How Many People Will be in Second Life One Year From Today?
In the process of pitching Second Life to various clients, I decided to answer just this question. Of course, I don’t have a crystal ball, so instead I resorted to using Excel (I think there’s a marketing slogan in there somewhere: “The next best thing to a crystal ball: Microsoft Excel”.
All jokes aside, I think the results of simply applying a compounded monthly growth rate are surprising (we all know how hard it is to calculate compound interest). What this shows is that if the current rate of 22% monthly growth continues, we’re looking at 3.6 million residents by July 1 2007. If things slow down and SL grows at just 10% monthly, there will be 936K residents.
If we decide to split the difference, we’re still looking at a couple million users a year from now. Pretty mindblowing.
July 19th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Reuben, if you split the difference between your upper and lower projected population numbers (3.6 million and 936K respectively), then yes, we could have 2 million plus by July 1, 2007. But if we split the difference between the 22% and 10% monthly growth rates (which would be16%), then what does that work out to be? Less than 2 million, I’m guessing. And out of curiosity, what would it look like at a 25% monthly growth rate? I’d plug the numbers into my crystal ball and find out but I’m not sure what your starting population is from looking at your chart.
July 22nd, 2006 at 5:05 pm
Jason:
At 16% growth we end up at 1,840,168 by 7/1/07 — at 25% the number would be 4,511,094. The starting population I used was 310,000, taken directly from the Secondlife.com stats page.
December 5th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
first bank…
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