economics stats

Anyone else notice on the economics stats that the number of top sellers in April decreased from March? That makes me feel better about my own sales performance last month, but it is troubling to consider generally.

yep yep .. )

slow month.....
sometimes that heppen in SL...everyboday have low sales....then month before

Hi, that' why in RL the economists tend only to compare 2 month or quarters, because a trend is then established by excluding special factors of only a month ( most important example is december because of Christmas).

Newland Dagostino

Okay... I looked... I don't see any section for "Top Sellers" and thus don't understand which portion of the statistics you consider to have decreased. The "Unique Users with Positive Monthly Linden Dollar Flow" numbers for April haven't been posted yet.
http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php

huh, the April numbers are gone now. They were posted when I checked this morning. I was referring to the number of people in the >5000 category. It was listed as one hundred thirty something for April.

No worries... all sorts of other interesting MTD numbers for April that moved downward.

* Islands Added are down nearly 19-percent.
* Square Meters Auctioned is down 13-percent.
* Total Square Meters Sold by Residents is down 13-percent.
* Supply Linden Sales (sales of "fresh" currency) is down 15-percent.

Even without seeing the new Unique Users with Positive Monthly Linden Dollar Flow numbers the SL economy definitely cooled off during the month of April. Growth has slowed.

Starting with October 2006 the number of Unique Users with Positive Monthly Linden Dollar Flow grew:
* 11.5-percent in November 2006
* 25.7-percent in December 2006
* 24.8-percent in January 2007
* 17.3-percent in February 2007
* 25.9-percent in March 2007

That looks like a white hot economy until one considers about one-half of one-percent of the total resident population (1 out of 200) makes a profit. Slightly less than 1 out of 400 residents makes a profit greater than US$10. But even with the cooling of the SL economy growth in Positive Monthly Linden Dollar Flow residents probably grew at around 22-percent.

Your post is pretty good but I have a question

the 1 out of 200

and 1 out of 400

numbers - where are you getting the 200/400 from? The number of Residents logged in in the last month? Total Resident Accounts ever Created? Or some Estimate of the actual number of active players.

I think the number of Active players is actually a lot lower than even the logged on in the last month number.

I derived the 1:200 and 1:400 numbers from Total Residents and total PMLFs (using the figures from May 1).

Unique Users with Positive Monthly Linden Dollar Flow grew almost 8-percent in April. Though there was growth it's dropped into single-digits.

What's it all mean? Economic growth in SL slowed dramatically over the previous month.

I agree with that -

I just think the total residents and total logged on in a month are grossly inflated numbers .. Unique users are slightly inflated - since with unverifed accounts Fake names can be used.

Meaning more people percentage wise make a profit than 1 in 200 / 400 - is all.

Sort of a relief to know actually; I was starting to think that I had a big over my shop somewhere...

Keep in mind that Islands Added and Auctions are hardware dependent stats. If LL can't get their hands on enough hardware, then those numbers go down. Who knows how much is in the queue and waiting to be filled.

Another thing to keep in mind is that gambling income in SL has taken a huge hit, casinos provided a lot of transactions and lot of cash flow.

Oh, I certainly understand. It gets worse when you take into consideration the fine print regarding PMLFs: "All numbers are rolled-up among avatar "alts" to the Unique Customer Level." So, the best we can do with any of the numbers is fiddle around and try to read the economic tea leaves.

For example, we can try to work up Total Unique Customer accounts. I vaguely remember that there's 1 Main to 1.5 Alts (this was from a tidbit at a town hall [I think]). We could guesstimate that 40-percent of the Total Resident Population is equivalent to the Total Unique Customer Accounts: about 2,485,330 which would mean during the month of April around 1.4-percent (or 1 out of 70) of the Total Unique Customer Accounts made a profit.

We could try to use the Total Customers Spending Money In-World figure as these are residents actively engaged in the marketplace (they're spending money): 302,665 in April, but that still doesn't give us the size of the entire marketplace (as not all sellers have to also be buyers) which would mean around 11-percent (or 1 out of 9) residents who are engaged in the marketplace are making a profit.

Okay... a variety of SL-related statistics have been linked on a recent blog post by Meta Linden:
April 2007 Key Metrics Released

As of the end of April there are:
* 5,973,301 total residents
* 3,768,092 unique accounts
* 83,063 premium accounts