Retention of New Sign Ups in Secondlife

I was reading the blog New World Notes when I ran across an interesting article about New World Numbers: The Trouble with Two Million written back on November 16, 2006. This article lead right into Tateru Nino’s Two Million Steps Forward… where she briefly discusses the rapid growth in Secondlife and goes deeper into the extremely small retention rate.

In this article she delves into live help and the impossibility of gaining new helpers fall into the impossible category as Secondlife membership is growing at record pace. Finding qualified Live Helpers becomes a daunting task. Over 13,000 new sign ups a day causes the few volunteers to burn out way to quickly and the new sign up are not learning how to use Secondlife.

So many of the new sign up have read about Secondlife in the media and come into it expecting it to be more of a game like they have grown used to playing… most find Seconlife a disappointment. They arrive at Help Island and usually aren’t met by a mentor (there are not enough mentors to go around and those there are are burned out). In an attempt to have mentors and volunteers for live help, it seems the quality and knowledge seems to be going in a downward spiral.

Maybe this is a big reason that only around 10% (according to Philip Rosedale) of the sign up for Secondlife stick around to become active residents in Secondlife. Most volunteers think that most people become bored or confused, expect more of a “game”, don’t understand the purpose, or offended by all the sexuality as reasons that such a large number never stick around to enjoy Secondlife. Many of the live helpers figure that less than 1 out of 50 actually stick around to become a resident. But Phillip Rosedale states….

“Actually, it is much higher than that,” he said.
“Although Second Life is still challenging to get used to, about 10% ofnewly created residents are still logging into Second Life weekly,3 months later. 10% is pretty good given the computer requirements andsteep learning curve”
Surprisingly, he added, “That percentage hasn’t changed much with the much higher rate of new users.” as reported by Tateru Nino
As you can see, even with the conservative numbers of Philip, that 2 million is down to probably less than 200 thousand regular users of Secondlife.

Yes Secondlife is growing by leaps and bounds! With all the trouble in the grid of late I can’t help but be concerned that the growth rate is still to fast.. even at only a 10% retention rate. Of course I am certian that Philip isn’t interested in what I think, but I think quality is considerably more important than quantity.

Feel free to express your opinion in the feed back comments.