Statistics

Since this blog is primarily about Second Life™ I think it fair to say my visitor stats are representative of SL Users. If you are interested in knowing what hardware and screen resolution other SL residents are using, read on.

The stats are from my Google Analytics account. If you use both Google’s and WordPress’s stats you’ll notice considerable difference in how they count visitors and page views. Google is much more conservative. In general Google reports visitors and WordPress page views. Since my readers read 1.76 pages per visit my Google stats are about half what WordPress shows.

Google provides stats that are not available from WordPress. For instance, how many people visit your blog every day? In my case: 80+%. Every second day? Third? Longer? Once a month? In my case: 2.2%.

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Every so often I see someone using statistics to back up a viewpoint they have. It is very common among Warmistas and Deniers. We also see politicians misusing statistics. The most common misuse of stats is to select the data segment and use it to PREDICT the future. If that worked, everyone would get rich playing the stock market.

So, recent articles on stats got me wondering what was up. I used to write an article each month on SL statistics. Unless stats are showing change, they get pretty boring. It’s been 16 weeks since I wrote about Second Life Statistics (Sept. 2011).

Sign Ups

Rod Humble, the Linden Lab CEO, seems to have been spinning a bit when he said, “…and over the holiday period we had over 20,000 new people sign up a day.” Well, take a look at the stats. I get the images from Tateru’s site, Dwell On It. I composite them in Photoshop to provide a longer period. You can click the image below to see a larger version.

It looks like for the month of December the average could be over 20,000 per day. So, the spin, like all good spin, has truth in it. But, since then the sign ups have been in a steady decline.

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There are really no changes in the statistics this month. Trends are continuing. So, I’m not posting graphs or doing detailed analysis. I do have some comments.

I can see a slight consistent increase over the last 5 months in daily sign ups. It looks like that is trending upward and is pretty well established. So, I think the changes in the SL sign up process have made a significant difference. We can say that change is working.

On the other hand, concurrent logins are trending down or up depending on the data you consider. Metaverse Business stats were the best for seeing the detail of what was happening, having the max and min login with the average. But, their stats stopped when the SL Splash page changed. They have yet to fix the problem. If you are interested, send them an email.

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Second Life’s second quarter economic stats were released 2011-08-13. Since then several people have blogged their take on the numbers and what they may mean. Those that have heard the addresses and panel discussions at SLCC 2011 have probably noticed a disparity between what bloggers are saying and what Lindens are saying. I’ll take a look at both sides of the coin.

The Bloggers

Several bloggers posted their reviews of the economic stats before SLCC convened. Others posted after SLCC concluded. Some of those posting are:

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