Virtual worlds come of age: Second Life users trade over a billion real-world dollars

The game’s creators, Linden Lab, also announced that its players have spent a combined total of more than 1 billion hours in Second Life, marking significant milestones for the virtual worlds industry.  

The company also shared a series of additional statistics that reveal the scale of Second Life and its virtual goods economy, as well as the activity and engagement of its Residents.

Some key stats released by Second Life today include: 

• In total, users around the world have spent more than 1 billion hours in Second Life. That’s roughly 115,000 years spent doing everything from meeting and socializing with friends; to attending live concerts; to creating, selling, and shopping <http://secondlife.com/shop/>  for virtual goods; to learning a foreign language; to attending business meetings; and much more. User hours grew 33% year-over-year to an all-time high of 126 million in Q2 2009.
• Second Life Residents spend an average of about 100 minutes inworld per visit. This average session time is significantly greater than those seen with popular social networking Web sites and reveals the uniquely high level of engagement Residents have with Second Life.
• The equivalent of more than USD1 billion has been transacted between Residents in Second Life, who purchase virtual goods and services from one another. The inworld economy grew 94% year-over-year from Q2 2008 to Q2 2009. Now at nearly USD50 million each month in user-to-user transactions, the Second Life economy is on an annual run rate of more than a half billion US dollars, making Second Life the largest virtual economy in the industry.
• Residents create more than 250,000 new virtual goods every day – from clothing to vehicles to buildings to automatic language translators and more. There are now more than 270 terabytes of content in Second Life, and this is growing by approximately 100% every year.
• More than 18 billion minutes of voice chat have been used in Second Life since voice was introduced  in 2007. Voice minutes grew 44% year-over-year from Q2 2008 to Q2 2009, and more than 6 billion minutes of voice have been delivered in 2009 alone, making Linden Lab a major VoIP provider.
• Approximately 1,250 text-based messages are sent every second in Second Life, and more than 600 million words are typed on an average day. Roughly 60% of active Second Life Residents are based outside of the US, representing more than 200 countries, and the Second Life Viewer is available in 10 languages.
• The total land area of Second Life is now equivalent to approximately 2 billion square meters – roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island. Land in Second Life has grown roughly 18% since Q1 2009 and approximately 75% since Q1 2008. As the creator and original seller of all virtual land in Second Life, Linden Lab is not only the provider of the world’s largest platform for user-generated virtual goods, but is also a leading virtual goods vendor itself.

“These metrics give a sense of some key aspects of Second Life – the deeply engaging nature of the 3D world, the immense use of Second Life as a communications platform and the scale and strength of the economy based on the huge number of unique virtual goods users are creating,” said Mark Kingdon, CEO, Linden Lab.

“These numbers are a snapshot of the success of Second Life and its Residents today, and a validation of Linden Lab’s leadership in the virtual worlds space, but there’s much more to come. This is a year of renovation for Second Life, and we’re well positioned for reinvigorating our growth in 2010 with a range of strategic initiatives that will enhance the experience for existing Residents and propel our expansion with new users.”

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