The Alphaville Herald

1st Quarter Second Life Economic Results In: QPC holding steady for now

by Jessica Holyoke on 07/05/09 at 7:45 am

by Jessica Holyoke

After weeks of waiting, Linden Lab recently finally released the numbers needed for the Herald's Economic Department to report Quarter 1's Quarterly Profit per Capita for SL (QPC).  Or at least, most of them.

For as long as the Herald has been publishing the QPC, it has been based on an average of each quarter's total hours logged in per month.  The weighted Positive Monthly Linden Flow (PMLF) is averaged for the quarter and then divided by the average Total Hours Logged to reach the QPC.   The QPC is used to track the in-world economy, not the financial success of Linden Lab.  

The numbers can be used to compare other things, such as the change of THL within a quarter.  Linden Lab, in publishing their statistics, uses a by quarter comparison.  In Q3 08, THL saw a 4.37% drop in THL from the first month of the quarter to the last. Fewer hours were logged in by the end of the quarter than were logged in at the beginning while the Lab reported a quarterly growth of 8.26% from the previous quarter for Q3 08. 

The granularity of the reporting period is important because for Q1 09, the Lab did not publish the monthly totals for THL but instead published a quarterly total. The THL for January, February and March were not published as December 08's was also not published. But the overtime at the Herald was approved and the economics desk recalculated QPC for Q1 09 and the previous years using the quarterly weighted PMLF divided by the THL for the entire quarter. 

While the QPC's are exactly the same from one method of calculation to another, the PMLF used does include multiples of the same people theoretically.  The same two hundred people for example who earn greater than $5000 in USD per month are counted three times, once for each month instead of averaged out.  

XstreetSL might change all of this.  While being run by the Lab, it is unclear from the website if the profits from the website are counted into PMLF.  It would not seem to be the case, but now that the platform is merged with the Lab, those additional profits might be accessible.    Additionally, because the website would have customers that do not need to be logged in, THL does not matter to XstreetSL merchants, only web traffic.  The traffic Alexa.com reports for XstreetSL is slowly declining, with traffic trending down after Linden Lab purchased the platform – perhaps due to XstreetSL's integration with the Second Life web site. 

QPC might also help spot the trend in either bots or users who no longer spend money in SL.  Either way, the in-world econcomic activity appears stable to trending downward.