The Death of the In World economy.

Sorry to say but while the day traders are all crowing about how more ppl will ahve to buy Lindens to buy stuf, the in world economy is dying. Sales of content are at an al time low thanks to Lindens repeated mistake of lowerring/removing the ONLY income most ppl in game have. If you remove thier source of income you remove thier buying power, and you destroy sales of produced goods. Once again I call for Linden to ENFORCE an in world minimum wage/commnission. fully 80% of the account holders in SL are not day traders, so while Phgil is caterring to the richer few, the major portion of account holders are sufferring and content creation is dying as it has nothing left to support it in world. I cannot suport a workplace to build nor can I support a home or shops without income. Thinking strongly it is time to look for greener pastures than Second Life, as obviously soon the only pl left wil be land barons and day traders. I wonde4r how they will fare when no one will buy thier stuff.

I laugh at hearing this comment over and over again. Truth is, sales of QUALITY content is at an all time high. Gone are the days of people just buying any crap, mainly because there is more and more quality out there.

Also, unless you are an alt, your sample size is just about 1 year, (August 2005). So how can you state it as "all time"

That is true... Selling Tshirts and ending up on the cover of Forbes are over.. Today, you have to work for you money with quality widgets that have hundreds of hours of coding, encoded into them... Thats Life... Or should I say, Second Life.. Muahahahahah...

Figures someone who can't make a stick figure would make this comment. So far the only thing I ever saw you try to make weas a total disaster economically. Wonder what you'll do when there's no one to buy your L's but toher day traders.

Actually I do have two accounts. And I know more than a few ppl who do make quality things, and so far they are pretty much all saying sales are in the toilet.

Getting rid of the basic stipend created this economic pinch. Now there's almost no point in making some good cheap stuff because the target market (basics) is gone.

It was removed to prevent abuses when the system went no-verification so all we have left in the low-end market are the basics who put in payment info.

So here I am just sticking with high-end products.

Fate Gardens' sales have been steady this entire calendar year except for March when they were down slightly.

I'd have a rough time explaining to the folks on Caledon's waiting list that this was a dead economy.

West Trade Imports is still humming along nicely - kinda hard for me to track as it's income is mixed in with parcel meter payments. But it's still comfortably in the multihundred dollar / month range.

Then again, most people who do business with me can't possibly be living off just the stipend.




There was a bank robber who was once asked why he robbed banks. "Because that is where the money is at!" he explained.

Perhaps it's time to sell premium items to those who do buy $L?

With the economy dead, you won't be needing all those worthless $L. Feel free to send them to my account, I will have a funeral for them. (We have lots of hookers and coke at these types of events)

I've personally had sales slow recently, but I attribute that to not bringing out anything new for a long time as I'm saving up to release a bunch of new stuff when our island opens. The economy feels fine to me.

My sales are slow, but just today and yesterday. That can change though quickly as I learned in the past. Also yesterday, the server for the SIM I was on left us with No traffice reported for anyone. Plus the fact for 12 hours the TP function for the SIM wasn't working. Tough to get customers appearing at 0 traffic. I really hope that opening up a new bigger store wasn't a bad thing. I thought it would be better (it looks better but emptier), but the last three days just haven't shown that.

Personally I am strongly thinking of removing all items I ahve created and closing shop up. The shop itself will remain since I share it with someone however sales on my end are not supporting it so what's the point in not deleting my creations? Time for me to look for greener pastures since Linden is doing thier level best to turn into a day traders only club. This is precisely the problem in our RL economy. A governing bodyu that caters specifically and strictly to the richest one percent of the population while the lower percentages have to support them. SL's in world economy is going the way of the dodo bird fast and Linden jsut does NOT seem to care.

My sales are just fine. In fact, they are so fine I'm considering quitting my SL "day" job of teaching and catching up on creating all those things I've been putting off.

Thank you for sharing that bit of information regarding your Sales trend. Content sales in SL is alot like a store in a shopping mall - sort of the equvalent of a real life grid. Anytime you see a store's sales either flat or declining while Mall Traffic is rapidly growing, most analysts would consider that a very negative trend for that individual store.

I don't know the exact numbers, but the with the recent huge increases in traffic (SL published member numbers and concurrency), sales should theoretically be booming. However, LL has chosen to create an entire generation of new members consisting of the landless poor.

The few new members that /do/ buy Linden dollars, and / or upgrade to premium, and start producing content are entering an increasingly competitive marketplace with statistically fewer residents with money to spend.

An interesting statistic would be to compare both the average and the median 'member account balance' prior year versus current year, same reporting period. Even better would be to graphically break out the account balances in tiers... numbers and/or percentages of members with account balances of $0 - 1000, 1001 - 10,000, 10,001 - 25,000, and so on.

In real life, we have certain communities that are veiwed as 'affluent' with lots of retail outlets and significant depth of upscale 'content'..... versus economically depressed communities with fewer retail outlets and alot of discounted, cheap, and generally lower quality 'content'. The successful wealthy gravitate to their enclaves of affluence and the lower classes are left to the inner cities and low cost rental housing. It is interesting to observe the same sort of stratification of the SL community and society occuring.

*waves at Khamon

I have no idea what you're talking about, in the last three weeks my sales have gone through the roof.

Sales must be ok on average. Lindex volume was over 13 million for the 5th day in a row which is the most days over that amount. I just wonder if there is just so much more competition now than there was a few months ago even.

You do realise that if I give you L$125,000, that counts as a give and receive transaction totalling L$250,000 in "volume"?

Then you give it back to me, that's L$500,000 transaction total.

Repeat, that's a million L$ changed hands.

A simple automated script between a player and an alt running for a few hours could easily top millions of L$ in 'transactions' even with a tiny amount being transferred each time.

Just like the 300,000+ "residents".... don't trust the figures.

Lewis

Actually, my sales have been steadily increasing. I do a little advertising, I private Beta some of my stuff, and I offer as much support to my clients as possible. I try to make decent stuff, and I am often (when online) in my shop to help people and get work on my products done. It's been working for me rather well, actually

I believe that's why the OP quoted lindex volume (which is a much more sensible metric), and not the in-game trades figure.

For my own part, sales are fine - if anything, they're up a shade since 6/6. I suspect the loss in sales that _some_ traders are seeing has more to do with sharper competition than anything else. Amongst the influx of new users that we've seen since the start of the year are some very talented content producers, and it's only in the last couple of months that they've got to the point where they're bringing their products to market. The general standard of merchandise that consumers expect for their linden$ is rising.

Makes sense, I joined after the new year, and within the last couple of months have been steadily releasing products. Also, the competition is what keeps me in development 3 out of 4 hours in SL.

Just keep your certification valid because you never know when LL will just pull the plug or make a change that will affect your sales.

Anticipating change and working ways to make the changes profitable, rather than sticking to a singular view is the key to success in business.

I recommend the book "Who Moved My Cheese".

Zany, I do hope you're joking! We LOVE your classes.

~Asp

"Sales of content are at an al time low"

Where is your source information? On what are you basing this conclusion? How did you reach this conclusion?

Don't you remember your maths teacher telling you to "always show your working"?

Musuko.

Most people in this "game" can well afford to buy Lindens on LINDEX, so the argument that everyone in here is POOR is pretty damned lame. Anyone in SL can afford a broadband connection; therefore they can afford to buy a few thousand Lindens on Lindex. That they don't WANT to is beside the point.

THE ENTIRE THING IS NOT A FREEBIE, FOLKS!!!