Continuing my look at Second Life Statistics, I thought I’d take a look at a few stats that critics say are really important.

Residents Logged-In During Last 30 Days (as of today): 1,050,655. Clay Shirky, in particular, criticizes Linden Lab for not touting this number, which Shirky says is commonly used by the online marketing industry for comparing websites. The current number of total registrations is 4,397,513, meaning, almost a quarter of all residents logged in within the last 30 days. Compare this to the percentage of registrants the logged into LiveJournal in the last 30 days–9%.

According to Zee Linden, 63% of all registrants are unique, meaning, of the 4.4 million residents, 2.8 are unique. Uniques are another common measure of online marketers. It’d be interesting to see if Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, or Google use total registrations when talking to marketers about their email capabilities, or if they use uniques. Six years ago, I remember having this very discussion with Yahoo! at a client’s office, so I know it’s an issue not just for Second Life, but for other forms of registrations. The answer I heard was, “We know we have alts, we just don’t know how many.” But, I’m sure things have changed since then. Compare Second Life Registrations to World of Warcraft registrations (WoW being a common comparison among critics). WoW currently has 8.5 million registered users, all of which are paying customers. Second Life has 57,702 paid subscribers as of January 2007. The number of paid SL subscribers is miniscule compared to the number of paid WoW subscribers. What does this all mean? WoW is a runaway best seller. Assuming only 8 million users paid $19.95 for the software (which is conservative and almost certainly too low), Blizzard has collected $160,000,000 since it’s inception and that’s before subscription fees! Linden Lab only pulls in $574,135/month in paid subscriptions. They collected around $3 million in fees last year. Tiny compared to WoW. Even if you throw in the US$65 million in-world GDP discussed by Linden Lab, the total value generated by SL is small compared to WoW. Much of the criticism is that Second Life is over hyped. Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s important to understand that it’s not a mega blockbuster hit at this time. It’d be more appropriate to look at as an independent film.