Exclusive: Second Life Starts To Grow Again

They say numbers don’t lie, and in recent months the number of people populating virtual world Second Life has started to rise again. Mark Kingdon, CEO of parent company Linden Lab, has been touting the return to steady user growth; to back up his claims, he shared with us the chart below, which tracks the number of unique repeat logins into Second Life on a month-by-month basis (it doesn’t include new signups during each month.) That number stood at 731,000 as of the end of March, the result of an upward climb that began in August 2008. Notably, it’s higher than the number of SL’s active monthly users (defined as those who log in for more than an hour at a time) in March, which Kingdon tells me was just 650,000. Since taking the helm from founder Philip Rosedale last April, Kingdon has been working with a team of newly-appointed executives to simplify the user registration/conversion process and stabilize the platform — efforts this chart suggests are paying off.