Second Life Gaining Germans, Losing Women
According to a report released by comScore, one of the leading online traffic analysis firms, there are now more Germans using the virtual world of Second Life than there are U.S. residents. Only 207,000 Americans logged into SL in March of this year, compared to 209,000 Germans, comScore says. In fact, Europe has by far outstripped North America. Europe accounted for 61 percent of SL logins in March, comScore says, versus only 19 percent from North America. And yes, comScore claims to be counting “unique people” age 15 and up who actually logged into the service. Interestingly, comScore also says the male-to-female ratio was 61 percent to 39 percent, which, if I remember correctly, is somewhat less balanced than SL has been in the past. Where have all the American women gone??
Feeds
Maybe all the American women are logging in as genderbending Germans.
First - where’s the report? Sounds interesting, but I don’t know how they obtained their data.
Second - Why doesn’t Linden Lab release this information publicly? They *have* the information. What is the big secret?
Third - if the statistics are actually correct (cannot verify, so this is an armchair discussion) then it may be demonstrating an aberration in previous data. There *are* more Germans in SL that I have seen. Perhaps I should start tagging them and setting them free. Watching their migratory patterns. Or maybe I should find out how the statistics were come up with and look closely at how they were done. I go with the latter. I have no time to run around tagging German or American woman avatars.
Here’s the link to the press release, Nobody. Although tagging the avatars sounds way more fun. :)
That link rather asks me for a username and password.
Despite that: I might suspect that as many Ladies residing in the United States of America are within SL as before, only they have been overtaken statistically by European Gentlemen. Possibly. Not that anyone can really _tell_.
Anecdotally I have encountered many more French and German folk than previously over the last few weeks, I must say. My French is poor and my German non-existent; I rely on the Babbler to be quite honest, magical device that it is.
as written in the press release, here’s how they get the numbers:
“comScore, Inc. is a global leader in measuring the digital world. This capability is based on a massive, global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given comScore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.”
So basically I would then trust the Linden Lab numbers more and they actually said that 26% came from the US and 13% from Germany IIRC. Again of active residents. The problem is maybe the definition of an “active” resident. At comScore I think it’s somebody logged in between January and March while for Linden Lab it means that he/she logged in more often.
Unfortunately we also don’t know the absolute number of active residents from Linden Lab. They refer to it via percentages but never tell the total in their key metrics (at least I didn’t find it).
So actually Linden Lab published more or less the same information but of course they always could do more :-)
[…] Wie auf 3pointd und heise nachzulesen, gibt es anscheinend inzwischen mehr Deutsche als US-Bürger in Second Life. Nach Angaben einer Studie von comScore sollen sich im März 2007 aus Deutschland 209.000 Personen angemeldet haben, während es nur 207.000 aus den USA waren. […]
You know what that means!! More tiny penises!
Whats your guess? Where’s the journey going? Even more Germans and even less women?