Apologies for the delays in getting these out, folks, we’ve been busy behind the scenes trying to focus on some service improvements, stability, and instrumenting the system to deliver us more internal metrics - such as Teleport problems. I expect to more consistently release these within the second week of each month, to correspond with the week that I’ll be holding office hours. (Note: I have changed my office hours from weekly to monthly to better focus on delivery and service stability)

So, here’s the facts: October is now available in Excel, OpenDocument, and Google doc formats, though you’re likely going to bypass those altogether and look at November stats in Excel, OpenDocument, and Google doc formats since all of the October figures are included in November- excepting the breakouts of active users by country and age brackets, and the breakdown of Logged In users by Gender, which are always specific to the month published. Please check our Metrics Glossary for an understandable set of definitions of the figures we publish in these documents.

Key takeaways: In November, we had another slight reduction in overall Logged In User Hours (our first drop was back in August) that is related to the Unplanned service outages. Overall economic metrics continue to trend slowly upward, including the Lindex exchange figures and resident-to-resident transactions. Premium accounts continue to slowly tick upwards.

Change: Due to data quality concerns under the “Unique” population figures published historically, we are discontinuing publishing this figure. It had several challenges, regarding retroactive cancellation of accounts and the algorithm used for determining uniqueness.

Thanks everyone, and see you early in January for the 2007 Economic wrapup, where I’ll look to format these in an additional simple single-page with the top 10 key figures by month.

[update: Included link for Metrics Glossary page and Changed link to October google doc to one that includes the October Active Users by Age Bracket - the previously published set included "data through" on that tab for November - previous dataset visible here]

Hello everyone! I have posted the Economic Key Metrics through September 2007 on our Economy site, in the standard Excel, OpenDocument, and Google Docs formats. Definitions for these metrics are available in the wiki Metrics Glossary page.

Top highlights include: a slight increase in Premium accounts for September, and continued gradual growth along other metrics as we continue our focus on increasing Stability and Availability of the system. As Hamilton noted, the Service Availability chart has been updated through September, where we had great success in decreasing Unplanned Outages.

Please join me on Friday mornings 10 AM at my Office Hours in Beaumont to discuss these metrics and to triage any other requests for the public JIRA category for Metrics.
(more…)

Over the past 4 years, there have been many thousands of news articles and analyst reports about Second Life. Some of these have included incomplete facts, questionable assumptions, or odd comparisons, but we at Linden Lab do our best to take all of it in good humor. We live in a fast-paced world of constant information and change, and we know that even the best-intentioned people can put out results before understanding the facts. Hey, we should know - some might say that we ourselves put out product that isn’t always fully baked.

However, sometimes misinformation takes on a life of its own - especially when the source is a normally reputable institution. We respect Yankee Group as an analyst firm in good standing in its field. But their press
release this week cited a figure that we just can’t figure out: they claim that the average time spent per user of Second Life is just 12 minutes per month.

Just this past August, users of Second Life spent over 23 million hours in Second Life. During that month, there were just over 974,000 user logins to Second Life - that’s an average of 23.6 hours per user!

But hey, maybe Yankee Group was looking at a different user number. Were they counting the unique user registrations? That would be 6.2 million users - but that’s an average of 3.7 hours per user. Maybe they were
counting cumulative total registered accounts through August, 9.3 million users. Uh, but even that is still an average of 2.5 hours.

So, just what is that 12 minutes per month number?? As near as we can tell, that might be the average time that users spent logged in on the Second Life website in a month. Or . . . could it be . . . the 6.2 million unique user registrations divided by 23 million hours is close to 12 minutes . . . but that makes no sense - is it possible that anyone would have done the division backwards??

Many European Residents have asked for clarification about VAT (Value Added Tax) in Second Life and how it impacts them. While each case may be different, I’ve tried to answer the questions in the Knowledge Base and to make it easier, I’ve also attached the VAT FAQ here.

The questions fall into a few categories, which I will try to address in this post. I’ll also be available in-world at a Town Hall meeting on Monday October 8 at 11:00AM PDT at The Pooley Stage to answer additional questions as well. Please come prepared with voice enabled so you can hear, as I’ll be answering by voice and chat questions by voice to be more efficient with the time.

First there’s been some debate as to whether or not we have to charge VAT and why.

The best place to get full details about European legislation is at Europa, “the portal site of the European Union”. It provides up-to-date coverage of European Union affairs and all legislation currently in force or under discussion.

The relevant section on that site is called “VAT: Special Arrangements Applicable to Services Supplied Electronically”. The Directives were implemented to create a level playing field for European Union (EU) businesses with regard to the indirect taxation of electronic commerce. Essentially, prior to this Directive non-EU-based companies providing electronic services to EU customers had an advantage in that they were not required to charge those customers VAT:

(more…)

[Resolved 10/3/0 3:45pm PST]
The stipend payment process has now completed and the directory fees have begun processing.  Actually, by the time I wrote that, the directory listing fees were already complete.  Thanks for your patience as we got those processes completed.

[Update 10/3/07 9:15am PST]
Group balances have now paid out, but the stipends have only completed about 70%. As soon as the stipends finish up, the directory fees will begin processing. We’re sorry for the continued delay, but hope everything will wrap up soon. I’ll update when stipends finish and then again when directory fees do.

Good afternoon everyone. It appears that group payouts have not been paid for the past few days, directory listing fees haven’t been charged, and stipends haven’t paid out yet today. We have begun the stipend payout processing now, which will be followed by the directory listing fees. The group balances will begin paying out tomorrow at the regular time. We are working to discover the root cause of these delays and apologize for the inconvenience.

Hi everyone, I am releasing our Key Economic Metrics through August 2007 in Excel, OpenDocument, and Google Docs formats.

There are few changes to the format this month, only adding a new Usage by Age report for residents over/under 21 years, and removing the server and client FPS Performance reports and crash reports data as it is being moved to the Service Quality Metrics Page instead of squeezing into Economic statistics. Please expect an updated post from me with pointers to the FPS and crashrate charts on that site shortly.

We have been focusing on the Service Quality metrics during my office hours, Fridays at 10 AM in Beaumont, and we will be drilling into client and simulator performance again this week- I hope to see many of you there.

[edit: fixed Google Docs link]

Hello everyone, I am finally publishing our Public Metrics in Excel and OpenDocument and Google Doc formats through July 2007. I apologize about the delays in getting these posted, but hopefully the addition of some new data should make this worthwhile.

The new data, as highlighted by Phillip during his keynote at SLCC last weekend, now includes client crash rates, and both server and client performance statistics in terms of Frames Per Second. I have taken the step to publish these figures as Daily statistics for every day since January 1, 2007. As Phillip indicated, we will also be including metrics on Inventory Loss shortly- I expect to include it in August’s data. We will be focusing on discussing these new metrics during my office hours in Beaumont at 10 AM this Friday morning during my weekly office hours- please come ready to discuss them, these meetings have been very fruitful lately and I appreciate everyone’s input. Talk to you tomorrow!

More explanations of the new key metrics below the fold.

(* Edit: Links to XLS and Open Document versions amended- thanks! )

(more…)

Have you got the downtime blues? View the latest installment of Second Opinion, the Second Life newsletter, on our website and coming soon, grab a newly updated copy from one of our in-world locations. (Don’t forget to sign up for automatic in-world delivery of upcoming issues!) This month in Second Opinion, find out what Sabin Linden says about Het-Grid, get information on SLCC, learn about AjaxLife in our interview with Katharine Berry, read up on Stephany Linden’s voice tips and tricks, check out our view on the new features vs. bug fixes debate … and more!

Also, as a reminder, we are no longer emailing the newsletter, but will instead continue to improve the online and in-world versions for everyone to enjoy. For example, you can now get the RSS feed directly delivered to your RSS reader du jour. Have any suggestions on how to make the newsletter better? Email them to the editor.

[UPDATE] Thank you for your comments. We greatly appreciate your continued patience during downtime. Please note that in the near future, and thanks to Het-Grid, downtime will occur less frequently. Don’t know about Het-Grid? Check out Breaking News in this month’s newsletter.

Hello All!

I’ve published this next month’s installment of our public metrics, which are available through our Economy page or linked here in Excel, Open Document, and Google Docs format.

I am planning on enhancing these formats to include CSV text files but need to figure out how to deliver the metadata and definitions for the reports along with the data all in a single downloadable package monthly, so if this interests you please vote for the JIRA task and join the discussion about this in my Office Hours.

We have created new JIRA categories for requests for additional reports and metrics, or for changes to our public data feeds. Please add your requests there and vote for the ones that interest you most.

If you have any questions about the economic stats behind month’s numbers, Zee Linden, our CFO, will also be coming to this week’s Office Hours to talk about the economy. As of this week, Beaumont should be a voice-enabled sim, so we invite anyone wanting to use the First Look viewer to join in the conversation via voice also.

Thanks everyone, and see you soon!

-Meta

(update: apologies original post had a problem with my unique and signup figures)

A while back, Robin Linden blogged about our advertising policy changes, located here. Classified ads for businesses in Second Life related to Casinos or other Gambling related activities will be removed by Linden Lab with no refunds given.

Also, parcel descriptions which advertise the same activities will also be changed, as they fall under the same guidelines.

Best!