Premium accounts decline in July
By Eric Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Aug. 31 (Reuters) - The number of premium accounts in Second Life declined in July for the first time on record, according to statistics released by Linden Lab yesterday.
Linden Lab lost 5,810 premium accounts last month, a decline of over 6 percent from June. At 88,797, there were fewer of the enhanced accounts in July than in May.
Premium accounts are those that pay a membership fee to Linden Lab, and receive a weekly stipend and land ownership privileges on Second Life’s mainland.
“The most significant reason for the drop in premium numbers was the enactment of a program to put accounts on hold that were in arrears with us,” said Meta Linden, who compiles the monthly statistics for Linden Lab. She added she didn’t see a correlation between the drop in premium accounts and the gambling ban, which went into effect the same month.
July’s figures also saw the debut of reliability statistics, promised by Linden Lab Chief Executive Philip Rosedale at the Second Life Community Convention last weekend. Over 22% of Second Life sessions ended “abnormally” in July. Rosedale added in an interview with Reuters at SLCC that Linden had no specific benchmark for reliability, but hoped publishing the numbers would generate feedback for the company to gauge its performance.
Thanks in part to the declining number of premium accounts, population density continued to fall in Second Life. At July’s end, there were 575 m2 of land per premium account and 50 m2 of land per resident active in the past 30 days, up from 494 m2 and 43 m2, respectively, the previous month. Jack Linden announced on Wednesday Linden Lab would be slowing new land additions in early September.
Total hours spent in-world increased 8 percent in July to over 23 million, an accelerated rate of growth from June’s 5 percent gain. Second Life gained over 800,000 new avatars to 8.5 million last month, but of those less than 500,000 are counted by Linden as new “unique residents.”
Americans continued to comprise the largest nationality of avatars, making up 27 percent of Second Life’s residents and spending 35 percent of the total time in-world. July saw a spike in Japanese Second Life usage, with a jump from 27,040 to 44,847 active residents.
Second Life’s population by gender remained unchanged from previous months, with women outnumbered by men in-world by approximately three-to-one. But women make up over 42 percent of Second Life’s usage, spending on average far more time online than their male counterparts.
