Woohoo!!! 80,000!!!

In the case you described above, you don't really _own_ the land on a private island. You "own" a deed, which allows you to use the land. It's simply an overly complex rental arrangement. The island _owner_ can revoke your deed at anytime and evict you from "your" property.



Tier fees are actual revenue for Linden Lab.

Upload fees and ratings fees are not income for LL. Upload charges and rating fees are simply "sinks" which remove Linden dollars from the economy, they have nothing to do with the bottom line at LL (think of money removed by sinks as being destroyed).

The "sustainable independent economy" you described above can only persist as long as there are enough Premium accounts (including the tier fee-paying Premium accounts) to offset the ever increasing costs of the Basic lifetime accounts. Once the costs associated with Basic accounts exceed the revenues generated by Premium accounts and tier fees the economic framework is less able to persist, and potentially, will cease to be.

Right. Dreamland has grown fast, more than 50 sims since March. And some people indeed have Basic account.

One much better number to judge SL growth is the monthly revenue in tier and subscriptions LL gets, the total number of sims and the weekly total in world sales. Since Basic accounts are free the total number of "users" has become kinda meaningless.

I agree with you. Well, it is just a number ... who cares?

Mel

Thank you, Anshe. In your estimation, is the percentage of people who reside on your properties without paying for and contributing tier through LL at all significant? Rough estimate perhaps and do you see this as an increasing trend or has it somewhat stabilized over the past 6 months? Tier paying or otherwise, I consider people who make a stake in terms of a residence likely to ba active participants in the economy.

...read your TOS - that's exactly the same case with parcels on the mainland...in fact, excepting the tradeoff of more-primitive land management tools in exchange for freedom from premium account requirements, there's absolutely no difference save the reputation of each respective administrator...


...where do you think those linden dollars come from?..whether they ultimately enter my hands through currency exchanges, through services and sales to other users, or through land rights is irrelevant - what all those sinks actually do is drive the scarcity of linden dollars, which in turn drives the value equation of premium accounts for those who choose to buy them, which alongside lindex in puts a little extra money in LL's coffers to supplement tier, which is their *real* revenue generator...


...you'd've been mistaken if you hadn't included tier in that statement, but on that account, at least, you're correct...second life is administered very much as the archetypal georgist economy, and LL has thusly supported its admintration since, what, 1.2?..

...presently LL is positioned to support itself quite handily as long as there is a demand for land, premium accounts aside, and make no mistake that this wasn't but one carefully calculated step within their greater master plan: to bootstrap an open and independent economy and position themselves to profit quite handily from its burgeoning growth by occupying the same niche filled by bankers and brokers in RL...beyond a certain threshold of activity the grid won't even need to be under LL's exclusive control anymore, and i'm certain that's also in their long-term sights as that's where SL's relevance to the 'net as a whole will really explode...

The fundamental difference and actual trade-off is whether or not you _own_ the parcel. Renters are not stakeholders. They are simply subsidizing someone else's stake.



Linden dollars are actually injected into the economy by: Starter monies paid upon creation of Basic or Premium accounts, weekly stipends, daily Dwell monies based on traffic paid to landholders and land-holding groups, new resident recruitment bonuses, L$-based prizes for certain projects, and tips and purchases in-world by individual Lindens (yes, the Lindens do buy things).

After that money is injected into the economy it sloshes around (circulates).

Money is removed from circulation and "destroyed" by various "sinks" such as First Land purchases, upload fees for textures/images, animations, and sounds, and rating points, and the purchase of land sold at auction when Linden dollars are accepted for the transaction. A lack of scarcity has been a problem in the past leading to repeated inflationary spirals resulting in a reduction of stipend bonuses earlier in the year and the elimination of stipend bonuses with the release of version 1.7. This is a 75-percent reduction in the weekly stipend amounts being injected into the economy. Scarcity isn't being created on the "back end," it's being created on the "front end."

If you buy Linden dollars from the LindeX you're paying Linden Lab US$0.30-cents for the transaction. The seller pays a 3.5-percent commission to Linden Lab for the transaction (plus additional fees ranging from US$5 to US$10 in the event they wish to transfer these net US$ amounts). All of the money bought and sold via the LindeX must already exist within the economy.

If you have a Premium monthly account you're paying US$4.59 per L$1,000. You can also own land. This is new money being injected into the economy.

If you have a Premium annual account you're paying US$2.77 per L$1,000. Again, you can also own land. Again, this is new money being injected into the economy.

As you presented a value argument, a resident might get the best value when upgrading to an annual Premium membership (unless they need more than L$26,000 over the course of a year).

However, as free Basic accounts pay nothing to join they pay US$0 per L$1,000. They simply have to wait patiently and accumulate their L$50 per week. There's no US$ cost associated to this money before it gets injected into the economy. Free Basic accounts are actually a better value than any other account type _unless_ one considers land ownership to have a higher value. Based on the current declining trend in the percentage of residents willing to own more than 512-sq.m of land, and thus pay tier fees, an ever increasing majority percentage of the population does not value land ownership. I'm not sure how vibrant an economy can be when there's decreasing percentages of ownership.



Thank you for pointing out that I failed to make a mistake and that my main point is correct. It's most gracious of you.



You're relying on players other than yourself to buy the land though.

LL makes far more money in tier fees than from commissions collected from currency transactions at a factor of 1 to 31.

Allow me to reiterate my main point: Over the course of the past six months the percentage of residents, when compared to the population as a whole, willing to _own_ more than 512-sq.m of land, has been falling dramatically. Residents actually willing to become stakeholders in SL have been growing at a far slower rate. At it's present rate of decline there will eventually be far too many Basic accounts than can be sustained by an ever-decreasing percentage of Premium accounts owning more than 512-sq.m of land and thus paying tier fees.

Your "archetypical Georgist economy" cannot exist if there is no framework for it to exist within.

In a nutshell: The declining rate of conversion from Basic accounts to Premium accounts is potentially, and most likely already is, problematic to the continued health and survivability of the Second Life community.

I think market share of zoned sims that are managed by residents is fairly stable now at about 10%. There is nothing dramatic now.

One thing to note is that people in Dreamland and other resident managed communities still pay tier or rent, just not directly to Linden Lab. They very much contribute to the SL economy.

Anshe,

Linden Lab is making signifcantly less money through you than they would be if the residents were paying tier directly to them for the same sized land, as you are using the discount you receive for owning the entire island. How is this not harmful to Linden Lab? They would be making 2-3 times the tier fees per sim of land that they are getting $195 a month from you for.

rofl!

coco

Don't they make a good bit of money up front by selling the SIM via $US auctions?

Wouldn't cost this LL less customer support?

"Sounds impressive" DOES pay the bills. It convinces more people to put more money into it. (Both players and investors.) That's why I'm all for these numbers.

coco

P.S. Plus, it's exciting.

This is a private island sim, not mainland - and the upfront costs pay for the server and licensing fees ,apparently. When you buy a private island, you are getting 65,535m of land with it included. You don't have an additional fee to then buy that land.

Wanna make a bet for sooner than New Year's Eve, Rick?

I'm willing to bet you $2,500 Lindens it will reach 100k before New Year's Eve.

Is it a bet?

coco

When Philip responded earlier this year to the zoning debate with a stated preference for resident lead initiatives I figured it must have been cheaper to forfeit the profit than to staff up to provide land management services. It seem like a reasonable area to let go control of and keep the manpower forcused on the technical side of the platform.

Most corporations have gone this route. The related costs of human resources (health care, vacation, social security,...) have skyrocketed making it a common avenue to take.

For those of you keeping score at home, these data may be described in the following ways, where x is incrementing months and y is the number of landowners as derived from Lordfly's reasoning:

y = 249.45x + 1237.3
R^2 = 0.9897

or as a polynomial,

y = 0.0841x^4 - 2.1887x^3 + 19.025x^2 + 167.17x + 1411.8
R^2 = 0.9994

[Graphically, see attached]


Look mommy! I can use Excel! =D

I agree with you as well. I just was sorta saying we'll have 100,000 by the end of the year no problem. Though when we get over 90,000 I will put up another forum contest to PICK THE DATE AND TIME we reach 100,000.

Aw, phooey. I can't make any money with things like this. Nobody took me up on my offer for bids to get me to shut up, either.

coco

Where is the overall growth rate for comparison? If your doing show & tell, we need to compare the slope of the growth in number of landowners relative to the growth of the overall population.

I can remember, one and two years ago, Lindens saying that they had to be careful to not grow too quickly and outstrip The Grid All Hail The Central Grid's scalability. Now I know that they meant The Asset Server All Hail The Central Asset Server.

Yea, that is some of the reason that the much awaited features aren't here yet. They are working hard on scalability aswell.

Happy to crunch the numbers, if someone's got the raw data.

That is what it seems like. And personally, I think SL *is* growing way too fast for its own good. But maybe that is for another thread all together.

Ever seen Chromal's website?
http://planet0.planet-zero.org/~chromal/slpop/

Population information going back to September 2005 appeared earlier in this thread:

/108/a5/70902/1.html#post737727