Second Life usage down over five percent in November
By Eric Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Dec 19 (Reuters) - Month-to-month usage of Second Life declined sharply in November, according to new statistics released by Linden Lab.
Residents spent a total of 24.6 million hours in-world last month, down from 25.9 million in October, a decline of over 5 percent.
November’s drop is the second time on record Second Life scored fewer hours than the month prior. In August hours dropped less than one percent from July.
Linden Lab added 982 premium accounts in November, a one percent gain. Premium accounts pay a subscription fee to Linden Lab in exchange for a stipend of game currency and property rights on Second Life’s mainland.
Figures for “unique residents” are no longer being tabulated. The count of unique users was considered a key metric for followers of Linden’s virtual world as many people have multiple accounts, or “alts.”
“We are discontinuing publishing this figure,” wrote Meta Linden on the company Blog. “It had several challenges, regarding retroactive cancellation of accounts and the algorithm used for determining uniqueness.”
Second Life caters to a mature audience, with 83.6 percent of hours spent logged by residents age 25 or over. That puts Linden Lab in stark contrast with competitors like Virtual MTV or Habbo aimed at the youth market. Second Life avatars under 18 are restricted to Teen Second Life, which amounts to less than one-half of one percent of all Second Life usage.
November is cold and it is supposed to be a month of increased usage. What is going to happen in June? I can see people getting tired of SL. Not trying to be negative. Just stating my POV. Maybe it is just me.
Sun Dec 23, 2007 11:12pm PSTI can understand the decline.
I first heard of SL a couple weeks ago while watching CSPAN. A national politician said he was building a virtual place where political debate could take place and that peaked my interest. Corporate lobbyists have already disenfranchised American voters by bribing (”campaign contributions”) a majority of both parties. Libertarians like Ron Paul would make matters even worse.
At first I was amazed with the environment and began vigorously exploring it. It didn’t take long to determine which activities were most popular. They are
1) Learning how to build (rez) SL objects and write scripts that power them, and
2) sexual activity.
If avatar counts determine popularity all other activities pale in comparison. That probably explains why one rarely sees normal looking avatars in SL. All the female avatars look like scantily clad Hollywood starlets, or porn stars. The guys dress like pimps. SL is about fantasy, after all. When I was on SL Help Island a female avatar transported in and stood there, buck naked, coyly asking “Do I have any clothes on?”. As if she didn’t know. For those not aware, the camera angle is behind and a few meters above an avatar. She could easily see herself. She didn’t need to ask.
Several nations have built presumably functional embassy’s in SL and major corporations also have their presence in the virtual community, even if it is only for advertising, since they have no one to bribe on SL. I was pleased to find MANY universities and colleges with an SL presence. Being a professional programmer for over 30 years I was curious to see how a seminar on “Java and the Web”, presented by Sun at their SL campus auditorium, would work. It didn’t require registration so I arrived 5 minutes early and took a seat. Several others soon arrived. We waited for the presenter to arrive. About 10 minutes after the announced starting time folks began leaving. Within 5 minutes all had left. No reason was given by Sun for the no-show.
That’s the way it is all over SL. I tried a variety of places at a variety of times and days. Morning, evening or night, weekdays or weekends, it didn’t matter. If the event taking placing had nothing to do with object building or sex no one showed up.
Most users apparently don’t have enough bandwidth (over 765kb/S) to support streaming video or audio and the default audio is 32kb/s. The only form of communication left is a rather slow version of IRC. One sees an avatar that appears to be typing on an invisible keyboard. Seconds later their message scrolls by in a communication window, mixed up with several others typing at the same time. I am not a fan of IRC, but that is about the only form of communication that will work in a group environment, giving the present realities of IPV4 and ISP bandwidth manipulations.
I was looking to buy land or rent but noticed a HUGE number of land parcels for sale. Some, on the newer Island Estates, have been empty for several months, and most have never been occupied. Yet, the law of supply and demand seems limited in SL. Considering that I would have to pay between $10-20/month to rent a house or buy 1024 sq meters of land on which I have only a limited number of primitives (prims) to work with, usually less than 300, my SL home would look primitive indeed. And for what? I don’t sleep there. I don’t shower there. I don’t have to eat there. I don’t even have to buy airline tickets. I can fly or transport anywhere for free. If I would do anything there it would be to build objects to decorate my apt or home. Why?
Add to all this the fact that for American users SL income has to be reported and will be taxed. All the burdens of paying for government but no services. There is no police, no courts, nothing. It’s a wild, wild west where the fastest gun wins. Anything goes as long as you avoid making the folks who own the servers mad.
I decided not to purchase a premium membership. My curiosity with SL is over.
Wed Dec 26, 2007 11:12am PSTI feel I must respond to the comment above, written by GreyGeek Kirak, because it is well considered, but contains a number of misconceptions.
The first thing is that avatar counts do not necessarily determine the popularity of a place in Second Life. Camping chairs, which property owners use to pay residents to park their avatars and drive counts up, tend to distort traffic numbers. As a rule, you have to have been in Second Life for more than a few days to have noticed that, and started making your own decisions about where people really are. You cannot rely on the traffic rankings.
Another important thing to note is that the people hanging out on Help Island tend to be Newbies, like you, GreyGeek. They are wearing freebies—clothes that someone gave away. When you are dressing from freebie boxes, you get what you get and you do your best with it. It is, again, only after people have been in world for a while that they start to develop their own personal style. My avatar, for instance, looks a lot like me (not really very much like a porn star) and tends to dress more conservatively than I do in real life. We are, both of us, quite small and fine boned. In real life, I wind up shopping in the children’s department, while she gets to wear the grown up clothes I can never find in my size.
Once you get dressed, you cannot count on staying that way. When that female avatar teleported away from her previous location, (the word is “teleported” not “transported”) she was probably fully clothed. There is a glitch in the system that sometimes results in an avatar being stripped naked during teleport. Since it can take a while for an avatar to resolve on screen, she may not have noticed she was naked for a few seconds. When she did notice, she may have thought there was something wrong with her viewer. She was almost certainly not being coy. The best thing to do in that situation is answer her question. Tell her she is naked. Help her. Don’t treat her like she is stupid. It is a common occurrence and might just as easily have happened the other way around. If you must ask someone if you are naked, how do you want them to respond?
An additional teleport glitch is sometimes termed the “hairy bum bug”. That’s when all of an avatar’s prim attachments (prim hair is very popular) are attached to the bottom of the pelvis during teleport. The avatar arrives at his or her destination point with a bald head and a tuft of prim hair extending downward from the crotch. It can be mortifying if it has never happened to you before, but people who have been in world for a while are more sympathetic. It will eventually happen to everyone.
I was somewhat dismayed that you dismissed building and scripting in Second Life, because I happen to _love_ building and scripting, making textures and animations, and playing with sculpted prims, and I consider the free classes available on those subjects to be a completely unexpected bonus. I like to take part in creating the world. Still, I recognize that not everyone is as interested in that as I am. My partner, Har Dyrssen, loves SL sailboat races, which always have a good turnout, but may be difficult to find in search. My friend, Micki Underwood, plays a lot of live music. There is usually a pretty solid attendance but, again, you won’t find it in search. You see, not all events are posted as public. You have to spend some time in world, talking to people, making connections, interacting. Then they tell you about the fun stuff. It’s a little like real life: You only get invited when people know you.
With regard to communication in Second Life: I would say that many, if not most, of us have voice capability. I certainly do, but I rarely use it. You see, if not everyone in a group is using a headset, it is rude to exclude them by using voice. Period. It is like talking in a language that you know one member of your group does not understand. Someone may not use voice for any number of reasons: they may not have a headset; they may be in a public place; they may be role-playing an avatar of the opposite gender; the baby may be sleeping (finally!); they may even be (gasp!) at work. Streaming audio is a different thing. Voice chat will still work when there is a live musical performance streaming into a parcel.
It is also very funny that you should mention land prices and empty parcels. If you look around on the web a little, you will see that people have been complaining because they think the Lindens are keeping land supplies low deliberately to drive prices up. It could be. Or it could be that they are keeping mainland supplies low because of the availability of estate land. I refuse to speculate. Lindens do what Lindens do.
Prim limits are a different kind of complaint. Now, I am never especially bothered by prim limits because I am Photoshop proficient, so I know that a whole wall of a two-story house, with the windows and trim and everything can be built with one prim sporting a sophisticated custom texture which utilizes transparencies. I have also spent some time torturing prims (they really call it that) to learn how to get the maximum number of usable surfaces out of one of them and learning the uses and limitations of sculpties. I could build an amazingly complex 300 prim furnished house. You could, too, but you might need to check out some of those building classes. Once you have your house, you could invite people over to visit, or maybe hold an event of your own. Since you, as a parcel owner, have the ability to ban other residents or prevent them from creating objects or running scripts on your parcel, there needn’t be any Wild, Wild West.
Most of the difficulties you have described, GreyGeek, have to do with being new to Second Life. They can be overcome by being patient, accepting your ignorance, and becoming willing to learn. Until you can do these things, you will always be a Newbie. Look me up when you’re older, and I’ll show you around.
Sun Dec 30, 2007 4:12pm PSTGiven that the most popular sites in SL were sex or gambling related, it might be interesting to your readers to research how these declines in usage directly relate to the recent bans on gambling, implementation of age-verification for mature-rated sims, age-play and other similar restrictions.
Other factors may also be contributing to the decline, such as the published reports that many businesses have realized that SL wasn’t providing a return on investment in terms of increased brand recognition or conversion of virtual customers to real world customers. Clearly the “build it and they will come” model hasn’t worked for companies like AOL, Sears and Circuit City. Fewer Second Life corporate adopters mean fewer builders online for long periods of time creating these environments.
Thu Jan 3, 2008 8:01am PSTSeriously, SL is a great concept, but has serious flaws it could never overcome. As GreyGreek points out, take away the sex/gambling and people spending countless hours standing around talking crap, what are you left with? Not that much really!
For user growth to have declined to the point of being flat so early does not say much for this technology. 500,000 worldwide users is a drop in the ocean.
Why on earth any individual or company would want to invest in SL when you have one totalitarian organization who dictates the entire SL world? One organization that imposes its own laws and is never democratically elected, can release infinite amounts of land, control the money supply, take your money for any reason and the list goes on and on. Time to move on…..
Fri Jan 4, 2008 2:01pm PSTLike the internet, SL is filled with what I would consider inappropriate material. However, if you peel back the onion and refuse to participate in those activities, there are many more decent places with amazing people who are trying to create a complex and intricate world. I think “newbie’s” get lost in those inappropriate locations, because they are sometimes and unfortunately the loudest. I agree with Doreen Garrigus; patience is required before a really enjoyable experience can be had. And like a fine wine, it does get better with age.
I had to try Second Life two different times before I was able to get over my frustration. I even deleted my account after my first run at it. Luckily the next time I started an account, I found a really great group of people at a SIM called Activ8 who were welcoming and showed me the ropes. I was able to give it a fair shot, and now it is as important to me as any of my other RL hobbies.
Sat Jan 5, 2008 10:01am PSTSL does very little to ensure return visits by newcomers. It could use a few marketing lessons for aiding (and keeping?) new customers.
As a one-year member, I visit SL only when I’m bored to death. Or, I visit when I’m in the mood to be frustrated to wits end–as noted by Pinion here. SL is indeed exceptionally frustrating even after a full year. (The mentors are worthless. That has been my experience.)
SL is difficult and *good* advice about navigating it is far from easily found. Questions are answered with riddles.Friends are not easily made. Racism seems to be a bit of a problem. (Thanks for confirming what I’ve felt with the Tutu interview. Avatars of color *are* treated differently by many others.)
I remain only to see the “phenomenon” and its outcomes. There is no other compelling reason for SL. It’s certainly not at all fun.
Were I a corporation, I’d place my marketing dollars elsewhere–at least for now. Maybe one day….
Sat Jan 5, 2008 11:01pm PSTSecond Life is not at all boring, its is a really creative place with loads to do. But at the moment its a bit like the start of the Web, when people said “all well and good but you can’t find anything”, then came google. The biggest problem is for Newbies to find out what to do. And how to find people that like the same things they do. Just learning how to get around is tricky. But so was the web initially, now we all know how to click on hyperlinks and search for things we want. SL has to make it easier for Newbs to find places where they can hang out. But if you are persistent and have the drive, once you are involved and understand how to find things there is heaps of things to do depending on what you like to do. Visit an Art Gallery, See a Live music show, see a SL magician live show, Go on a Tour of a sim built like the Harry Potter Movie, watch a Live SL TV show being filmed,,,(which is what I do, Im the host) watch a fashion show, watch stock car races, sailing races, ice hockey, dance at clubs, I could go on, but how do you know what to find what you like? Well as someone else said its a bit like landing in a strange town and not knowing anyone and expecting to find what you want in a guide book, well I think SL needs a better guide book a sort of “Lets Go” SL, free for all Noobs and easy to navigate…but don’t go thinking that its all about sex and porn star avis, that, is unfortunately what most noobs get suckered into thinking… that, thats all there is. Go watch www.slcn.tv any of those online Vid Podcasts taken in SL and they will show you some (and only some) of the great fun things to do in SL. Paisley Beebe (SL Jazz Singer and TV Host)
Mon Jan 7, 2008 5:01am PSTI’ve been on SL for about a year now. I own land and I’ve done and seen a lot.
It’s a great forum for meeting friends from all around the world. But as I step back I wonder, why am I doing all this? Granted my friends are important. But I spend hours creating things, building things, which are on some company’s private servers. I don’t own them, despite what Linden says. And when the day Linden goes out of business or decides to change ownership, all of this may go away. The hours of work spent in SL gone.
So to people like Paisley Beebe… you talk of spending time to see an art gallery or to see a live show or watch a TV show being filmed… let me ask you one important question: Why don’t you do these things in Real Life? Your experiences would be more real, you’ll get to hear and smell and feel and remember those experiences instead of watching them off a 15, 17, 19, 21 inch computer monitor.
Tue Jan 8, 2008 6:01pm PSTI’ve been a user of SL since 2005. Its grown vastly namely when it became free to join.
Fluctuation of users over users is to be expected after the last years rapid growth in publicity and users.
I use SL basically to have fun, build cool things throw in a few scripts, network with people with similar interests(music), hangout with people from America , Europe to Japan.
Like any location if you go to certain locations you will find sex shops etc but every city also has cinemas, clubs, universities, shops etc in that way SL mirrors RL.
As for bandwidth.. Running voice, audio and video is not a problem with 1MB connection or above.
Its a new(ish) media that allows you to share your creativity and that my fiend is a good thing compared to Trash TV on an evening.
Wed Jan 9, 2008 6:01am PSTSadly I have to agree with GreyGeek Kirak although I have been around for a year now.
The only reason I stay in SL is to chat with about a dozen friends (i.e. poorly implemented IRC) and (gasp) camping!
I enjoy programming and building things, but both ca be done much better elsewhere (www.renderosity.com for example).
Linden Labs has proven to be capricious enough that i hesitate to invest any significant time or money in SL for fear that it will suddenly become forbidden.
I already have a cool skybox that I only “rez” when we are playing with it. It is too “broadly offensive” to risk leaving out any other time.
The “skybox” version I have build offline using Poser and Carrara is on MY machine and *I* control who sees it! Can’t do that on second life!
In short Second Life has become BORING and is only getting worse. Whenever the camping goes away then so will I.
Sorry folks.
Sat Jan 12, 2008 9:01pm PSTI’m on SL since August 2007. Many times I thought I’d seen all and it was time to quit. But each time something happened - a person met, an island or an activity discovered - which made me stay. And I found most avatars extremely nice and helpful persons.
Tue Mar 11, 2008 8:03am PDT