Lies, damn lies, and statistics?
Sep 12th, 2006 by ShaunO
In the spirit of keeping one eye firmly on reality whilst the other one is wandering around the virtual…
The numbers quoted in the BBC piece quoted in my previous post were the usual stuff..
- Justin quotes “640,000 residents”
- Justin also said - “they know ‘people’ earning upward £50,000/year by selling virtual land”, and finally
- Julia quotes “nearly 700,000 residents” (doesn’t she listen to her own interviews?)
Well the last figure is just totally wrong - todays Second Life (SL) account registrations is 677,420 - why not just say the number (or whatever it was on the day they built the story) - it seems ‘nearly’ is now defined as plus or minus 5% - gotta love the media, not..
The ‘headline’ number also takes no account of any realities like alternative accounts, or ‘Alts’ (Tony Walsh reports having at least 5 ‘Alts’, just about every high profile SL resident who blogs say they have an ‘Alt’). The headline number doesn’t take account of any other available ‘levellers’ (such as they are) either - like that ‘active accounts’ in the last 60 days is just 289,000 - less than half the ‘headline’ number.
It seems watching television these days is the official way to “feed yourself bullshit”… (and don’t bother giving me any comments on that - I know it’s been that way since the birth of mass (media) propaganda…)
I’m also a little weary of people using Anshe Chung’s quoted annual income (which I am admittedly assuming that’s what Justin is referring to) as a financial example - she is definitely the exception not the rule (and good luck to her!) - but 1 in 677,000, or is that 1 in 289,000, or is that…..?
This constant quoting of spurious numbers by the press leads to a valid curiosity by many as to the ‘real’ statistics of Second Life.
Another interesting quote from a recent Popular Science article - “There are at least 3,000 entrepreneurs making $20,000 or more a year on SL businesses”.
Tony Walsh keeps an occassional eye on Second Life numbers and reports his thoughts on the Popular Science article here (and I gave a reference to another of his handy summary articles on SL numbers in my last post on SL population numbers).
Tateru Nino is predicting a million sign ups by about Nov/Dec 2006 acknowledging this is just sign-ups but stating her view that it will be a psychologically important (albeit arbitrary) number…
As far as Second Lifes (commercial) survival goes the most important number (that we don’t have access to) is the number of paying accounts (and therefore probable tier paying land owners) - is my calculation of somewhere between 35,798 and 44,748 (based on August’s Stipends sink figures - link requires sign-in) too far off the mark? It just assumes a top number by dividing stipends paid at current stipends of 1600/month or a bottom number of dividing stipends at 2000/month (the old stipend amount). I’m assuming no basic accounts (old or new) get stipends now - but honestly can’t remember if that’s the case.
So if the logic of the math is right my view would be it’s probably somewhere in the middle (of 35K-45K).
Following on, if the numbers are accurate, from the quotes in the Popular Science article:
“There are at least 3,000 entrepreneurs making $20,000 or more a year on SL businesses”
that’s somewhere from US$60 million up…
“an annual gross domestic product of $64 million (U.S. dollars)”
means that approximately 3000 of, say, 40,000 subscribers, or 7.5%, are taking 93% of SL GDP (GDP used with tongue firmly in cheek..). Wonder how that stacks up with real world numbers…?
Although ‘at the end of the day’ it doesn’t really matter how the numbers are stacked… and hence the quote..
“lies, damn lies and statistics”
Benjamin Disraeli
the paid accounts number and the ‘tier’ paid monthly number are the keys to commercial survival (and is the very reason we don’t have access to them one can guess), and hence Second Life’s survival. These numbers have to be sufficient for Second Life (Linden Lab) to maintain and grow, and to, eventually, get big enough to be able to ‘wean’ Linden Lab off venture capital.