The Relative Popularity of Second Life across Nations
Last week Linden Lab published some new data about Second Life. As I have always been quite curious about the data behind the virtual world, I decided to check it out.
Linden Lab nicely delivered the information in an Excel spreadsheet.
Apart from the much debated upon data on the population, I was particularly interested in the worksheet showing the active residents by country. Which nations are more keen on Second Life than others and can we explain that to some extend?
Actually there were no absolute numbers in the residents-by-country worksheet, but only percentages of the “Active residents in the top 100 countries”. “Active” is defined as a resident who has logged in for more than 1 hr in the previous month.
Risking the thorn of the Second Life statisticians, for the sake of this blog post I estimate the number to be around 350,000. This is based on the often mentioned retention rate of 15-20% and the unique number of residents, being around 2 million at this moment.
One of the most easy explanations of any country difference, is of course the availability of broadband excess. So for this analysis I used the OECD Broadband statistics for June 2006 (I added some statistics for broadband access in Brazil found on the Internet).
From the Linden Lab and OECD data I constructed the following chart:
Then I specified this relationship:
(1) SL/inh = a + b*(BBS/inh)
relating the number of active SL residents to the number of BB subscribers, for which the regression equation is stated in the chart (intercept forced 0).
As we can see from the chart at least we can say that indeed, as expected, broadband access is an important factor for explaining the number of active SL residents per country.
However as we also notice, broadband access, does not explain everything. This implies that the variation in the SL/BBS ratio, the number of active SL residents to the number of broadband subscribers, a “clean popularity measure”, should be explained by other factors.
(2) SL/BBS = measure of relative popularity, corrected for having the means in terms of broadband access.
The table below presents three types of rankings:
- plain SL number of residents: US wins of course
- SL per 100 inhabitants: Netherlands wins
- SL per broadband subscriber: Greece wins, followed by Western Europe
But what are factors explaining the latter ranking? Judging from the countries with a high SL/BBS ratio, it appears they all are located in Europe, except for Brazil. The US, where Second Life comes from, is not even in the top-10 in terms of the popularity measure. While the top ranking goes to Greece, three out of the four most SL-interested countries are from Western-Europe: Netherlands, Belgium and France. Well, I would not dare to speculate about the reason for the appearance of e.g. the Netherlands (liberal environment = Second Life?).
By the way, have you seen the position of Japan? Didn’t the Japanese have an important substitute for Second Life?
Somehow there is something about Second Life that attracts people in one country more than in the other. But wait, why should I try to figure this all out?
This is a call to anyone out there: who can give me one or more reasons for the appearance of the countries in the SL-popularity top-5?
Edit: Neville Hobson offered one explanation in For Immediate Release, being the number of bloggers, as proxying for people interested in new things related to internet.
Related: all my Second Life articles
Technorati tag(s): Second Life, Broadband
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posted Feb 13, 12:02 am on Feb 13, 2007 |
category: Second Life
Although the US represents the greatest single number of residents, if other countries, particularly West Europe, are aggregated they far outweigh the US total. It would be interesting to do a more detailed analysis of time on-line and duration playing. My experience suggests that many Europeans, are attracted, give it a go, for a few weeks, but then drop out. For me the greatest frustration is that all events ( clubs, concerts, education, sports etc etc) are based around US and primarily West Coast time. Nothing is ever arranged during European hours and the overlaps are somewhat restricted for many of us.
Of course if more SIMs were owned by Europeans, no doubt they would work times convenient to them, but inevitably the US West Coast crowd have a first mover advantage.
The analysis done, demonstrates the attraction of sl to Europeans taking account as it does of population and broadband access, but if Linden want to make it a global experience, they will have to find a way of influencing the time zone issue.
— rudolf Feb 17, 08:08 pm #
Hi Rudolf,
Thanks for stopping by here and leaving this interesting point of view about the time zone issue. Although I have been “bothered” by that a few times, I didn’t see it as something that could hamper the (continued) growth of SL in Europe.
Like you said, if more Europeans get active in arranging events, I think this issue will slowly go away though.
By the way Shel Holtz of the For Immediate Release podcast (in show 215) offered me an additional explanation for the relative attractiveness of SL to Europeans: according to him (“wild guess”) it “may have something to do with the lowered inhibition of European people to get themselves a second identity and feel comfortable with that”.
Keep those comments coming!
— Marcel Feb 17, 09:57 pm #