Wise Buddha

Second Life is all the rage and whilst we take the odd visit from time to time the jury is still out for me as to how I feel about the experience. Part of me is intrigued by the notion of exploring a virtual world and meeting people from all over the planet plus of course their business model is interesting.
The other half of me thinks that it is taking my interest in technology and culture a liitle too far and instead of hanging out with complete strangers on line I can be doing better things with my time. We’ll see - for now I am dipping in to see what’s going on and the most interesting thing is the revenues they are generating and the user base. One thing about Second Life is that they are being very transparent about who is hanging out, they have just released key merics for the site here.

It makes for interesting reading -

Total registered users 3.1 million, up from 124,000 a year ago. If you strip out multiple user info a more realistic estimate is 2 million users, which is a significant increase from the 100,000 or so a year ago. There are about 30,000 users logged on at any one time, visiting nearly 300 islands which generate approx $200-$300 per month each in revenue, in addition there is a 100 odd km’s of prime real estate, which costs $3-$10 per sq metre - all this adds up to about $650,000 per month in revenue.