Retention Problems

Second Life has a serious retention problem. I have provided some statistics on this at my Academy. You can look at this any number of ways, but, if you look at the number of residents that have logged in during the past month or two you will find that only about 10% of the Second Life accounts could be considered as active - meaning that they show up in Second Life on a regular basis and interact with either the environment or other people. So, even though LL boasts that they have in excess of 10 million accounts, that is largely marketing hype. There are probably less than 1 million active accounts at any one time and less than 100,000 paying accounts. This makes the world much smaller than the hype might suggest. A typical evening in Second Life will show around 60,000 users logged in. Even if it were a different 60,000 users each day, that would only add up to 1.8 million users over the course of a month. This is bad news for Linden Labs because their product is not nearly as popular as they try to claim. It is bad news for advertisers who are trying to advertise products in Second Life. It is bad news for vendors who sell products in Second Life. And it is bad news for residents of Second Life who have invested a lot of time and other resources in this virtual world betting, basically, on Second Life futures. Over the next few days, I will look at the retention problem, speculate on the reasons for it, and suggest some solutions.