SL Public Economic Statistics

Hi All,

Publically available economic statistics are clearly going to be important to the growth of SL, and so we want to design a great system for generating those statistics.

To drive discussion, I've attached a spreadsheet with some actual data from the last 4 week on the SL economy. Take a look and respond with comments on what you think is useful, missing or unclear. Bear in mind that we will likely not have the time/resources to provide every piece of information you might be interested in, so try and prioritize - what would you MOST like to see.

Based on feedback, we will come up with an automated way (website, etc) of providing uniform access to these statistics for all SL residents.

Sorry about the download bug... we are fixing. In the meantime, I reposted the message and file in the main forum at
/invalid_link.html

Try and respond here, though - we'll move the responses back to this thread.

You should be able to download this now!

Colin

Ok Phillip in a quick over view I was surprised at the stability of land sales both from LL and LB's. This being the case tells me that as an over all the summary that the populace believes Land Barrons are controlling the economy is false.

This tends to lean more toward the erratic sales of either animations or Scripted animated objects over all.

Good news is least there are still a lot of people giving gifts out there..

Shadow

So much for the speculation re: the reason why people are not buying consumer items in SL is because they are saving their Linden$.

The medium resident balance is only $1,085!

Doesn't seem people are saving.


====

Second Life Economic Statistics

Last Updated: August 2, 2004
Money Supply: $70,619,568
Total balances in all resident accounts
Median Balance: $1,085
The median resident balance

Thanks for sharing this data with us Philip. My feeling, of course, is that I'd like to see as much info as possible as long as it doesn't infringe on anyone's privacy.
But, specifically, I think the one thing your spreadsheet is missing is the amount of land sold - the land area of the transactions. While it's interesting to know how many land sales there were and the average sale price, that data doesn't tell us a lot without knowing the average size of the plots sold. Is the average sale L$10,000 for 1024m of land or 2048, etc.

This is great. Thanks Philip.

Here's a couple of things I'd like to see...

object sales-
1. highest number of transactions for a single merchant.
2. average number of transactions per merchant.
3. highest L$ amount for transactions for a single merchant.
4. average L$ amount for transactions for all merchants.

The above should exclude land sales and IGE and GOM accounts.

Thanks for the data!

* * *

Data Requests:

- Land:
-- Mean price / sq.m. with Standard Deviation
-- Mean size of lots sold with Standard Deviation
-- Auction data:
--- daily or weekly totals

- Money Supply:
-- Money in and out of the exchange accounts
-- Weekly Stipend
--- per AV
--- mean stpid w/ SD
-- Other sources of Money into the economy - dwell, bonuses, contests, referrals, etc
-- Auction data - to see how much money flows out of the economy
-- L$ being used to pay LL fees
-- Other outflows of L$

- demographics:
-- sl population
-- histogram of wealth distributions
-- histogram of sq.m. owned
-- histogram of unused and used tier

- sales
-- total-mean-sd price for objects sold
-- total-mean-sd l$ paid to objects
--- gambling data if that's possible
-- total-mean-sd l$ paid to people

- Trends
-- historic data from previous weeks
-- weekly numbers on the money supply

do gom transactions show up as gifts and/or payments?

I'm gonna wait for the 1.2 release of the zipfile. Version 1.0 wouldn't install and 1.1 doesn't work on my nVidia card.

Good stuff.

GOM deposits and withdrawals within SL should show up as payments according to the definitions in the spreadsheet.

i don't know how much GOM atms are used, but wouldn't those count toward payments?

i've been thinking about the numbers, and i have concluded they aren't very informative in their current form.

in larger economies these numbers might signify, but in something as small as sl much more fine-grained data is necessary.

at the moment there are two important questions:
- is land speculation driving the land prices?
- have object sales slumped?

the data on hand doesn't answer these questions.

* * *

the average price per land transaction is l$8k. but without knowing how much land has been sold, that doesn't tell us the l$/sqm which is the price of land.

the median resident balance is l$1k, but the mean appears to be around l$8k.

it's interesting that the average land transaction and the averge balance are similar. but without more information it doesn't signify.

* * *

object sales look steady over the 4 weeks reported, but how many active players were there over that time? if there were more players over that period of time, that's bad. if there were few, that's good. also, are there more retailers?

note that vending machines fall under payments and not object sales. and payments have gone down by l$6,000,000.

how many of these were currency exchanges? since GOM uses ATMs.

and there's something strange:
payments include money paid and received by a resident to or from an object. is this a measure of total money transacted, or a measure of money residents have spent? (i.e. paid + received? or paid - received?)

* * *

the number of gifts increased in number, lower in volume. how many of those were us$:l$ echanges? are these coming from contests, raffles, lotteries, philanthropy, alt account consolidation?

* * *

someone made the comment with a median balance of $1k, then people must not be saving up for land. but you can't draw that conclusion without minimally knowing the active number of accounts during that period of time, and knowing what the mean balance for those accounts are.

* * *

to some extent, the question shouldn't be "what data can ll provide?" the question is "what questions does ll need to be able to answer?"

in the future where people are working in sl, for businesses some of the questions are:
- what is the mean price per object (direct and vendor)?
- which is better vendo or direct?
- have sales per retailer been going up or going down?
- have sales per cusomer been going up or going down?
- is there a correlation between land prices and object sales (prices and number)?
- is the money supply increasing or decreasing? does this correlate to prices?

for residents some of additional questions are:
- plus what is the l$/sqm
- how are most people earning l$?
- is there inflation or deflation?

these questions also translate into user experience:
- how much us$/l$ does the average active player invest into their sl experience?
- is this amount of money attainable for the average new player?
-- how long does it take to raise that much l$? how long is that compared to mean length of activity for new accounts?
- ie. how much money do people need to have fun? and how long does that take? will people give up before they reach the fun threshhold? is l$ even necessary to have fun?

First, thanks for the data Philip!

Second, I've thought hard about how this should be handled and here's my ideas:

I think there is a great need to have economic data posted regularly, maybe bimonthly. Now, the most controversial part I think that there should only be raw data released. I don't believe that LL should have to take the time to gather everything AND make it into something useful to us. There are many people who are capable and willing to analyze the numbers given, and make their findings available to everyone inworld.

Now the question of what data is needed.

Land: In world sales only should be provided (since we can gather the auction info ourselves) and should include the sim the property sold was in, size of the plot, and the price it sold for.

Object Sales: This is tricky to handle without infringing on privacy. Maybe this data does need to be handled by LL, since I cannot think of a feasible way to give info to the residents without violating merchants identities.

Money: Only a few numbers need to be provided here. Total L$ in circulation by day. Total L$ taken in/out of circulation by day(including L$ gained in dwell etc. and L$ spend in auctions etc.). And maybe a daily balance by av without names.

Other info needed: Total population of SL. Number of people logging in, daily numbers. New accts., daily numbers.


I know I had some more ideas, but they have escaped me for now. I'll edit if I remember them.

Anyways, that's my 2L$.

Philip & Co.,

I think you're on the right track with predicting such needs.

Many good ideas so far, though, thinking in long-long term, stats will need to focus on economy as a macrocosm.

Questions that come to my mind:

- What geographic areas are desirable for sales?

Perhaps there would be a way to visually track sales on the global map, in number of sales, total sales, and in mean / median sale price. If shopowners can see where certain places sell more, it'd give more value to a naturally "commercial" district. (I might also exclude <$2 sales.)

- How are individual product markets doing?

Maybe we could track different types of items, not just land vs. object, but also: vehicles, weapons, art, clothing, adult, houseware / furniture, entire homes, jewelry, AVs, etc.
Maybe we could add a classification system to sales - allow an object a "type" attribute - in addition something that could be searched with. These could even be further subdivided in some categories (male/female, boat/car/plane/etc, kitchen/outdoor/dining room/bedroom/etc)

- How might a corporation be possible in SL?

A SL stock exchange based on brand names? How might sales figures be needed to support this, which I think will come in the future? Could sales be tracked by large groups?
For that matter, what about privately-owned non-incorporated groups? Why not show stats for one major brand that has lots of products selling in many sims?

Hope these ideas feed into your braintrust over there

-Hiro Pendragon
serving SL from Varney 200,200

/13/ec/20087/1.html


Sorry but I feel this falls under the economic system very much.

These are some interesting numbers but some of them are of questionable usefullness.

The definition of payment in the spreadsheet would seem to include payments to/from GOM ATMs, but technically these are deposits/withdrawals and not an indication of people's spending habits.

The payment definition also includes games such as blackjack tables. So if I spend a couple of hours playing high stakes blackjack, that could generate hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of 'payments' even though the net change in what I won or lost would be much less.

It's interesting to know the median balance is $1085, but this is essentially 'spending money' -- we don't know if people's balances are low because they are spending all of their money, or because they are depositing it into a GOM account. My in-world balance right now is below that mean, but I have much more money deposited in GOM.

Land sales statistics would be much more interesting if we knew the average price per m2.

The total money supply is an important statistic, but only useful when we can see how it changes over time. I would have liked to have seen a graph of this stat over the four week period.

Hiro interesting idea.

What are your thoughts (anyone?) on how to register brand names, and what about registering service-based groups that offer fee-based services?


For example - i've introduced the Awakening Avatars Escrow Services as a way to help with SL Economic Development (Escrow Services - Helpful to SL Economy. I would assume I'd have a way to brand this name so it could be treaded on a future SL Stock Exchange.

Comments?

I'm not particularly surprised. I conjecture that this spreadsheet was generated to appease the players who thought it would be helpful to know something about the economy. Now we know something about the economy; unfortunately one can't derive doodly from it.

Just my opinion, I could be wrong...

http://www.uspto.gov/

Given that technically speaking legal precedent in the US shows that the "game company" owns all virtual property, the real issue is enforcement by Linden Lab of copyright / patent.

Currently SL does not enforce player-claimed copyright according to the Linden I spoke to when I had someone try and exploit one of my items. I do remember that Linden Lab did ask that out-of-game copyright be respected; for instance in the game development contest I inverted a "golden arch" on a "WacRonald's" fast food store, because someone else in the competition told me that Lindens had asked someone to do something similar.

I've mentioned copyright to Hamlet as a subject likely he might want to explore in NWN, as the issue starts to be challenged.

Anyone hear of any good examples?

-Hiro Pendragon
Serving SL from Varney 200,200

Philip,

My #1 suggestion concerning these stats that you published is to, at the very least, continue publishing weekly the original set of stats. There were many suggestions that have merit, but since its apparent that you already collect what was in your original spreadsheet, how about keeping that info coming out until you decide what else to add.

- Ace

As long as it doesn't break anyones privacy, more information like this would be interisting to see. I'm not much of an economist but its still interisting to see whats going on and can help with other things.

If you could make it automated so that updates can be seen as soon as possible (maybe even live), that would be awsome.

It'd be neat to see trends over time and apparently very usefull to many people.

Hi there,

I'll try to update the doc weekly, yes. The weekly interval seems most useful for watching trends, to my eye.

regarding the copyright stuff - Hiro - we support the DMCA mechanism for copyright resolution, which basically means that if a copyright holder wants to seek out an infringing user we will connect them and let them deal with it outside of SL. In the future we may add various ways to help residents resolve these disputes, but bear in mind that if we are to create a real judiciary, etc, we will somehow have to charge considerably to support it - just the way taxes pay for such things in RL.

When can we look forward to received weekly economic reports? Couldn't this information be auto generated?