Boycotting Lindex is woud not be effective

Roxie:

Lets see, LL makes about 50,000 a day from tier fees from private islands. I have no idea how much they make from mainland tier...

By my estimation, LL makes about 3-4 thousand a day from the Lindex.

I don't see trying to boycott the lindex will do much financial harm, even if it was possible to get enough people to do it.

I don't condone any kind of action against the Lindex. I am a firm believer in free markets.

So my question is, why would you want to financially hurt LL? Because of the lastest blog about cutting down on offensive materiels?

Remember the crackdown on casinos a few months back? They are still alive and well...

Im not sure where you get your figures from.

the amount of money would be

Supply Linden Direct sales +
The percentage off of Linden sales (3.5%) +
The amount of buy fees
- Multiplied by the number who use it, Multiplies by how long their boycott.


Thing is LindenX can be bypassed without people having to give up their Second Lives.

The reason Roxies Idea wouldnt have worked is not many would have been willing to put up with giving up Second Life things for any length of time.

But a sizable chunk of the SL population could boycot LindenX forever and not suffer.
Thus it would have the constand thron in the side problem.

The protest I beleive was the icrease marginalization of Residents and how their views on and interests in Second Life are ignored.

Go back and read the archives of the forums from 2003. You will get a pretty big understanding how much residents concerns mattered then, as opposed to now.

Mitch Kapor in a interviewe stated that money sales counts for the largest stream of revenue for LL followed by land sales and tier.

It's not a matter of hurting them it is getting their attention.
24 hours is not going to sink Linden lab nor anyone else.
Linden Lab does not respond to the forums, people emailing or calling.
The Open Letter Project they send out a lackey to talk nice to the masses.
There is one thing and one thing only Linden Lab understands, That is money.
So for 24 hours we stick a finger in their eye. Then we will see if they get a clue.

If you do not think this affects you. Second Life is a closed society where everything and everyone is interconnected in some way.


Rox

June 23 Sell Nothing Day

A quick look at the Economics Statistics page shows that, at worst, Mitch is wrong, or, at best, Mitch was right for a brief period of time in the past (though this is highly unlikely).

For the month of May there were L$128,365,341 sold by the Supply Linden account on the LindeX. These were sales of "fresh" (new) currency with an approximate value of US$480,769. (sourced from: Economic Statistics

As of the end of April there was a total of 83,063 Premium accounts with an approximate value of US$826,476.85. (sourced from: Second Life Key Economic Metrics through April 2007

For Mitch to become "correct" in his statement there would have to be revenue generated by sales of Linden dollars on third-party exchanges which is not reported as sales by the Supply Linden acount on the Economics Statistics page.

The largest source of revenue for Linden Lab is tier fees and private island fees. We have no hard data for total tier fees, but we can make a low-end calculation based on the total number of private island multiplied by the old monthly private island fee:
7,388 islands * US$195 = US$1,440,660.
Note that this is a low-end calculation as we have no idea how many island owners are paying the new fee for newer islands of US$295 a month.

Based on some quick calculations using Linden provided data we can see that Mitch (if he actually did make such a claim in an interview) is way off-base.

The largest source of revenue for Linden Lab remains tier fees and private island fees which are paid by Premium accounts.

The number of people using the LindeX is ridiculously low given the population size:
One side-effect of "boycotting the LindeX" is it'll hurt business owners far more than it will ever hurt LL. If they can't sell their L$, they can't pay their tier. They have to pull out of SL entirely before LL even notices the loss in income.

Not logging into SL at all for 24 hours would mean more than simply not contributing to the economy for 24 hours.

(Forgot to link to where the quotes came from: http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/12/12/growth-of-second-life-community-and-economy/)

*huggles* I'm glad that someone is worried about the average SL business owner.. but there are alternatives to selling/buying L on the Lindex. There's SLExchange, which is better, faster and don't charge exchange rate fees for buying L!

Also, they don't have the kind of silly trade limits that the Lindex has.

yes the only way to make any sort of boycott sustainable would be one that hurts THEM and not US.

And that doesnt Hurt THEM enough to damage their bussiess. Just enough to get their attention.

Im not advocating a LindenX ban.

I just doing a thought experiment.

If 1/5 of all activity from LindenX was stopped becuase of a boycot - By Elex's figures thats $100,000 US a month PLUS the 3.5% fees.

That would be enough to get noticed.

That would be the same as 10,000 Premium customers who didnt hold more than a 512 switching to Basic.

it would be very difficult to pull something like that off. Project Open Letter was widely reported and after what, six weeks? it's got approx 4600 signatures. and that is incredibly accessible (you just have to add your name) compared to what's being suggested here.

it depends on the fury of the groundswell i guess, and whether they can sustain their fury. history suggests the groundswell isn't good at doing that.

nearly impossible actually

If the Lindens dont manage a way to communicate to most residents ; how can Residents even begin to suceed in it?

During April 2007 229,079 residents purchased currency off the LindeX. April was also the first month since the launch of the Lindex that the total US$ value of L$ currency sales declined. May also saw a decline in the US$ value of L$ currency sales. For whatever reasons residents have been buying less currency for at least the past sixty-days.



Plenty of residents aren't participating in the SL economy as they never returned in-world after sign-up. The oft-bandied about figure is 90-percent.

Ooops, I was figuring how much the LL makes in Lindex fees. I forgot that the buying of the lindens is money in their pocket too.

The lindex says around a quarter million a day is bought, but we have no figures how much is taken out a day...

Has anyone been keeping track of the total suppy of Lindens? Its at 2.6 billion now, and I seem to recall it was around 1.6 billion at the beginning of March. So lets say 1 billion lindens added in a 3 month period. Thats about 11 million lindens added a day. Do we need to subtract stipends? Thats about 6 million a day.

So adding 5 million lindens a day pure profit from people buying lindens to the fees we getabout 18,000 plus 4 thousand = 22 thousand a day from the Lindex.

Of course we have to consider the linden traders! They buy and sell lindens all day long. These sales are not new money, but money being recycled. I would estimate they equal around 20% of the linden total for the day so you can't really count that. So thats more like 15,000 a day plus 4,000 = 19,000 a day

So the lindex profits are anywhere from 10-25% of profits, I would guess towards the lower end.

This is not even considering land sales, so saying around 10% of LL profits from the lindex is a pretty good guess.

So, 20% figure wanted for the boycott of 10% of the profits equals 2% gross profits for a day. And 20% seems to me to be an unreachable figure. I highly doubt that LL would even notice such a tiny glitch.

It's not (though I don't suggest a boycott over the current clarification to the Community Standards as it can result in the boycotters being "tarred with their own brush".

As the goal is to "take money off the table" and the largest portion of Linden Lab's revenues are derived from tier fees those residents with excess "unused" tier can absorb the tier of other residents and thus allow them to tier down (and "take money off the table".

For information on the total supply of Linden dollars (along with some other useful numbers) go here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxbDc4B2FH97MGp5oMmJrfQ&gid=3

You'll want to actually read the column which says "# Buys". There were 229,079 buy orders on the LindeX which has no relevance to the actual number of residents buying L$, other than that it's the maximum if everyone buys L$ only once per month which is unrealistic.

I sourced the number from LindeX Virtual Currency Exchange Summary posted by Meta Linden here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxbDc4B2FH97MGp5oMmJrfQ&gid=4
specifically # Buys for April 2007: 229,079

I thought of that after I posted and edited . You're still wrong however. It counts the number of transactions, not the number of residents.

Yeah... I'm a "bad man" as I'm using a source you originally pointed to in which Zee Linden states that more than 90,000 residents have used the LindeX:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/12/12/growth-of-second-life-community-and-economy/



which was way back in December... as Zee can't predict the future he has to be pulling the number from somewhere, most likely the # Buy figure for October 2006 (90,717).

As this is a "smartest kid in class" contest now would be a good time for you to drop a line to Zee Linden explaining the difference between # Buys and residents. You might also take a moment to mention you sourced his incorrect information. I'll wait over here.

I don't believe that boycotting Lindex will have much of an effect on Linden Labs. My reasoning is stated pretty clearly in this post: "What is Important to LL" /327/96/188154/1.html. Also, Slexchange can't create new L$ out of thin air to meet demand. LL can.

What might work better is to threaten (and be ready to follow up on) an organized boycott of real world businesses who use SL for advertising purpose IF Linden Labs imposes draconian social policies for the sake of those same businesses. This would have to be an open letter, worded very carefully and reasonably so as not to frighten away the real world businesses upon which LL is counting for its continued survival. Ideally, it would be worded to emphasize that the majority of the SL population opposes these changes.

If LL's big-money corporate customers start asking them to lay off the restrictions, LL will listen.

boycotting the RW corporations in game already takes place - no one knows they are there

Seriously LL should promote them better.

That way those who arent anti-corporate can go see them.

the simple reason it won't work

There are only like 88k users who are paid members who can even see the forums

of that only like 10% use it.

even if all 88k paid users read this and did it that still only .012% of the population

but since not even 10% of the paid users know the forums exist thats about .0011% of the users

I agree.

However, there's a difference between ignoring RL corporations in-world, and actively boycotting them in First Life. Some people are already doing the latter because they resent the intrusion of RL corporations in SL. I'm not among them - I just do what I can to educate RL businesses about the realities of SL culture and encourage them to integrate with and add value to the SL experience rather than just use it as a virtual billboard or gimmick as most of them do. (IMO, Coldwell Banker is an example of a RW company that's actually going about it in the right way.)

You left out the crucial "since its inception" which means that someone who bought L$ in October 2005 and hasn't bought any L$ since then, still counts as one of those 90,000 residents who have *ever* used the LindeX to buy.

You'll also notice that when he quotes numbers in the blog post, he refers to the November 2006 numbers, not October as you suggested. If he mistook transaction type count for resident count, he would have quoted "over 110,000".

There is no contest: I stated that the number of people who bother to buy L$ is likely 1 in 10 if that, which you refuted and I pointed out an error in it. An actual number would be quite insightful, especially since they do track it internally, but they don't feel like sharing.

My point was simply that only 1 in 10 is even eligable for a "LindeX boycot", while everyone is eligable for "stop using SL for a day". They track concurrency and they track hours spent online, and it's actually the more impacting choice. Not logging on shows that you can live without SL when it comes down to it, not buying anything simply means you can do without a luxury, but meanwhile you're still using LL's product.