Here's another clue in the 40,000 people plateau mystery of Second Life, offered by reader lkosov:
I sat there with the world map open and watched the green dots on Learning Island 1 for an hour yesterday, from 1235-1335 SL time. From what I can tell the player dots update once a minute, so it's an imperfect way of monitoring things, but was easier than creating a new account and camping on the island. Anyway, best as I can tell, twelve accounts joined in that one hour. Saturday afternoon in the Americas, Saturday evening in Europe. If that's normal (and that's a big assumption to make from one observation of one hour's possibly flawed data) that's something like 9,000 new users in a month. Even if I'm somehow an order of magnitude off, that's still a *far* cry from "300,000+ [per month]".
I just checked Learning Island on the map myself (screen capture above), and only counted up to 6 new users (i.e. the green dots on the dynamic map); no surprise, since it's in the middle of a weekday. But I also double-checked the most recent new registration figures I've reported from Tyche Shepherd of Grid Survey, from last October — through 2020, between 6,000-18,000 Second Life accounts were created every day.
So what explains this discrepancy?
One key factor: A registered user is only someone who's created an account on the Second Life website– whether or not they actually download the client, run it, and log onto Second Life itself.
About a decade ago, as it happens, a Linden insider told me that less than 10% of new "users" actually make it that far. Many people are brought over via web ads and expect a browser-based game or a downloadable mobile app, and become confused, frustrated, or bored along the way. Very few people own a PC or Mac that's powerful enough to run Second Life adequately, and so those new "users" drop off too before actually making it into the virtual world itself. In the Squid Game of Second Life, only a handful survive the red light/green light elimination round that is the new user experience.
All that said, the underlying mystery remains: If only 1% of those 300,000 new monthly accounts jumped through all the fiery hoops to become regular users, that would still be 3,000 new users a month and 36,000 new users a year. Yet somehow, average concurrency never really changes.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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