Zee Linden Statistics Spinning Revealed
by Pixeleen Mistral on 12/12/06 at 7:47 pm
By Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk
Today, Zee Linden released a set of eagerly awaited statistics on the Second Life economy that paint a cheerful picture of premium account growth with month-on-month growth running around 8 – 10% and showing a 15-30% growth rate in the last three months.
However, Zee Linden only calculated the monthly growth rate for premium accounts — hiding a strange trend of accelerating and decelerating growth in transactions and online hours that runs on a 3 month cycle. To be sure – Second Life is growing, but tracking the month on month rate of growth in hours spent online and transactions shows an recurring 2 – 3 month cycle – perhaps suggesting that waves of users arrive – and burn out after a month and a half – only to be replaced by the next wave?
[graph after the jump]
month on month growth rate in hours, transactions, and L$s
While some have speculated that Linden Lab is moving to a business model dependent on selling it’s in-game currency – Linden dollars – the growth rate in the the Linden dollars held in-world fell at the same time the hours spent online grew in November.
We will leave deeper analysis of Zee’s numbers for later – but looking at the acceleration and deceleration in growth rates for some of Zee’s economic indicators suggests that the road is not quite as smooth as the official Linden graphs might lead one to believe.
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