1. Linden Lab’s ”State of the Virtual World – Key Metrics”
This is the most complete stats package Linden Lab has released yet, with data going back to 2002. It indicates numbers of unique accounts, how many accounts have EVER logged in, and how many accounts have logged in in the last x days. Their data only goes up to January, however.
2. Linden Lab’s Economic Statistics
This is a good place to get daily updates which can be used along with the numbers in State of the Virtual World above. They’re mostly geared towards the state of Second Life’s internal economy, but there are accurate numbers on logins today, this week, this month, and so on.
3. Tateru Nino’s Second Life Charts
Tateru’s graphs are useful and highly accurate, but their data doesn’t always go back over large periods of time. They were originally provided to demonstrate the discrepancy between number of accounts and number of users. Tateru’s charts were produced by scraping data from the front page ofSecondLife.com.
One interesting observation of Tateru’s charts is this: Second Life consistently hits a new record number of concurrent logins every Sunday at around 1:30 PM, Pacific Time. It’s usually an increase of over a thousand users. However, Monday –the day with the lowest concurrent logins– often boasts the greatest number of new accounts created. It would be interesting to be able to find out why.
4. “Second Life Second Life Residents Statistics, from the Second Life Research blog
This is very useful: it’s an accurate, “presentation-quality” graph, correlating the growth of overall population to the one metric we can rely on as a sign of growth: the increase in concurrent users. As you can see from the graph, the numbers match up. This demonstrates that while we shouldn’t rely on the account numbers themselves to demonstrate Second Life’s current userbase, (1 million six months ago, 4.6 million today) we can use those numbers to express Second Life’s growth.
5. Linden Lab’s “Economic Statistics: Graphs: ” page.
These graphs all represent the growth of the internal Second Life economy over time. However, they’re a bit dated now, only going up to December 2006.
