Europeans Predominate in Second Life

A new study by comScore indicates that Europeans Predominate in Second Life. The cultural ramifications of this are significant. For some time I've characterized Second Life as a kind of Virtual Amsterdam, a progressive party atmosphere where pretty much anything goes. This revelation certainly underscores some vastly different cultural attitudes encountered in Second Life, especially about sex, but about other things as well.

The authors found there to be 1.3 million Second Life users in March 2007 (although I'd be curious to hear how they define that because they are clearly not going by just subscriptions, which are at about 6 million), but here's the interesting part: UP 43% since January! The study also found Second Life to be over 60% male. This "sounds" like a not great figure in terms of female representation, but when you consider that in traditional themed MMOGs, such as World of Warcraft or EverQuest, female participation typically caps out at about 20%, it's actually pretty good.

Comments

[Taelos Katran]

The Second Life main web page presents statistics on how many avatars that have been created (not really a representative of total unique subscribers). It also show how many have have logged in in the previous month (perhaps a better gauge of how many *active* subscribers they really have). Presently that statistic is about 1.3 million.

I think a "social" MMO's health and actual membership base is best characterized by the number of avatars who actively use and contribute to the virtual culture present in the MMO. Thus as far as I am concerned these people are correct in their claim that Second Life has 1.3 subscribers.

Taelos Akami (Second Life)

[Celia Pearce]

Thank you Taelos. One of the things that made this report reputable to me was the fact that they based their subscriber numbers not on the hype but on the monthly log-ins. Second Life is a special case; since it has had free accounts on and off since it started there are many people who "have" an account and have never used it. In fact I know many people who say they have an account but then when you try to meet them in-world, it turns out their avatar is parked in the tutorial area. Which is another way of saying they have never actually been in the world.

At this point, there are a certain percentage of people for whom "having a Second Life account" is more of a status symbol than anything else; they feel it's de rigeur to say you have one. I even know of someone who was asked to design custom avatars for a group who then didn't even get accounts. They just wanted a picture of their "Second Life" avatar for PR purposes. It used to be geeky to have an avatar in an MMOG and virtual world; now it's trendy.