Alphaville Herald

State of the Economy

Lowest profit per capita growth ever in Q1 2008

by Jessica Holyoke

Zee Linden recently posted graphs reflecting the strength of the SL Economy here - and Zee is very happy to report that the SL Economy grew by 15%. However, the story is not that simple. By several other measures, the economy growing slowly if at all. For instance, the Quarterly Profit per Capita (QPC) shows an anemic growth rate of 0.18 for the first quarter of 2008, the lowest on record. This suggests that virtual economists may want to take a very careful look at Zee’s numbers.

Quarterly Profit Per Capita posts lowest growth rate on record

Zee’s first graph tracks User-to-User Transactions in SL It is an interesting graph because we’ve never seen user-to-user transactions before. The economic statistics page uses Resident transactions and counts. The raw data spreadsheet has L$ Supply and user-to-user transactions as a page, but only details the Money Supply on that page. The raw data used to create the first graph is not readily available. More importantly, the graph uses two specific terms, user and resident. In Second Life, a user is the typist, the person behind the screen. One user can control many residents’ user-to-user transactions - which would eliminate the transfer of money between alt accounts from the reckoning.

Second Life Economy is in a Recession

Residents with a positive monthly L$ cash flow declines for second consecutive quarter

by Jessica Holyoke

After the banking ban, there are commentators who state that the Second Life Economy is in a recession and then there are the opposing commentators that say that the Second Life Economy is not in a recession. 

According to Wikipedia, a recession "is a decline in a country's gross domestic product (GDP), or negative real economic growth, for two or more successive quarters of a year."  Linden Lab does not have figures on GDP or economic growth.  But the Economic Statistics page does provide two numbers that can assist in seeing if there is a recession, Positive Monthly Linden Flow (PMLF) and total User Hours Logged. 

PMLF is the number of unique users that showed profit over a particular month.  On the statistics page, they are grouped by number of users that have experienced a degree of profit in U.S. dollars.  This number is better than the other monthly spending numbers because it eliminates any Alt effect.  For the resident transaction numbers, if I gave an Alt any amount of money, it would be counted in the totals, even though I was not spending money, just shifting it around.

Second Life users with positive monthly L$ cashflow getting harder to find

Second Life Economic Statistics Analyzed

by Curious Rousselot, metaverse numerologist

As many of us are no doubt aware; Linden Lab publishes statistics about Second Life. Conveniently they also make the historical data available in Excell and OpenOffice, and Google Docs format. This gives us here at the Herald a chance to see how the economy of Second Life is doing and to comment on it. More importantly, it gives us the chance to make pretty graphs of the information too. So, I thought it might be nice to put some of my amazing spreadsheet skills to use and see what we could get.

Obtained by dividing the total L$ by the total US$ of LindeX transactions

As we can see, after a serious drop in value of the L$ in September of 2006 the L$ has been holding pretty steady between L$260 to L$270 per US$. Admittedly I'm no economist but considering the relative size of the economy this is pretty impressive stability over the last several months.

Intersexed Avatar Children Hard to Find

Daddy/little girl, mom/daughter are most popular ageplay groups

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

For those who’s Second Life might not be complete without acting out fantasies with hermaphrodite child avatars - the odds do not look good. But an exclusive Herald study suggests that daddy/little girl ageplay is popular among 44% of those who express a preference by joining an ageplay fetish group. Mom/daughter ageplay is in second place with 25%, and daddy/boy places third with nearly 15% of the group members - so perhaps incest is not a major issue in this community.

How would you like to play today?

However, in the study of the Second Life groups, Herald researchers found only about one in a hundred ageplay avatars joined the hermaphrodite/intersexed ageplay group. It is unclear if this is due to poor marketing, asset server problems, lag, or the limited number of groups Second Life citizens can join.

SL Overtakes TSO in "Subscribers"

As the Second Life homepage map reveals, the population of SL now exceeds 40K, which, according to the most recent figures, means it has probably passed the ever plunging TSO. Of course people don't actually *pay* for their monthly accounts on SL, so it is not clear what this statistic really means -- the only meaningful measure of success for SL is the amount of land being rented or owned by customers. Still, it is a psychologically important milestone, both for SL and for those of us who can't avert our eyes from the train wreck that is TSO.

The Cory Details

Looks like today is gonna be hype Cory day. There are notes from Cory's talk at the Serious Games Summit, up on the Wonderland blog, and some of the statistics are interesting (if they are widely known, well, I didn't know them): Examples:

Last month: 20,000 people used SL. 50,000distinct items were sold. There were 1million p2p transactions.There are 7000 user hours per day spent creating. 3.5 user years per day! If Sturgeon’s law holds, then 90% everything made is crap bit 10% is good. It follows that of the 1300 items created daily, SL gets 130 really good. Also: 50% of the users are women.

I have no idea how SL can reliably document some of this, and I also wonder if person hours spent creating objects includes newbies working on their avatars and rezzing cubes. Saying that 10% of the objects created are "good" sounds wildly optimistic to me.

October Census: Alphaville is officially dead

Following up on our February and May Census, here are the results for Alphaville in October (taken Oct. 10) and it isn't pretty. Following are the logged hours for the top 100 properties in every catgory rounded to the nearest hour.

Category

May Census: Activity in Alpha Down 15% Since February

Back in February, we published some stats from CherryBomb, who counted up the number of hours logged in the top 100 properties in each category. While it is difficult to extract conclusions from these surveys, they do provide some interesting discussion points. (For example, residence is up 8%, but romance and welcome are both down 29% -- are we becoming homebodies?). The survey was taken on May 24 (a Monday as opposed to a Thursday – Feb 4 – on the previous survey) Comparative stats follow.

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February Census of Activity in TSO

Raw stats thanks to Cherry Bomb (who is not responsible for the explanation or the formatting!)

We are told by EA that TSO has 80,000 subscribers, but did you ever wonder how many actually play TSO or how many hours are logged? Perhaps we can extrapolate. Following is a census of recorded visitor hours listed in all the top 100 properties on Feb. 5, 2004. This is mostly for fun, so you can draw whatever conclusions you wish. Following the raw numbers are some methodological remarks.

2/5/2004