Lab Tries to Hide SL Downturn in 3rd Quarter Economic Report
by Jessica Holyoke on 20/11/08 at 8:25 pm
Pay no attention to the player hours logged in September
Fresh out of the Herald‘s Money office, (unfortunately located right next to Jimbo’s) is the 2008 Quarter 3 Herald financial report. The compilation of this particular report was a bit harder to compile as a key piece of data was missing. Zee Linden reported how the hours logged in for October of 2008 grew 11.4% over the hours of September to a record 37 million hours. However, the number of hours logged in for September are not located on the Economic Statistics page. And the graph used to show the amount of user hours logged in shows an aggregate for the quarter, not the individual month.
But algebra helps out this time. If October’s logged in hours equals September’s plus 11.4% and 37 million, then September’s hours would be 33.2 million hours logged in — the fewest number of hours logged in per month for Q3 and lower than the amount logged in in June.
Looking at the Total Hours Logged Growth Chart, the total logged in from the first month of the quarter to the last month of the quarter declined by 4.37%. This follows two quarters of steady growth over the quarter. Why this is being reported is that overall for a platform that needs to grow, more people should be using the service over time and from August to September, they didn’t. In comparison, at the end of June and Quarter 2, THL grew by 16%.
The PMLF Growth Chart is determined by taking the weighted PMLF in the last month of the previous quarter and comparing it to the weighted PMLF in the last month of the current quarter. The Q3 percent growth is a very low 1.46% compared to 3.56% in Quarter 2.
Average PMLF is the weighted PMLF averaged out for the entire quarter. This number continues to grow as a whole. Raw PMLF, the basic numbers that Linden Lab prints out, grew by 2.5% from the start of the quarter to the end.
QPC (Quarterly Profit per Capita) held steady at 0.18 for Quarter 3. What this means is that people are making about the same per user hour logged in. Now of course, this does not capture the land business outside of rentals and it does not capture people who get paid for in world services using off world means. The overall picture looks the same from last quarter.
Where things get interesting is that we can compare third quarter results over more years now. As a function of growth, Total hours logged in has seen the worse growth ever last quarter than any other previous Quarter 3 over the last five years of data. PMLF quarterly growth was at the lowest point in a Quarter 3 ever in three years of data. QPC is lower than any Quarter 3 result in the past three years.
Are you going to eat that?
Nov 21st, 2008
Nice write-up, Jess.
Boy, looks like the new management is doing a great job!
Where’d he come from again? AOL?
Stuff like this happens when you try to impress investors instead of pleasing your user base.
So congratulations on attracting your new “Solution Providers”, guys.
IntLibber Brautigan
Nov 21st, 2008
Jessica,
Good report, good analysis. It is clear that LL has let the ranting ninny anti-everything nincompoops con them into banning everything that made SL great as if it was ‘community consensus’ to get rid of it. It never was. What it was was the Lindens who hold office hours get hornswoggled by ranting demagogs like prok, the arborists, etc into believing that their anti-commerce ranting bullshit was the community sentiment, when it never was.
The rest of us, those of us who actually built the SL economy, not the ones who unproductively sit around jabbering and slandering others (really now, Prok, you’ve been here twice as long as me and havent even accomplished half of what I’ve done, why do you waste all your time attacking and smearing others rather than just working on your own business?), generally have not attended office hours because we are too damn busy. This has been to our detriment.
LL needs to pull their heads out and get the fact that it is no-holds barred economics in the economy that attracts users here. As soon as LL started regulating the economy to death, it started dying, and the userbase started dying too. STOP IT. Proof positive that the pro-regulation pro-government bullshit put out by the likes of prok is inherently damaging to any economy, RL or SL.
Marc Woebegone
Nov 21st, 2008
A vanishing little game….
Thorstein Halderman
Nov 21st, 2008
As IBM found out years ago, installed base is king.
And the installed base here are the users of SL, commercial and social. The sooner Linden Labs understand that the better.
sheila6225 Allen
Nov 21st, 2008
September Key Metrics Excel format can be obtained at the following URL. I am not sure if it is officially finalized or not.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/static-secondlife-com/economy/stats_200809.xls
Emperor Northon Hears a Who?
Nov 21st, 2008
IntLibber Brautigan,
Clearly you have gotten a hold of some powerful hash and post under its’ influence. Care to share it with the rest of us?
Meanwhile back in reality Second Life users are not here for the economy, there are to have sex and attack each other, preferably at the same time. If user hours are down it is because they have found more convenient way to fight and fornicate. So what event happened in October were we all could attack more people? The election stupid. Doubtlessly you didn’t notice because you were cruising for hookers in SL’s “economy”.
As for you laughable libertariantard assertion that government regulation hurts the economy care to buy a bond derivative on a high risk mortgage? I understand they were quite popular.
LOL
Nov 21st, 2008
You mean Linden reasurch has been saying business is better then it really is?
Is that news to you?
2 cents
Nov 21st, 2008
As the U.S. and Global economies go – so does the virtual rip-off!
/
Multi-trillion dollar devaluation of retirement accounts. About 70% of working Americans have some sort of retirement savings. Many see balances less than half of what they had in Dec ’07/Jan ’08.
Job losses totalling more than 1 million and projected to approach 2 million in the U.S. – just this year alone.
Interest rates (= cost of money) are tanking worldwide. Even saving doesn’t pay anymore.
Personal Savings Rate (rate at which folks save a part of their after tax dollars) in the U.S. is not just zero but effectively NEGATIVE if you consider the lack of saving coupled with the huge amount of borrowing (money borrowed on second mortgages as one example) and now the evaporation of those previously perceived HIGH home VALUES which wipes out the 2nd mortgage VALUE.
Home values in the U.S. averaging 60 – 70% of what they were at the most recent peak; some markets experiencing a greater than 50% drop in value since ’05.
Price of OIL on the slide and projected to hit as low as $30 to $40/barrel in the coming months.
The cost of war = approx. 10 Billion/month to the United States – just for Iraq.
/
~ all in all ~
/
The perception of WHAT is VALUABLE is dramatically changing worldwide.
You’d best re-think your strategy of where to put your money!
You’d best re-evaluate what constitutes VALUE in entertainment and discretionary spending!
You’d best get back to basics and ditch the virtual bullshit!
You’d best GET REAL
and get a f’n grip!
/
/
Linden Research will fail in 2009
Bank On It…
(that last bit was a PROTIP btw)
Harvey Wallbanger
Nov 22nd, 2008
Oh no. SL is full of life. You just haven’t located them due to the land mass being the size of 456,389,35 earths. You have to look a little harder.
If you scour the map inside and out, right about 750M you will find hundreds of those little green dots. They don’t say much however. They seem happy just spawning in and drooping over.
No reason whatsoever for the numbers to not show the increase. Especially those large groups at around 750M or those large masses under the ground huddled for warmth.
No matter how good the odds of landing on an empty sim is however, you will certainly run into Intblubber or someone like him. Imagine the odds.
IntLibber Brautigan
Nov 22nd, 2008
Norton you idiot,
Anybody who knows anything knows the credit crisis began with a Democratic sponsored bill called the Community Reinvestment Act, which basically told Fanniemae and Freddiemac they had to lend mortgages to high risk people irrespective of credit score and irrespective of the neighborhood they were buying homes in. Consequently, they flipped hundreds of billions in high risk, soon-to-default toxic mortgages onto the mortgage securities markets, then started flipping credit default swaps based on those poisoned securities. When those high risk borrowers abandoned their mortgages like a too-expensive car loan, the house of cards collapsed. Banks called in perfectly good loans to make up the difference, and those homeowners defaulted too, cause they couldnt refinance as banks had grossly tightened up credit access so even good borrowers could not get new financing.
This is all due to democrat racial politics. And you all just put those idiots into complete power over the economy. Great going, dummies.
2 cents
Nov 22nd, 2008
“This is all due to democrat racial politics.”
Don’t be ignorant man. Maybe this shit started with the Clinton admin but the f’n “Bush Years” kept the same shit going – if not “and then some” – in an effort to prop up the economy following 911. Anyone that draws huge distinctions between the Donkeys and the Elephants using f’n stereotypes and generalisations has spent too much time in isolation and not using their greymatter. Home ownership has ALWAYS been a simple way for any governing body to spawn and brag about continued economic growth. Just like the way they’ve been telling people inflation has been under control for so many years based on some outmoded grocery basket of CPI items, when everyone knows better and can’t ignore the simple truth that prices have been going up on a whole host of things even after factoring out the price of OIL.
How about the way these Elephants have been saying the economy has been in good shape until the hammered dropped in October?
There’s been plenty of koolaid being chug’d in all quarters if you ask me.
Democrat, Republican, they’re more the same then different; centrist bullshit big money corporate sellouts that don’t give a shit about what’s really going on is more like it.
But that’s just my 2cents…
Intlibber is an idiot
Nov 22nd, 2008
Fannie and Freddie didn’t write mortgages, dummy.
Read a damned paper instead of listening to Limbaugh, you might learn something.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html
It boils back to the repeal of Glass-Steagall. NOT Freddie and Fannie “giving loans to poor people”.
Idiot.
IntLibber Brautigan
Nov 24th, 2008
Oh Geeze, McClatchy is as tired a biased leftie rag as you can find.
Of course Fannie and Freddie are not direct lenders, they were the launderers for the savings and thrift banks that the CRA forced to make bad loans. The thrifts would have Freddie and Fannie take bad loans off their hands to create the false impression that the CRA was a successful program for them, as Freddie and Fannie would take the bad loans off their hands and bundle them in mortgage securities to dump on the big investment banks which had no experience investigating the mortgages in these securities, and trusted Freddie and Fannie to not lie to them.
Of course the article focused almost entirely upon the clinton years, however it was the time since 2004, when the democratic majority House made increasing homeownership a priority. Good legislators like Senator Sununu, among others, sought to bring Fannie and Freddie under tighter scrutiny. The Democrats in congress prevented such attempts from becoming law. If Sununu had succeeded in 2005 with his bill, the current mess would be nowhere near as dire as it is now.
2 cents
Nov 24th, 2008
“If Sununu had succeeded in 2005 with his bill, the current mess would be nowhere near as dire as it is now.”
With all due respect;
The deluge of sub-prime loans that precipitated this current dilema were not peddled merely from 2004 and forward. You’d best do some research and see the long protracted build up that contributed to the “current mess”. Self serving blog entries like yours do nothing to enlighten or educate people. This isn’t a “liberal” vs conservative issue Int. Go look for statistical data before you spout off. Senator Sununu’s success in 2005, as much as I agree would have been the right course of action, would have done nothing to stem the default tidal wave already destined to come crashing down on the financial institutions.
“No where near” is subjective blah diddy blah coming from you. Make a f’n case for yourself or STFU! – with all due respect…
Pappy Enoch
Nov 25th, 2008
“Linden Research will fail in 2009″
OMFGawd. The end o’ the fake wirld am nigh!
Well WHEE HOO. If’n I are the last feller left:
Wun) I gits awl o’ them thar knotty wimmin hoo am left a-pinin’ fo’ a reel man
Tu) I kin live in Guv’nur Linden’s Manshun
Tree) I will be (by dee-falt) the han’sumest feller in SL
Fo) I will haf tu git mee a reel furst life agin’ (dang it)
2 cents
Dec 1st, 2008
“In case anyone wasn’t sure, we are now officially in a recession. That’s according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, which met on Friday and determined that the current recession began in December 2007.” (URL linked to NBER reference just click 2 Cents to go there)
Oil dropped to $47/barrel today and prices at the pump continued the downward spiral! Yay! for lower gas prices – Boo! for here comes the crash!
Still working that “nine-to-five” job and managing to log into WastedLife when no-ones lookin? Not for Long! ROFL
I wonder how many of you virtual pukes are gonna forgo buying “everyone on your list” a krixtmas present so you leave just enough sitting around to dump as spacebux into those Linden Research money grabbing hands that “need not beg” – why no beg you ask? – b/c youre all a bunch of stupid f***ing idiots blindly passing them the Quan with that “deer in the headlights” stare – THAT’S WHY!
Anyone doubting the Luv Guru now?
I’d say “that’s just my 2 Cents worth” ………………….but honestly I’m broke.
LOL
Wow
Oct 6th, 2012
Wow. Intlibber. You are so totally on the right track. But what you are missing is that decades ago when Obama was born in Kenya, he was immediately abducted by a socialist-loving alien race who brought him up in a strictly regulated, pro-government matrix run by gays and Jews. It was then that he was shown the future of America and told that he would be not elected, but placed into the presidency in the memories of every living American in order to blame the mortgage apocalypse on the de-regulations of the glass-steagall act. Congratulations!!! This is the FUTURE communicating to you that you are in fact a nut-job conspiracy theorist just like the countless other nut-job conspiracy theorists who find legitimacy in libertarianism! May I refer you to another article on this site – entitled: “dealing with mental illness in second life”? I think you may learn a thing or two.