The current economy within SL

I have a couple of alts that I made for specific purposes and never used again...

Honestly, I think it would be totally the opposite.

Yes,

But of course other than bots, theres a reasonable chance those other types are proportionally consistent over the course of the last year.

{EDIT} i forgot to add that i agree with your bottom line conclusion on all this hehehe)

those are not the best months to be basing the sl econnemy since they are the months with one of the biggest holidays of the year coming up where people spend thousands on one day..really there is a small window where the sl spending really flows well..spring and part of fall

Jan and feb are the worst months based on outside spending..the months leading up to it spending will slow as well for preperation for the holidays. summer which is the most costly time of year because of gas price increases affecting everything we do from grocery increases and electric bills gas bills..anything affected by gas prices. traveling and vacations are in the summer months as well..the spending will slow and population will lower..spring is one of the better times of spending which will be coming soon..SL is very seasonal and it's spending is very much infuenced by outside spending of rl ..

with the corperate banking crissis going on in the U.S right now and in part of the world people are having loans called in because banks don't have the solid asset for the money they have out on loans and all the giving of loans to people that had no buissness getting loans..i would say something like that would be felt in here for sure..but with a population increase and sl being free to join..
well people look for free in tight times..and people look for ways to make money in tight times..so theft will rise and the people looking for deals will rise..

in tight times the ones that are well established may not feel the pinch but the ones that rely on leisure spending as their income will be affected first..

but really do i think all this has to do with why some spending has slowed? not at all..
there is just more competition in sl than a year ago..

if your store is feeling the pinch or you don't have as many listeners on your stream or your tips have gone down or the traffic in your club reduces..more than likely it's because there is another rooster in the hen house whooing the sweeties hehehe

every zero you add to an average signficantly drops the average. If you factor in all the "alt farms" - none of which earn or spend any money, but log in 24/7, you're looking at a sizeable sebgment of the population that drags down the $l/user average.

As more and more farm botd log in, and stay logged in, a higher and higher percentage of the population, and a factorial percentage of hours logged in are doing nothing for the economy and bringing down the $ per hour per user.

I log in for four hours a day. I make $100l/hr (not really, just for example)
A farm-bot logs in 24 hrs/day. It makes $0.

28 hours of usage for the day for two users with a $400 profit= $00.035l/hrs logged in.
I still made $400l, but the number looks abysmal.

Personally my business is doing the same as ever right now, but for anyone noticing any weakness in the SL economy lately I would say it all comes down to this:

latest LL blog: "At this time we are asking that you do not conduct transactions for L$, land or object transfer."

The fact that every other day (seemingly anyway) for the past while there's been a warning not to spend money because of technical difficulties undoubtedly has had a big effect on shopping habits.

We dont know what portion of the population are camper/traffic bots though.

If they are half the population then the average the real users spend might be steady.

If they are less than 10% then the average real users are spending is still way down over the course of a year.

I would guess that Bots amount to less than 10% of the overall population - Maybe even significantly less. But I do not know for sure.

i think one of the worst times in sl was when the search engine died for like a week or more..that was killing me..then after that teleporting was impossible ..you had to log off and relog to the sime you wanted to go to..
now that was bad times hahahaha

Assuming a fairly constant proportion of people opening businesses ..

The amount each user spends on Second Life needs to keep up with the increase in population ..

If it doesn't then there will be reductions in average business income.




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There will always be plenty of individual stores who don't feel that pinch ..

That doesn't mean a pinch isn't happening.

There were people who became millionaires during the Great Depression .. Doesn't mean it didn't happen.

I think that this is the core issue.
There are so many clubs and shops offering basically the same thing.
If they are to survive as revenue earners then they need a large body of consumers.
Most consumers expect a decent level of service.

I'm a techie. I take a long-term view of SL-like technology. I'm here primarily to work and play with the tech and the creative side. I can put up with the borkiness in the hope that this is going somewhere good in the long term.

For consumers, it's either worthwhile or it sucks. There's been quite a lot of sucking recently.

LL really have to improve the experience for the consumer.
1) First impressions - It's been a few months since I created an alt to check out the whole signup/OI/HI/Welcome experience. It wasn't a happy time then.
2) Ongoing - Well we all know about that.

It's a shame. SL is a truly wonderful place. It has such potential.

There is lot of shops and services out there competing for attention yet some seem to be doing well. I wonder why?

I think personally there is only certain things people need on regular basis and its usually involving place to call home for those who need home base for creating, socializing, etc.

My friend who pretty successful at slexchange said he had theory only 10000 avatars on regular basis shop for anything at any time.

If anyone around who shops at length of time they become pickier, pickier about content.

Even my builder friends who buy textures
and look for higher and higher quality textures or quit buying them all together.

Us Americans are only certain percentage I thought of residents?
I thought no more then 50 percent of 12 million residents.

Yet most at any time there is 50k to 60k residents online.

Only around 10 percent shop or buy things on regular basis.

Rest make their own content or trying are trying to sale it.

Also there is less entry level jobs now since the bots taken over camping so less
is being spent.

thats very true..the things that i used to be addicted to don't grasp me anymore and really have not found much to move up to..i log in and then talk to some friends then look around wondering what i want to do next..so i hit the search engine looking for new and exciting things..
it's the same old thing..
i have been out of sl for over a week now because ..well i killed my computer..
the keyboard wire wrapped around my foot..i got up to get some tea and was slammed to the ground like a rabbit in a roped trap..i got up lookedat my computer and no display on the monitor and the hard drive light staying on..
dead computer lol

the first thing i thought of was ..omg SL..then i realized all the other things i couldn't get to like my bank online or my website i had to finish or the many other things..
i picked up a motherboard that would still use my old things and couldn't get into sl because of compatability of the graphics..


to say the truth the forums are much more exciting than my recent times in sl these days lol

there really was nothing that has me in a hurry to get back in..

That is an assumption that I don't necessarily agree is fact.

possibly

But you would have to look at why there would be a sharp increase in the proportion of accounts that were not the traditional type.

Bots, sure they have increased - but I was discussing non bots

ALT accounts - has something changed that would lead to more ALTS per person between jan 2007 and jan 2008?

People just checking out SL - has there been something that changed how many tried Secondlife while at the same time promoting less user retention?


and so on ..

Its quite possible factors have led to more accounts created on average per active user in the last year -but other than Bots I don't know what they would be.

Ok, 1 year ago, assuming bots made up 5% of total population...
of 1000 residents -
9500 spending $100/hr for 4 hrs logged in each = $3,800,000 total, or just $100/hr
500 spending $0/hr for 24 hrs = $0
total for 10000 residents = $3,800,000 for 50,000 hours or $76/hr

assuming your 10% bots-

9000 spending $100/hr for 4 hrs ea = $3,600,000 total (still $100/hr)
1000 bots spending $0/hr for 24 hours = 24000 hours of $0

total for 10000 residents = $3,600,000 for 60,000hr = $60/hr

So the number of bots in-world significantly affects the number of $L per hour spent/earned. If bots moved from 5% to 10%, it's an apparent 20% drop in economy when no other factors change. I've seen some estimates of bots being 20% of population, but really no one will ever know the exact figure.

i know people with more than 40 bots.i think you can buy them for like 2k each and if you know how to make them and how all that junk works you can drop as many as you like.

i have seen more than forty easily dropped at one time just to test a sim from one person and they never had to log off to do it..

Hmm. Maybe? I don't feel all that unusual.

Honestly most of the residents in Caledon have mainland and a parcel or two (or more) in other private estates. Who as far as I can tell are decent land managers too, for the most part.

There isn't much talk of unscrupulous landlords; it makes a big splash in forums but I don't hear much of it inworld.

If anything, people seem to move in due to interest in the community - it's a radically different experience than a lot of people's SL. The most 'on the mark' description is that of being in a guild, for those familiar with MMO games.


I tend not to spill user stats of Caledon residents because that's not right, but a few general trends are inescapable.

The foremost, is that we have some sizeable merchant-barons. They provide everything from clothing to architecture to animations to vehicles to event experiences.

The Caledon rent is pennies on the dollar compared to the take of many of them. Not all, but many. I can't even begin to tell you how strong the clothing industry in Caledon can be - I've heard figures of over 1000 USD a month. Against that, paying me $L 475/wk for a parcel isn't a big deal.

In fact, I've run the numbers and without the mercantile activity, Caledon would survive just barely I think on residential only... but certainly not grow. Think of the number of shops and boutiques you see in Caledon, and you can extrapolate the commercial/residential ratio fairly easily.

One of my naughty little secrets: there is absolutely no such thing as 'pure residential' land anywhere in Caledon. Some of the most powerful merchants were scraping by until they set up a tiny little lemonade-stand of a shop... and then everything changed. Of course, there were others who I thought were top notch that utterly bombed - consumers are odd creatures.

In this manner we are deeply tied in both broadly and directly to the entire grid economy. If it rises, Caledon does. If it falls... so do we.

Land tier is a significant, but not overwhelming fraction of Caledon's "GNP" - as a micronation we are an exporter, with a good number of fairly significant companies participating.

So when you see the huge country estate of one of Caledon's merchant-barons, and their flagship store, it's not their USD converted to $L paying for much (or any) of that. If you have ever bought a dress or a hat or a pennyfarthing bicycle in Caledon, odds are that the beautiful estate is being supported by you or others like you, who typically do not even live in Caledon.

I am not sure why you are normalizing this to "per hour".

Of course each bot will have a higher impact in this case since you are using a number 6 times higher for each.

If I instead use "$ spent per day" than each bot only counts the same as each resident.

9500 residents spending $1 a day = 9500
500 bots spending $0 a day = $0

10000 total spending 9500 = average of 95 cents

9000 residents spending $1 a day = 9000
1000 bots spending 0$ = 0

10000 total spending 9000 = average of 90 cents

Thus each 1% bot is only 1% drop in the economy (in this example)

Its possible the real impact is somewhere in the middle though - There will be some expenses that result from spending a lot of time in SL, and others that don't.

For example someone who logs in 2 hours a day might spend 75% as much as someone who logs in 8 if they are neighbors on an estate .. since their cost of living is the same.

I think you are understating your situation.

You have mentioned several times in the past how you have a waiting list and quite a lot of interest in your SIMs,

This isn't a grid-wide phenomena, if it were SL would be much more successful than it is.

Can we have Desmond as the new CEO of LL?

The original figures posted by ArchTx Edo were calculated in $L/user/hr
I just followed the same format for relevance

Ahh, okay.

I tend to think of it in terms Average $USD spent per month.

Thats also how I think of my own SL expenses.

I see the bottom line is how much content creators are being paid to stay in business.

I know many people who have had steady declines over the last year. A lot of this is increase in competition of course. But if you add in less $USD spent per person and its a double whammy of sorts.

It would help a lot to know how much of the population is bots. Of course LL could easily estimate this -- just keep track of the number of accounts logged in @24 hours a day.

I think the economy dropping in the US is a fairly major factor, with people prepared to spend less on entertainment.

Another one is that the range of supported activities in SL seems to have dropped. There seem to be fewer and fewer people trying to do creative and original things in SL which means that more and more people are just going clubbing because that's where everyone else is. I suspect a large part of this is down to increased regulation, both in-world and out-of-world; when I joined, it was not common to be able to explore into lots of places, but now even a casual flight across the mainland will usually have you haraunged by a security orb at least once and many, many clubs have their parcels locked down to nothing (no build, no script, etc) because of griefer attacks. This has caused many previously useful items to become useless.

Another aspect has been the change to real life focuses. I would never have thought that there would ever be professional entertainers in SL, but there are now, and most of them are doing great jobs. The side effect, though, is that if you're not one then you're just a customer, so there's less scope for social self-expression too.

Finally there's the problem that as people do panic about the market falling, which at least some people are doing, they market harder. This pushes up the cost of new businesses getting noticed, which discourages them from starting. That means that the content on SL becomes static, and that drives people away, making the market fall further and making the problem recursive.

Too much doom and gloom here! Will there be some spillover into SL from RL economic stress? Sure there will be some, potentially as described previously in this thread. But we are part of something special here!

We are all lucky to be a part of the early stages of this fantastic growth of the metaverse. Maybe this stat or that stat isn't trending up as some of us would like. But our population is growing faster than any world population that I know of. That's what matters. LL's focus needs to be on concurrency and growing its network, and the rest will fall into place.

btw Desmond I've been meaning to ask if you are a fan of Diamond Age. As if the aesthetics of Caledon weren't already enough of a reminder, what you just described is exactly the same as the economic status of the Victorian clave. Much as SL overall is informed by Neal Stephenson's book Snowcrash, I keep almost referring to Caledonians I meet as "Vickys."