Is Second Life dying? Has Lively died?

VtoR is carrying a story about Lively being "such a flop" as reported in The Economist. Whilst I've still not managed to use Lively, The Economist probably makes a fairly good case for it and, of course, supports my earlier article about how underwhelmed I was with attempting to use and reading about Lively so I'm prone to support its findings.

However, the article goes on to ask if Second Life is dying based on precisely one statistic: the decline in premium account numbers. A quick look at Second Life's economy graphs might well suggest the opposite is true. Monthly user hours, LindeX volumes, resident owned land mass, businesses showing positive monthly cash flow are all growing month on month. User concurrency is growing as well (although that is more in fits and starts as each new hard limit is reached). User-to-user transactions seem to show the only contrary indicator - a look at the history of Second Life might suggest why this has happened: there was a peak just before the gambling ban, then a fall, and a continuing fall with the banking ban. Then there is a resumption of the steady increase in user-to-user transactions although this is starting from a lower baseline.

The economic statistics page says we bought 1996 new islands in July 2008 and we're going to be close to the same number by the end of August.

Perhaps this explains what is going on. You don't have to be a premium member to buy an island, nor to rent/lease/own land on an island. Demand for mainland land is continuing to stay low - that wouldn't have anything to do with the recent changes to island prices making it much more attractive to buy an island and cheaper than ever to rent an island or land on an island too. Of course not. Second Life isn't cool, so we'll seize on one metric that proves our point and shout about how it says Second Life is dying rather than actually do any research.

To answer the questions I started with: the evidence isn't there to support the former. The latter isn't quite true, but it might be a matter of time - moribund indeed!