Projections
A conservative estimate of new resident signup rates shows Second Life reaching one million on or about December 4. But that's a conservative projection - this weekend, signups took rather a jump.
Based on a slightly less conservative projection, we're looking on or about mid-November.
Sure, some of those people no longer log in. Some of them are alts. None of that really matters.
What does matter is the psychological value of the relatively arbitrary number. Not necessarily to you. Not necessarily to me. Not directly anyway. Indirect effects, though. Well, if the past has been anything to go by, it should be interesting.
Update - Show your work!
Average new signups per day over the last 22 days is: 5471.
Here's a picture of that:
One million, less our current total signups is 345,322.
5471 into that figure yields 9 weeks - 13 November, in fact. I went with two more conservative figures (5000/day giving 10 weeks, and 4000 giving 12 weeks.
Here's a chart of the average signups over the last 22 days, projected forward:
It's going to take a fair bit of wiggle in the signup rates to not hit 1 million by december 31, considering there's a six-week margin. Honestly, if you'd asked me 2 months ago, I'd have seriously doubted the likelyhood of hitting the one million signups mark this year.
But having worked the actual numbers....No. I think it will happen. Potentially sooner than November 13, but if I had to put money down, I'd say between November 13 and November 30.
Nicely done, I must say SL has grown quite a bit. I remember when the number was 130,000 and I've only been a member since 2-5-06.
ReplyDeleteHehe, might be interesting/funny to see people actualy put bets on what day it will reach the one million mark.
After the security breach and surge in signups... These statistics must be hard to predict ;0
ReplyDeleteOf course that number doesn't actually matter at all. It's the people signing up with more ALTs after being banned repeatedly.
ReplyDeleteI think of it like a website hits counter, nothing more.
What you really should be looking at is how many people are online at the time. So far, around 10,000... That number of active account for the last 60 days doesn't means anything at all. It's just bunch of people jumping between ALTs.
Around beginning of the summer, as I recall, number of people that was online at the most was about 6,000.
Now it's up to around 10,000.
That's 4,000 more "real" people getting involed with SL.
Other companies like Blizard are going to laugh at that little tiny number. They're gonna roar their laugher when they hear about SL having 1 millions "ALT" accounts while they actually have about.. maybe around 13,000 people online at that time.
It's a joke. SL need to start deleting non-active-for-30-days accounts to save their embarrassment and database spaces.
Actually, each point of concurrency generally represents many people.
ReplyDeleteA concurrency increase of 1, on average, would signify an increase of 12 people, assuming each averaged about 2 hours per day. That's an oversimplification of sorts - but a workable one.
So the jump in concurrency actually represents a much larger pool of people than simple arithmetic would suggest.
Actually, for concurrency we're brushing just a few people short of 11,000 relatively often now.
However, like I said - it doesn't matter how many are alts. What does matter is how the rest of the world perceives that number, and there's no way we can change their minds that it's important.
One million signups or one million alts. It actually doesn't matter which if you're not actually in SL.