Opensim and other VW projects very similar to SL or slowly coming up behind Linden and will with luck hamstring or kill SL by the end of the year when they all go Beta.

Nothing living is ever static and thats even more true of technology.

Linden will lose their lead, and to be honest, this paying customer will be one of the first to abandon a sinking ship when the time comes.

Of course, it’s much less likely that it’ll come apart at the seams than it will just implode due to various things making the inflation absurdly high while interest in an unstable platform falls.

It’s like global warming vs. a lazer or something. Wear a cup.

“Linden Labs needs desperately to clean up its act and take care of its customers in a ethical way or face some real problems later.”

Like losing their paying customers, right? O wait… none of their paying customers know how to do anything outside of Second Life, so I don’t think that’ll be much of an issue…

Yeah they’ll be busting down his doors any minute now and confiscating his computer for evidence… LOL

Cry moar.

PS: AMERICA, FUCK YEAH.

2) PMLF excludes land transactions. That exclusion also encompasses payments to LL. The quote from the stats page is “BEFORE Linden Lab Charges are applied to the account”. That means these positive monthly flow people may not be positive if they are paying tier to LL. That always seemed weak to me because while the land cost might be “investment”, the tier is nothing but “property tax”, and that appears in any firm’s operating costs.

3) But regardless of the stats not including LL charges, the worst indicator of all is the number is 58K residents had PMLF. But there are 89K Premiums receiving weekly stipends. Maybe they have land, but its cost is NOT in the PMLF number. That means that not even the number of residents who are receiving weekly stipend manage to make a profit in the economy. A Premium resident who owns land, pays tier (if he owns > 512) and collects a weekly stipend and sits on his land and builds for fun will be a PMLF count. A Premium who spends all the stipend and more won’t be. So what this is saying is that not even the number of residents who get a weekly stipend of income manage to make a profit in SL.

2) What is is also saying is that if LL were to apply LL charges to that PMLF figure, it is reasonable to extrapolate a complete crash in that PMLF number. We can even estimate the effect. Category 1 of the PMLF chart is 0-10 USD. All the other categories do NOT add up to the number of PMLFs who are profitable at less than 10 USD/month. A weighted average of the categories yields a number of about $83 USD (excluding the top open ended category), but this is not the measurement we need. What we seek is an estimate of how much profit the “typical” PMLF makes. With the lower category so heavily weighted that number is swamped out. With 32,000 of the 58,000 being under $10 USD (which is tier for only a 1024 parcel), even with some of them owning no land at all, the likelihood is that including tier (LL fees) would collapse the PMLF number.

3) Conclusion: That 58,000 number is fewer than the Premium account total who essentially get money “free” each week, and it’s only 0.5% of the 12 million total resident count. It is further very likely to become miniscule with properly included LL fee accounting. It looks likely, even with only rough estimates, that the PMLF number would reduce by well in excess of 50% if tier was included. That would be < 29,000 profitable residents — out of the alleged 12 million.

Those are from their own Key Metrics, which is the reason why the February ones were 5 weeks late, and slipped out under the carpet without a blog comment.

It gets worse for premiums though. And there are under 90K of those, less than 20% of users. From the Economic Stats web page in Support, the last section, Sources and Sinks, you can see in March they paid out L$9m in referral bonuses. This is L$2K paid out for new premiums, paid in three monthly instalments of 500, 500 & 1,000. Thus in March at least 9,000 new Premiums were on board, and as many as 18,000 ie between 10% and 20%. Since numbers went down, and these new ones come in, it follows that more than that were old premiums who either left or downgraded. That’s around an average 15% churn rate every month!

We know they tidied up the web site, took off the Last 60 Day Logins for instance, when they were plummeting. Now we have the new Communications Manager Katt Linden trying to convince us they are being more communicative by shifting the status reports to a different blog, which is what we now see on the login page and not recent blog posts. And of course, coincidentally at the very same time, it means all those nsty out of service blog posts are magically cleaned up off the SL web site front page.

Talk about slimy corporate tactics. Still, that gives no excuse for that DiSSENTiON idiot to carry out federal felony offence DDoS and spamming attacks. The FBI is on his case though.

Zee seems like a good guy, but it’s worth always remembering as Linden’s CFO Zee has not only a *bias* but an *ethical duty* to spin Linden’s numbers in the most favorable light possible at all times. The more journalists/bloggers/pundits are crunching their own numbers, the more likely the truth is to emerge from the conversation.

My own take on Jessica’s PMLF growth rate chart is that the gambling ban was an SL-economy killer. Think about it — its not only the casino owners, from the big guys to the once-ubiquitous slot machines, but all the avatars in Second Life for no reason other than to gamble all buying clothes, hair, etc etc. The data shows SL is just beginning to recover, and like any maturing market, it’s harder to make a buck than it used to be.