"According to the recently published Yankee Group Note, Wither Second Life?, the growth rate of Second Life users has slowed since its peak in October 2006, while user engagement (as measured by average time spent per user) has leveled off at just 12 minutes per month." -- Yankee Group's own press release, via Virtual World News.

"I've looked at that sentence several times, and can't make head or tail of it, because it's totally at odds with all meaningful available metrics." - Hamlet Au, New World Notes.

This story's starting to spread all over the mainstream media, so let's actually do the math - because Yankee Group doesn't seem to have done any themselves.

Let's start by looking at the figures for August.

Total user hours for August (obtained here) was 23,455,451. Converted to minutes that is 1,407,327,060 user-minutes. That's quite a lot of minutes, yes. Now, the active users for the same month were 540,151 (from the bottom of this sheet). That's 43.4 hours per active user per month or 2605 minutes per active user per month

Obviously this isn't the math that Yankee Group did.

Wait! Maybe they used unique users! Let's look at that! Unique users for the month was 6,164,951. Let's see, that's 3.8 hours per unique user per month (about 228 minutes). Nope. Not these numbers either.

Total registrations? Surely not. Surely nobody would be daft enough to do that. Oh, but you know that some people would! Let's see ... that's 9,252,781. That's about 2 and a half hours or about 152 minutes per user per month. Okay, so that's not 12 minutes by a long shot.

Well... I suppose there's only one way to figure out what population figure they used, and that's to divide user minutes by 12, right? The answer has to be in the approximate ballpark of the population figure they used.

Here goes...

1,407,327,060 minutes divided by 12 minutes per user is ...

117,277,255! One hundred and seventeen million users plus change.

That's very generous, boys, but a bit off the mark. I'm sure I'd have noticed them.

Looking back through figures for prior months, I can't actually find a set of figures that they could have used to get their statement from. Maybe something from a year ago? Maybe something from another MMO by mistake? Back of a bar coaster? Or maybe they mixed it up with a website.

Either way, I've got to call bullshit on the 12 minutes number. It looks like complete rubbish.