One of the biggest criticisms of Second Life is that the numbers frequently hyped aren't accurate. It's true that there were one million user accounts as of 6 months ago and that as of this writing, the SecondLife.com front page indicates there are currently 4,598,897. That number will likely be over 4.6 million by the time you read this blog post. So what does that actually mean in practical usage terms? Are there 4.6 million regular Second Life users? Well, no. Immediately after that, the page goes on to indicate that only 1,629,589 users have logged into Second Life in the past 60 days.

For truly accurate information about Second Life's usage, we need to look at longer-term stats. Let's take a look at a few provided by Second Life users, as well as Second Life's developers, Linden Lab itself.

1. Linden Lab's "State of the Virtual World - Key Metrics"

This is the most complete stats package Linden Lab has released yet, with data going back to 2002. It indicates numbers of unique accounts, how many accounts have EVER logged in, and how many accounts have logged in in the last x days. Their data only goes up to January, however.

2. Linden Lab's "Economic Statistics"

This is a good place to get daily updates which can be used along with the numbers in State of the Virtual World above. They're mostly geared towards the state of Second Life's internal economy, but there are accurate numbers on logins today, this week, this month, and so on.

3. Tateru Nino's Second Life Charts

Tateru's graphs are useful and highly accurate, but their data doesn't always go back over large periods of time. They were originally provided to demonstrate the discrepancy between number of accounts and number of users. Tateru's charts were produced by scraping data from the front page of SecondLife.com.

One interesting observation of Tateru's charts is this: Second Life consistently hits a new record number of concurrent logins every Sunday at around 1:30 PM, Pacific Time. It's usually an increase of over a thousand users. However, Monday --the day with the lowest concurrent logins-- often boasts the greatest number of new accounts created. It would be interesting to be able to find out why.

4. "Second Life Residents Statistics", from the Second Life Research blog

This is very useful: it's an accurate, "presentation-quality" graph, correlating the growth of overall population to the one metric we can rely on as a sign of growth: the increase in concurrent users. As you can see from the graph, the numbers match up. This demonstrates that while we shouldn't rely on the account numbers themselves to demonstrate Second Life's current userbase, (1 million six months ago, 4.6 million today) we can use those numbers to express Second Life's growth.

5. Linden Lab's "Economic Statistics: Graphs" page.

These graphs all represent the growth of the internal Second Life economy over time. However, they're a bit dated now, only going up to December 2006.

So there you have it. Of course, the data available is all pretty basic. A lot of the really useful demographic data is missing: the gender breakdown by accounts, rather than use, or some way to compare the bell curves representing time logged in for women vs men from Ireland, for example. (Speaking personally, most of the women I know in SL tend to stay logged in for far longer periods of time than the men I know.)

The charts and graphs clearly demonstrate that Linden Lab has enough information on the userbase to find out those sorts of things, but they don't go quite so far as to make it publicly available. Still, they do put out some illuminating stuff, like the fact that Americans only make up 31% of the userbase by use, and that less than 45% of the userbase by use comes from predominantly Anglophone countries -- and that's still assuming that all those users ARE speaking English, which is pretty unlikely. English is very much the dominant language of Second Life, but it by no means is everyone's first.