Each month's release of new data from Linden Lab provides an opportunity to take an in-depth look at the growth and demographics of this virtual world and do some number crunching. First, a simple look at the population statistics reveals what many are already well aware of: Second Life is growing faster then ever. Total hours spent in-world increased 27.82 percent in March, for a total of 15,346,784 hours used. The number of total residents and unique residents increased by about 20 percent as well.

Average time spent in SL increases slightly

The average time spent online by each resident rose slightly to 4.83 hours per resident logged in, up from 4.53 in February. However, this is a relatively small increase compared to the overall trend in SL, which has seen the average hours decrease as users increase. For example, in Sept. 2003, when the first data was released showing unique resident and hour usage, 1,087 unique residents were logged in for a total of 51,699 hours, creating an average of 47.59 hours per user. It was not until about Sept 2005 that the average began to steadily drop. At the same time, the number of users began to grow more steadily; the average growth in unique users from September '03 to August '05 was 15.57 percent, while from Sept. '05 until now, the average growth was 28.40 percent. This pattern of more users spending fewer hours is to be expected while SL is growing so rapidly. Eventually the number of hours should stabilize at an average, but perhaps not until population growth also levels off.

More than 1000 islands created in March

Land growth has also increased at a steady rate, with 92.3 square kilometers added since February for an increase in land size of 22.4 percent. Population density also remained steady, with approximately 6,301 residents per square kilometer in March, compared to 6,376 in February. The majority of the land added was on the 1154 new islands created in March. Since LL started releasing land data in October, approximately 70 per cent of all land has been on islands.