As the controversy rages on about Unique registrations vs. Alts (for a good start into the controversy, read Henry Jenkins’ post, which references many other peoople), Linden Lab released some metrics ten days ago that shed light on the discussion. In this particular controversy, people were wanting to know how the registration numbers on the front page of SecondLife.com break down into unique’s vs alts.

Linden Lab allows anyone to register more than one avatar, called an “alt”. The criticism being, if everyone’s running around saying, “Second Life has 3.7 million registered users,” but the alt situation isn’t clarified, then the numbers are inflated–to Linden Lab’s advantage.I do cite the total registration numbers in my talks (which can be found on Second Life’s home page); I also cite the number of residents that have logged in the last 30 days, which is found in the community section, available to anyone with an account. I think both numbers are interesting and certainly, the 30 day number is the one you want to base any decisions that have to do with spending money, virtual or not.

I’m going to take a look at the data and see what story it tells us. In future posts, I’ll look at some other online entities and how they report on alts (or not).

Zee Linden supplied two columns of data, one titled “Unique Residents” and one titled “Total Residents”. Here are the numbers from his earliest time period:

Unique Residents Total Residents

September 2002 17 39

So, the first thing to note is that alts have been a fact of life in Second Life since SL recorded time. I imagine these alts are the developer’s way of populating the world before they had many people involved so they could stress test the system and not a way to make their world appear bigger than it is.

If you subtract the number of Unique Residents from the Total Residents, you get the number of alts. In September 2002 that was 22 alts, or 56% of the population.

The percent difference between Unique Residents and Total Residents in September 2002 is 129%. According to Zee Linden’s data, these early months had the highest percentage of alts. How did that percentage change over time? Here’s a chart that plots it, starting at June ‘03:

(Click for a larger image.)

It looks like after falling for the first half of ‘06, the percentage of alts in Second Life took a sharp increase over the summer and began to level off in the fall.

What does this mean? A positive view of the data would say as more and more people spend more time in Second Life, more and more people see the value in having an alt, so this increase is due to more people becoming more accustomed to life in an online world. A more negative view would say someone’s gaming the system.

I take the more positive view.

An interesting study would be what alts mean, and how people’s different identities play out through alts. Why do people have alts? What do they do with them? What kinds of needs do they serve? Who do they tie into self image?
Now that Linden Lab has released the data, maybe we as a community can concentrate on those interesting questions.

Another facet of alts is the money they make for Linden Lab. In January ‘07, there were 1,142,680 alts. The month before, 828,570, meaning 314,110 alts were created in January ‘07. At US$10 per alt, that’s $3,141,100 in alt revenue for Linden Lab in January ‘07 alone.
I leave you to find the meaning in that.