February 2007 Virtual World Key Metrics
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 4:20 PM by: Meta LindenHello everyone! I’m Meta, a new Linden working on delivering metrics and information to all of us. The Key Metrics up through February 2007 have been posted to our Economic Statistics page. A very thorough explanation of what these figures mean is in Zee’s very thorough explanation in February - please look back and read that post for a reminder.
The Excel document of these metrics is available here, and by popular (and logical - thank you JayR) demand, the OpenOffice OpenDocument Format (ODF) format of the figures is available here. For those not equipped with Microsoft office, I can recommend to you to Google Docs to handle the excel file, or the Open Source and free Open Office suite. For your convenience, I have published a copy from my own Google Docs location that you can view directly here. We are getting very positive feedback on sharing this in an open, manipulatable format rather than a fixed format such as PDF, so that you can report on these figures in your own way.
I am paying particular attention to the feedback on these metrics and the postings that have been tracking back to this, and will be working hard to expand and improve these. I am paying full attention to all critique of these figures and want to ensure that we’re delivering the correct numbers that mean the most to you, so please keep the feedback coming, and most particularly, the suggestions for additional figures or modifications to any of these. I will also be working to publish these earlier in the month so you have access to current figures as quickly as possible.
I just got my land in the Linden Village (look for the purple space on Beaumont) and will be posting my office hours in the near future, for any residents who want to come and speak with me about these. Thanks, and see you soon!
March 27th, 2007 at 5:33 PM
puedo cambiar el nombre de usario por elque tengo de sandrita27añitos me gustaria tener usario como rubiazaa27 me lo podeis cambiar es que ino no me deja entrar en cha,venga gracias y cordial saludo.
March 27th, 2007 at 5:46 PM
Very interesting material! A couple of suggestions…
1. I added another line at the bottom of the L$ supply page- a formula dividing the total user transactions (row 14) by the total linden supply (row 11) …. which measures the average “speed” of money transfer in the economy. (Perhaps someone with a better economics education than I have can give you the technical term for it.)
2. On the population page, I think it would be a great idea to move the unique registration numbers down to match the total registrations by date. Thus, you have one timeline that synchronizes both sets. (Yes, I know you would be leaving blank lines in the unique numbers, I don’t see that as a problem.)
3. Could you add a column for ‘active residents’ on the population page as well? This number is used for the analysis by country and age, so it would be nice to know what it was. (Plus, since you’re reporting those by percentages, knowing the total number would easily yield the numbers in each category.)
4. Could a historical analysis be kept on the country of origin? Have it sorted top to bottom as it currently is for the last (current) column, but have historical columns showing what each one was in the past as well. (yes, I know that means that the historical columns would not be sorted in strict top to bottom order. Again, not a problem to my mind.)
Thanks for this information, I like digging into it… and I’ve more than once impressed people because I’ve been able to tell them the facts I’ve gleaned from it!
March 27th, 2007 at 5:49 PM
Welcome, Meta, and thanks for the pointer to the files. The data point I’d like to see is premium accounts by country. Part of the squawking among the populace concerns free accounts, and the argument has been that a lot of Europeans, who make up the greater portion of SL residents, don’t have ready access to payment systems to become premium members. I’d like to see actual support for this position, as it is highly plausible. If the explosion of growth is coming from Europe without corresponding growth in premium accounts, it may help LL figure out how to tailor premium benefits or help with the payment situation so as to remedy the disproportionate growth vis-a-vis the growth in resident population.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:04 PM
Hi Meta,
By “OpenOffice format” you more correctly mean “OpenDocument Format (ODF).” OpenOffice uses this, but so too do many other applications.
Thanks very much for publishing in this format!
March 27th, 2007 at 6:09 PM
March 27th, 2007 at 6:22 PM
Welcome, Meta! Thank you for working hard to get us all this useful information!
On the lines of Cristalle Karami’s comments, I would be curious to see (a) the amount of L$ spent by premium and free accounts, and (b) the total amount of L$ held by premium and free accounts (preferably with age & country subdivisions).
A lot of the complaints about free accounts center around the premise that they do not contribute to SL and only create lag and eat up resources paid for by premium accounts. Part of that argument is subjective (e.g., the social contributions that free accounts make to SL cannot be measured with spreadsheets), but another part (i.e., their economic significance) can be measured objectively.
Also, a couple of clarifications in the stats_200703.xls file:
1) In the Total Hours tab - What is meant by “Total time for anyone who has logged into SecondLife?” Total time since birth, or total time for a given month? Depending on the answer and varying assumptions on the percentage of active/dormant accounts ratio, I come up with anything between an average of 1hr/day/account and 10hrs/day/account - some clarification on the definition would be helpful.
2) In the Land Size tab - Line 14 does not seem to reflect reality. If the numbers are accurate, then further subdivisions are needed to make sense of the data.
3) In the Premiums tab - what is the definition of “active?” Can you add it as a footnote for the next update (like you do in the Residents by Country tab)? I also think it would be useful to know the number of “dormant” premium accounts.
Thanks!
March 27th, 2007 at 6:25 PM
Welcome, Meta.
The graphss page only seems to show data through the end of ‘06. Any chance those can be updated? All the numbers just make my eyes glaze over - I need pictures..
March 27th, 2007 at 6:37 PM
Welcome Meta! Glad to meet you
March 27th, 2007 at 9:00 PM
2007年2月統計
Official Blogに2月の統計が発表されていたのでちょっと流し見。
Land Size (km2)
Calendar Date
Mainland
Islands
Total Size
山手線換算
2006/10/31
83.97
134.28
…
March 27th, 2007 at 9:04 PM
graphs being updated to match the monthly numbers would be nice.
March 27th, 2007 at 9:13 PM
[...] Linden, the new statistics/metrics Linden has released the statistics for the month of February (in a week, we’ll be looking for the stats for March). In a very useful move, the statistics [...]
March 27th, 2007 at 9:55 PM
who cares about your metrics when you have blown the database so bad people are unable to log in due tio a bs failed to transform error and cant copy the inventory? you should hire competent database engineers that know how to write ETL systems and are not so stupid they cant understand metadata to the extent the data wont transform.
so nice so nice.
nice wrecking job Linden Research is doing
March 27th, 2007 at 10:54 PM
Welcome aboard Meta
March 27th, 2007 at 10:59 PM
I looked at Key metrics and found that the balance of total supply of L$ of February was 1,964,896,741 while today’s total supply is 1,940,946,658. It has decreased!
Considering the figures in L$ Sources and Sinks of MTD, the total supply of L$ should have increased.
Am I misunderstanding something?
March 27th, 2007 at 11:21 PM
[...] Fonte: Estatística publicada no site da SL. [...]
March 28th, 2007 at 1:18 AM
Very interesting. 52.58% of users in Europe and 39.90% in the Americas (US+Canada+Central+South) by my calculations, so a third more users in European time zones than American, or 52% more users in Europe than the US…
So maybe Linden will think long and hard about a European centre, better support for Euros in terms of language, accent handling, payment methods and system downtime.
It also means no more than than 45% of users are native English speakers, and that’s ignoring the percentage of Spanish only speakers in the US.
And a warm welcome to the 0.01% in Antarctica, I guess not much to do in the evenings down there
However what is sad to see are the money numbers. SL did gain 9,000 odd new premium accounts out of a million new members, 0.9%.
But it’s difficult to work out numbers for business from those given in the spreadsheet or the Economic Statistics page. While it’s good to see an estimate of inworld business owners, it only includes those with a positive flow, not those losing money, and the results are given in USD with different bands to the L$ monthly spending.
What would have been useful would be the total L$ value of Business Owner flow and Resident spending as well as the banding. And does the spending include land purchases - I suspect so. About as transparent as the “financial institutions” inworld.
What is clear, is that for 5 million users there isn’t much of an economy outside of land deals. There are less than 12,000 people making L$100 a day or more from business by those numbers, and once you’ve taken off shop and house rental for a large number of them, it’s clear that next to nobody is making any money outside of a few biggies and land speculators.
Although I suspect it’s impossible to do, it would be interesting to know how much of the resident spending is on rent versus goods and services. But a rough estimate is about 100,000 spending L$100 a day or more, 8 times more than people are making, so something approaching 7/8 of money spent is on land or rent, a far higher proportion than in RL - could be much higher than that with the businesses making losses.
We don’t know how many business owners own their land and house versus rent, or how many are tier free, but if you take off such costs, it means only something around 5,000 or so of those with positive flow are breaking even or better on business activities.That’s about 0.3% of those logged in last 60 days, or 0.1% of total population, clearly a sick economy.
The reality of course is even worse. Those positive flows will also include things like escorts, who can earn 1500 in an hour, as much as one of those traders in a week, and some club and casino owners, who will have positive flow but not be creating content. And while those positive flows do not include land sales, they wll include rental income, so you can reduce that amount even more.
Excluding land sale profit, there are about 300 people making enough for SL to be their main full time income, I suspect the majority of those being property landlords, successful club owners and escorts, and a handful of the big (because they were early starters) skin, shape, hair, clothing, weapons and gadget makers, and a couple of scripters. Most of the rest are scrabbling in the dirt with the rest for the chickenfeed.
And indeed one must ask why bother spending hours and hours on content creation, when a land speculator can flip a sim in a day for L$1 a metre profit, as much as that average business will make in four months - and with 15 million sq metres on sale, 60m sold in the last month, he can clearly do that 4 times in a month - make in a month what a content creator wil do in about a year and a half.
And of course you see that in every new sim added: people aren’t building interesting new places to discover. Within a day of being virgin and barren, they are parcelled up, with yet another samey lag inducing club and casino offering the same as everywhere else, some ugly empty buildings plonked down, and a myriad of For Sale revolving cuboids as people immediately resell for a quick profit. And to try and ensure they do, the remaining space is taken up by ad boards and searchlights. And hey presto, one ugly sim.
And the mechanics of running a business are a little more involved. All a landowner has to do is spend a few minutes buying the land, parcelling it up and placing an ad. After that his biggest concern is whether he can tp there when a buyer or tenant arrives
A shop owner has to search for a good shaped parcel, in a good position and location, try and determine if it really has decent traffic, then kit out the shop, set up the vendors, organise ads and marketing, both inworld and probably on the web markets too and so on. And their problems continue. When the system gets laggy, people get bored waiting for stuff to rez and leave, their vendors and network servers may not update, delivery failures occur, you have to sort out those customer problems - and that all cuts in to creation time.
Traffic. Mmmm. Well, we were promised a recalculation of traffic to take out campers which falsely bump traffic. We’re still waiting. And how much/ Well a friend of mine has been building a shop over the last week, she’s probably spent 6-8 hours a day there. Had a few visitors, showed a couple of friends, the landlord, and a couple of other brief visitors - brief because the shop is empty. And her traffic is 750, for what is really about a dozen visitors plus her. So a 24 hour camper is probably accounting for 1000 or even 1500 traffic. Something to think about when renting at a 5-6k traffic mall with 4 or 6 camp pads - all the traffic will be campers not buyers.
Along with those useful additions to the business figures, would be some measure of how much profit or loss people make in such places, and the tenant churn, or how long people stay before they cease to rent their shop. For many places I suspect it is spectacularly high - doesn’t affect a landowner much, plenty more suckers around which is why many don’t even bother to ad or promote their mall.
For them, as most people, fixed, stable client software, non laggy environments and ability to log on and have a reliable network, be able to tp, see water, not be invisible, lose money, objects, inventory deliveries etc. But that’s a whole other blog
Although I am offering a free RL business idea to anyone who wants it: a hair transplant business, to cater for SL’ers who have torn theirs out….
I do assume however, Linden are being creative, and have obtained sponsorship from Nike or Adidas, and that we will shortly see RL shoes we can wear up our ass. AFAIK the wig market sponsorship is still up for grabs
OK, that’s the analysis, complaining and whinging out the way. We need to be positive, and come up with ideas so the Lindens read, and the post doesn’t get deleted.
I do love SL, like a lot of others, for the creativity it allows. Sadly, as can be seen that is dying. I’m sure that SL is no longer taking the creative direction Linden had hoped. So what to do…
Clearly, with a million more people, more than 20% increase, another $90k a month in premiums isn’t going to pay too many salaries, even with Lindex fees and tiers on top. So that needs to be increased. With a bigger incentive than the promise of login ability when there are too many users if that option is ever used and access to the forums. Perhaps bring back First Land, and ensure there is enough for the demand so that it doesn’t speed the land speculation cycle.
And make it easier to pay via other methods such as debit cards. Not everyone has a credit card, especially in poorer countries, and some don’t allow students to have credit cards for instance. PayPal Europe, perhaps because it is in the UK, takes the UK debit card Switch, but doesn’t accept French or Dutch or ones from any other European nation. If they won’t, then change provider. The UK is Europhobic, which is a good reason not to locate a European Centre in the UK but another European country. Most Europeans speak English as a second language, but Brits generally don’t speak any second language. (I’m British, but live in France for those interested).
I don’t have Visa, but I can and do use my French Carte Bleue to buy items online, from the Apple Store and others. I buy iTunes, .mac accounts, computers on there, but can’t pay for a measly $9 a month premium because Linden and PP don’t take the card. Sort that, and I know a lot of Europeans will start getting premiums and buying on Lindex. I’m sure the same will apply to South America and other countries. Secure systems exist, use them.
Secondly the economy needs a rethink. It’s clearly not working, and property prices and speculation are insane. There are moves afoot to ease this but more needs to be done. Open servers may completely change the market.
In RL there are a host of menial jobs that are part of the economy, and those don’t exist in SL, like cleaning, laundry, supermarket shopping. That makes it difficult for noobs to ern. So that end could do with stimulation, to improve the user retention rate and boost the economy.
Creative competitions, maybe projects like making a movie in SL could all be funded. The funding could come from a tax on property sales, the number of scripts running on a parcel (which may aid lag too!). Perhaps sponsorship or bursaries to help new businesses get started.
There must be a way to get a larger number of people in a sim. I don’t mean every sim, but surely Linden could develop one or two environments that could host several hundred or a thousand people, and be used for live music, theatre productions and so on (OK maybe the odd big club party too). That would stimulate activity to produce and act for instance, promote and so on. Jobs and money. If you run four class 5 sims on one server, that should hold one sim with 400 people no prob.
User confidence. This needs to be improved. Aside from SL usability issues, the blog is full of the same sort of post - griefers, scams, LL not listening. There should be at least one forum open to all users, whether Linden looks at it or not, for a place for discussion and issues. At the moment, this has to be done on other sites, as posts are removed here if off topic. Other places and avenues have been closed.
Confidence inworld. Well it’s going down, with fear of griefers, and the increasing number of scams and frauds. Linden cannot hide their heads in the sand much longer. It is a truth of history that no civilisation survives without laws and a way of enforcing them. And there are many unpleasant activities here, not just from disruption, but evictions without warning and auroreturn whilst offline, pyramid schemes, scams and frauds, that are all illegal in RL. You can read of legal action being undertaken on other sites. That should not be necessary if there was a method for dealing with disputes and issues here.
Sure, the Lindens are busy. So committees could be set up, maybe a sort of police force, and they could act in arbitration. That would ease a lot of the load on Linden with abuse reports for instance. Yes, there would need to be impartiality, an appeal process and oversight. But there could be layers, ultimately passed on to Linden if not resolved. That would ease the Linden load, and restore people’s confidence.
Linden would need to set down a basic code of behaviour, what is and isn’t allowed, punishment guidelines for breach of ToS, perhaps zoning in some sims (release percentages that are residential only, commercial, or mixed), perhaps minimum notice for tenants, all stuff that is necessary in RL but is missing here. With freedom comes responsibility. A landlord’s freedom is all that counts, but what about the freedom for a tenant to live their life too, to expect a minimum commitment, to not have to waste time finding a new place, redoing marketing, notecards and the like?
If people are going to play at banking, stock exchanges and companies, and are ultimately usng real money, then some form of proper SL company entities and basic regulation should be set up, for those who wish it. Share capital deposited in an escrow account for instance.
Clearly such rules and regs need not apply to entirely private whole sims, but should to more public ones, and people can choose which they inhabit, frequent and do business in.
Those measures would help restore some confidence, ease the fear of SL falling into completele anarchy, and offer a measure of safety, security and freedom from downright fraud and theft. More unscrupulous people are already joining, and it’s only a matter of time before the likes of Nigerian scammers do too.
They would also boost the economy, and Linden’s revenue. Sure, some of those measures may affect people short term, but hey, that happens in RL too, you adapt.
Over all, it will lead to a better world, and a better world will be a bigger, more attractive one with more opportunity. Then we’ll see the numbers here hit 10 million users, 5 million logged in last 60 days, rather than see more withering. The blog may even get more readable with less complaints
March 28th, 2007 at 1:22 AM
Fantastic stats Meta… very interesting read. Not much to add which hasn’t already been said above.
@ Zimmy Ginsberg … that has to be the longest post I’ve ever read.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:54 AM
Zimmy Ginsberg great post, I agree with most of what you write, however my overall knowledge of SL is limited to the short time I have been here. There maybe one thing you overlooked regarding economics of SL in regards to businesses making profits or not and that is the effect of gains made in RL, for example clickthru companies, and that terrible Hippy survey thing. Running costs for a reasonable parcel of land is very likely insignificant in regards to positive RL returns compared to the same returns one could expect from advertising in RL.
March 28th, 2007 at 2:19 AM
The big flaw with “business owners” listed are you only count those who work in L$ only, rather than an actual proveable figure.
For example, I know one person listed on your developers directory whose income from SL has exceeded $1,200 so far this year - but as it’s all in “real money” outside of game, is not counted within your statistics. I’m sure he isn’t the only one who prefers to work in real money instead of going through the bother of cashing out L$.
Broccoli
March 28th, 2007 at 2:28 AM
Jam those metrics up against some other mandatory numbers:
1. Completely seperate land transactions and keep them out of all other numbers. They are of no interest economywise. Land speculation metrics is not of much value to anyone except land speculators.
2. With the rest, seperate all gifts out as income/expenses.
3. Remove from the numbers those payments that go to an object which then pays out. Gambling devices and timeclocks are of little interest. They are in the expense/income bracket.
4. The remainder should be purchases. Obtain data feeds from sl exchange and sl boutique to add to the numbers.
5. Now we are down to the “economy”. With these numbers, graph them over time against users online and system catastrophe time periods such as what has been going on since January. See if the Linden research staff is a direct negative impact on the real economy. See what the true impact of all these failures are on the economy. Then level it out so we can see what the real flow is. You see, while the system is malfunctioning it is near impossible to create new wonderful content for residents to purchase and enjoy. Therefore there should be a decrease in content creation tracking with a decrease in real spending. In addition, during most of these fiascos, residents are unable to go anywhere to spend any linden.
6. Give us the numbers on counterproductive residents. those residentsa that collect linden for the sole purpose of selling it to take the money out of SL. Then delete those accounts and implement a machine ban accordingly to keep them out. Report how many accounts are created daily by IP bands. I.e.; a series of IP addresses in, lets say, lagoniatviasoko nirvana, creating 1000 accounts per day, and those accounts doing nothing but camping for lindens and then sending the lindens to a concentrator account that subsequently sends the lindens on to a further concentrator and on and on till it gets to the account that sells the linden. That category of accounts should be in violation of the TOS so add such language to the TOS. You are here to be a productive resident or you are not a resident.
7. How about accounts, regardless of payment info status, that sell content but don’t take the money out of SL? Those people that keep the economy flowing by introducing content to enhance and enrich the resident experience while taking the income and spreading it back into the economy. How many such accounts are there and how much linden is being transferred for the express purpose of resident experience enrichment? Now there’s an interesting number. Then break the numbers out by payment info status so we can see how many of those NPIOF accounts are productive residents.
Lots and lots of potential numbers to see what SL is really like.
I would really like to see the impact of these system failures on the overall true economy.
March 28th, 2007 at 3:10 AM
Yeah let’s have a government, Ann Otoole for Prime Minister/President LOL
March 28th, 2007 at 3:17 AM
welcome Meta!
and thank you very much for going out with ODF.
March 28th, 2007 at 4:11 AM
@ Dekka Raymaker - well I was talking about an SL business, SL content only, rather than a RL business with a presence in SL. That means of course all costings, sales etc are predominantly in L$, and the only exterior websites I meant were slx, slb, apez and the like, which as Ann has suggested should be included - most of the time they would be I guess, I think only slx gives an option to cash out currency.
@ Ann Otoole - good one Ann, as usual lol. I love number 7, be useful to show how us NPIOF scum are not a waste of time. But why stop there? Show the numbers for all, premium, PIOF and NPIOF and let’s see which group does more creation and spending and which takes it out, and how many roll back in their land profits and how many cash out…
Land sales should be kept separate, but we should know land rentals too, both residential and commercial, and how they affect income for landlords, and business expense for retailers.
March 28th, 2007 at 5:20 AM
The population statistics are not very useful….can you run the numbers of the average number of people inworld on an hourly basis (and then get an average for the day, with max and min values)? it would be interesting to see the hourly cycles and the daily cycles.
My intuition, just by glancing at the stats every time i log in, suggests that the average inworld population hovers around 30,000 residents at any given time.
now, take that, then give me a google-map like rendering showing the average population density…this way, i could get a read on what regions are most populated.
March 28th, 2007 at 5:38 AM
hm, intresting blog, intresting comments.
I read it as u got 65+ paying premium member plus 1000s of private island fees(not talking about the purchase price of those islands)and lots n lots on mainland fees.Dont get me wrong, i m gald about this statistics, I would like to see improvement on other issues too please, and LindenLab can obvisly afford it,lol
Yesterday was another “crash” day, we (business owner) all lost a lot of money again, what about a statistic of how much money get lost in bugs n downtimes?Or how many premium member have downgraded per month?I will be one of them aswell soon if LindenLab keeps ingoring basic problems and does not offer a working customer support. At least it seems LindenLab is not compleatly deaf, shown on the amound of blogs we became to read since friday. Glad u prove a point with it Linden, communicate with us, we are not your natual enemy, even if we are “just customer” for LL. Communicate, explain the situation and keep a 24/7 service team for upcomeing problems inseed of telling us proudly one tech monkey was called in or stuff.
March 28th, 2007 at 5:42 AM
all the talking about money makes me sick .
March 28th, 2007 at 6:07 AM
[...] Meta Linden has provided an update on SL metrics. Australia is steady on 1.48% of the overall SL population: [...]
March 28th, 2007 at 6:49 AM
In the Monthly Spending by Amount, would it be possible to add a new column (Total spending), which would be the total amount spent by transaction size.
Without that it is impossible to work out the average spend in each transaction size; a figure that would be useful in developing a business plan and business case.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:46 AM
Good points Zimmy and yes being a “real” bussiness owner is SL is frustrating to say the least. I also agree very little new content is being created because of this: “it’s just not profitable”.
I built my “Skate and Date” Ice Skating Park trying to do something different besides yet another casino or strip club and can barely just break even. On a good week might clear $1000L, most is from tips from older residents who enjoyed their visit. By the time I run a couple of events and contests etc, I’m back where I started.
Lag created by nearby empty casinos and abandoned land that had the “auto return” toggled off, which is now full of shouting spam and pyramid/slot machines rezed by people who own no land themselves (not to mention all the spinning -forsale- thingies land speculators love) has all but ruined the sim I bought land on. I was forced to move my whole ice skating park into the sky because of this, which seems OK now that I have distanced myself from all this junk. If no one owns the land (owned is no longer on SL), why can lindens at least turn auto return on till they decide what they are going to do with it? Or have this on as default? These trash filled sims are not helping anyone.
Also be nice if they looked to see which sims had events running in the before they just blindly shut them down for a “rolling restart”. I know I’m a small fish in the scheme of things but ignoring the small bussiness owners trying to do something different isn’t going to make SL improve or be more interesting for users.
I do this for entertainment and I’m not expecting to make a bunch of money but it is a lot of work trying to make an interesting place for people to visit and would be nice to be rewarded for my efforts at least a little bit?
I think that was what LL did by paying people for their traffic numbers before camping abused that system. Not sure what the cure is either.
Stephe Ehrler
March 28th, 2007 at 8:09 AM
How about plain-text or CSV?
For that matter, how about letting us download our transacttion history in CSV (which can be read and manipulated by just about anything) instead of XLS (which requires Office or an Office equvalent)?
March 28th, 2007 at 8:34 AM
Welcome Meta. I hope these comments serve as an introduction to which you’re getting into.
I don’t know how the internals of LL work — I’m hoping that some of these comments can be brought before the world designers. The above comments are some of the clearest and best on the long-term, economically driven problems in SL. While it may not be the end of the world yet, these comments are the canary in the coal mine.
I hope we can help you generate the numbers that you can use to start some changes in SL. We would all like it to flourish.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:51 AM
If you’re really upset about the economy of SL, I think you should take some tips from history and follow these easy steps:
1. Take over a sim somewhere (perhaps using XBox HALO troopers?)
2. Confiscate all of the L$ any resident of the sim has, so it can be “consolidated for future redistribution.”
3. Give the people…I mean avatars…in the sim meaningful “real work” to do, perhaps by creating rows and rows of dirty toilets to clean, or acres of rice paddies that must be continually replanted.
4. Round up “counterproductive residents,” but don’t delete their accounts or block them out, ship them to one coner of the sim you could call…hmmm…the Virtual Gulag?….where you can force them to make virtual reproductions of cheap plastic toys. Or you could just mark them by making them wear some sort of symbol while they were out cleaning all those toilets.
5. Make sure all of the productive residents are kept happy by giving each one of them a nifty uniform and cap, holding rallies where you can sing the old songs, and maybe have a big bonfire.
6. Make sure YOU get to wear some nifty designer sun glasses and have a neat cap!
Next thing you know, there’ll just be smiling, happy people everywhere!
Hmmm….wait a minute…this sounds like North Korea, or some kind of socialist movement from the 1930s! Not sl!
I thought SL was designed to be a complete anarchy? That’s what makes it so charming, wild and free. Economic analysis is an interesting excercise, useful for making business decisions, but don’t use it as the basis of planning for your Revolution, Ann and Zimmy.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:02 AM
And plenty of the best brandy and lots of… erm.. well nm.
Thanks Klang for the vote of confidence but I’m late to the show. Phillip is leading the revolutuin and the SL Hand Symbol is the one that is on the flag going up the hill to take over the world.
Looks like he gets the Hennessy and girls.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:41 PM
I am commenting here because this is the first thread that is not closed. The revision installed yesterday has crashed my machine twice already, in a way that nothing has since I put it into service last September. (Crash reports have been sent.) I am in SL for fun. I have reached the point where there’s no fun in it and as soon as I can recoup something of what I invested in the place where I live in sl I will be outta here for good.
March 28th, 2007 at 3:45 PM
Zimmy and anyone else interested in the need for some sort of legal framework for SL - have a look at this article, which constituted some of the research for a TV doco http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2007/s1876068.htm
The comments (for the most part) above are wonderfully cojent. Ann, I would fall into your category Erle @19. We make about 450L per day over a sim and quarter beachclub - mainly from tips. My direct out-of-pocket expense is around $250AUD per month, and my business partner is out around $300USD per month. So we’re not making any profit and not likely to in the future. But we’ve created an environment a lot of people take pleasure in that’s restfull and a great place for them to hang out. So we get our return more by way of other’s experiences than in $ value.
However
I have to put up with the same thing as Erle - the remaining blocks on the sim seem to be full of bloated scripts and campers which cause lag and other issues on our enterprise.
I visit our beaches and islands every day, as does my partner when he can. We have actively reduced the number of scripts running and try to keep our load down as much as possible to counteract the enterprises of others who never visit their enterprises and don’t actively maintain their property.
I refuse to have camping chairs and other suchlike on the property, so our traffic is a real number - a good one I might add - not a false, bloated one. But it does not assist me in promoting my enterprise - because Search is prioritised by traffic, and the bloated numbers get the top positions.
An interesting number on the data Meta (and thank you for someone taking the initiative and giving us at least the beginnings of some transparency), is that the amount paid out by Lindens for Stipend seems to have reduced. I may be reading this incorrectly, but if not, does this mean there’s been an actual reduction in the number of Premium accounts?
I sincerely hope Linden read and take notice of this thread - some very constructive, knowledgeable comments and critiques. Unfortunately, I don’t think Linden Lab takes critique very well, and therefore don’t like reading any of the comments on any of the blogs. But I live in hope that they’ll learn their lessons as they mature. And that those lessons aren’t learned by the withdrawal of large corporate entities when the truth about the instability of the platform becomes evident that their hoped-for marketing return is not forthcoming.
I am also aware that there are competition environments being developed - I therefore feel that Linden lab needs to work more on it’s PR with existing residents - to ensure a loyal client base remains when the competition provides an option. At the moment there is little or no effort being made to ensure loyalty.
Just some observations and comments
March 28th, 2007 at 3:45 PM
brian, the following is an excerpt from an earlier blog posting by the lindens:
UPDATE: Residents who are experiencing viewer crashes or other blocking issues should report them, but can also download the 1.13.3.2 viewers which will be supported during this transition period. The links are:
Windows:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/download-secondlife-com/Second%20Life%201-13-3-2%20Setup.exe
Macintosh:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/download-secondlife-com/SecondLife_1_13_3_2.dmg
Linux:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/download-secondlife-com/SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_2.tar.bz2
March 28th, 2007 at 3:47 PM
@Klang: SL is a socialist utopia. No, really, every avatar’s basic needs are met by the state (Linden Labs) at no cost. The only thing you need money for are luxuries.
March 30th, 2007 at 9:09 AM
[...] Tuesday, Linden Lab released key metrics for February 2007. Meta Linden provided these statitistics on the Second Life Blog in various [...]
March 30th, 2007 at 11:00 AM
@Argent: Exactly. So, why even bother to analyze economic data, extract ideas from that analysis, and propose a psuedo-legalistic, psuedo-governmental framework to fix perceived problems?
The problems people seem to complain about the most fall into two categories:
1. All of those freebie, noobie, “unproductive” new residents.
2. Too much lag, too many rolling restarts, too many technical problems on the grid to run a profitable business.
At the end of the day, the answer is the same for in-world business owners as it is for Linden Labs: provide quality goods and services, or your clientele will vote with their dollars (yen, euro, renmenbi) and move on to the next best thing. Too much lag? Move to a private sim. Not enough traffic/sales? Change your marketing strategy. User dissatisfied with Grid stability? Invest in infrastructure. And so on.
As far as the “socialist utopia” is concerned, remember that at the end of the day there are hewers of wood and drawers of water that underping all of sl? Who are they? I don’t know, but Linden Labs answers to someone…..
March 30th, 2007 at 11:39 PM
[...] gender balance in Second Life continues to skew in favour of the masculine according to the updated demographic statistics provided by Linden Lab. Although the proportional drop in female residents is very small there’s certainly a trend [...]
April 4th, 2007 at 6:24 AM
Sorry … this is slightly off topic ..
I am trying to track down a Stock/Share Exchange that I can use.
I went to VEX and got this link but I am unable to get it to work in my browser … is this a technical problem?
http://www.sl-stock.com:8098
Thanks!
April 5th, 2007 at 11:29 AM
I see excel and OpenOffice versions being posted on the official sites… but who can help get a persistent web-bsaed published spreadsheet posted on the official site? - like:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxbDc4B2FH95A_Mr7_a_gVw
Seems like the most accessible version….
April 10th, 2007 at 8:39 AM
Whilst analysing the data on Residents_by_Country I noticed that the figures published for February 07 are identical to those for January 07. Somebody seems to have forgotten to update the country-spread. Please take care to update them with the next report.
Furthermore I would welcome figues on the daily spread of usage, i.e. number of users per day-time per continent.
Go on with the good work, we need this figues satisfy our professional clients.
Michael
April 13th, 2007 at 3:00 PM
I would very much like to see numbers on returning residents. How best to do this I will leave up to you since I don’t know what data you have to work with before it gets aggregated into the spreadsheets.
April 19th, 2007 at 10:54 PM
[...] metrics are best to deliver. Some of your comments are very insightful and helpful, sometimes quite verbose… We have had many solid suggestions for improvement, some of which I am working on delivering [...]
October 24th, 2008 at 9:10 AM
[...] February 2007 > [...]