Interesting tweet from NBC Senior Business Reporter Ben Popken, citing Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg: Since the pandemic, Second Life has seen monthly active users (or MAU) grow from 700,000 to now 900,000. That's good news for the SL community – but how good depends on the definition of a monthly active user:
"MAU represents all unique users who log in to Second Life in a given month," company spokesman Brett Linden tells me. "This includes newly registered, returning, or reengaged users. Newly registered users who do not log in are not included in our MAU calculation."
The surprising thing to me is this: Second Life MAU was at 800,000 in 2017 (also according to Linden Lab), so since then, usage has continued to fall, to beneath 700,000 before the pandemic hit.
Also, Second Life has reported attracting 350,000 monthly registrations on average, so that too must be factored into this MAU number:
"While businesses have consistently used Second Life for remote meetings and training for many years, we are seeing a significant increase in demand now as organizations seek out online solutions that offer something more engaging than video conference calls," said Ebbe Altberg.
— Ben Popken (@bpopken) June 16, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Assuming most of those new registrations log in at least once month, it's quite possible the number of engaged, returning SL users had fallen to below 500,000 before the global quarantine hit.
Putting these numbers all together, I think the reasonable conclusion is this: The pandemic has created an unexpected (and in utterly tragic circumstances) opportunity for Second Life to reverse its downward trend. It's now up to Linden Lab to make the moves needed to maintain this small growth spurt caused by the quarantine, and build on it.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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