Median linden balance halved in two months

As per this page

http://secondlife.com/community/economy.php

The median balance for active SL accounts has been halved since september.

Is this because of all the free accounts? Should this even be a metric to bother with?

I noticed that too and went, "Hmm." I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there are no longer stipend bonuses.

Those are two very good reasons.

I say a combination of both

The wealth of SL is increasingly in the hands of a few Lords.

Agreed. I'll be out completely in a month or two... *sigh* and won't be able to afford a thing. And one thing I won't do is buy more.

It shows that we can savely ignore the "number of active accounts" when measuring true growth of SL. Much more interesting is to watch "number of concurrent users" or the growth of L$ transactions, which also grow impressively, but not quite as fast.

Yes, the gross transactions figure in terms of $L's continues to grow. I would like to see the number of transactions per member, and the average $L's per member tranaction. Those might also be good indicators/metrics to track over time.

For example, it can be shown that the $L gross transations are being increased by the population incrase, and not by the increased "wealth" of the individual members in terms of spending on a per capita basis. Spending per capita is down significantly since July of 2004. This implies that the overall SL wealth may be held in fewer and fewer accounts. Which is a logical assumption, based on the rapid growth in free memberships the past couple of months. These thousands of new members are 'newbie poor' and mostly rely on the stipend as their SL income.

Reporting Period Tot. Residents Total In-World Sales $ Sales / Resident %chg.

07-25-04 10,000 $36,442,990 $3,644
01-23-05 22,000 67,196,116 3,054 (16.2)
06-19-05 31,000 86,768,933 2,799 ( 9.3)
07-24-05 35,000 91,691,696 2,620 ( 6.4)
09-18-05 50,000 124,668,287 2,493 ( 4.
10-30-05 80,000 130,051,240 1,624 (34.9)

Bottom liine, SL is growing and is significanly larger both in terms of population and land mass. However, spending per capita should perhaps be of some concern to the social planners out in San Francisco.

Are YOU better off than last year?

Sorry.. should have attached via Excel spread sheet.. but the numbers are all there.

I think the median alone is practically useless. For those that don't know, the median is found by arranging all the people in Second Life in a list sorted by how much $L they have. The dead center of the list is looked at, and that person's balance is the median balance.

Now for the strength of the economy, I would be more interested in the $L in circulation, the rate of creation of currency, the destruction of currency, the amount of money being put in open sell orders, the amount of money changing hands per day on the currency exchange, and the amount of in-world transactions. To me the median balance shows very little, ecspecially without a mean to compare it to. It would be easier to draw a conlusion of any type with the mean, median, and total currency in circulations listed. It would be icing on the cake if we had the Standard Deviation as well.

All of this just makes me wonder if we'll get another economics town meeting with Phillip in the next few months.

How much do people get when they create an account?
If it is 500, then it looks like a lot of people create accounts but never log on, possibly because they have unsupported hardware or something
If they log on at least once, they would eventually get another 50 at the end of the week and their balance would be stuck at 50 until they logged in again.

What does that mean ( savely ignore ) and (concurrent users)
is it something like casual players or those pesky tourists



The Transactions on the web page is the biggest scam in the gamming world
It's really a simple counter of failed login attempts X 3 with a $ put in front of it

glad I could clear this up

Waves