hopefully moves the debate on from all the hooha about total number of users, to what is actually being done in Second Life and other Web 3.D environments, which in my view is truly revolutionary.