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Premium account percentage growth
Meta Linden, the new statistics/metrics Linden has released the statistics for the month of February (in a week, we’ll be looking for the stats for March). In a very useful move, the statistics are available in OpenDocument format, making them much easier to deal with and process.

The chart above (linked to other charts of my devising) shows the percentage monthly growth of premium accounts each month since February 2005. February 2007 saw flat growth in line with January: 15% (now at 66,800 premium accounts). If the growth of premium accounts remains flat, we should tip over 100,000 premium accounts in May.
This appears to put Second Life’s growth about on-par with the growth of the World Wide Web at the same age, both in percentage growth and absolute numbers of paying ‘owners’. At this stage in the WWW’s lifecycle, it was largely driven by geeks and pornography (there was little adequate transactional framework for gambling) - and businesses were starting a rush to establish their presence — most of them not really very certain why or how.

The mainland size increased 13% in February, and the number of privately owned sims increased 14.6% in the same period. The average age of residents dropped from 37 to 33 this month, with the largest age-band being 25-34 (71.6% of Second Lifers are 25 years or older).

We asked Meta Linden for an overall, personal impression of the figures and trends. Meta responded, “Many key metrics are trending up, for lots more residents! And I’d love to see what the residents do with this data- posts to mashups and visualizations they do of it would be great. Please fold, spindle, and mashup these figures.”

Someone remind me to set the Lindex transaction data to haiku form.

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