The Alphaville Herald

L$ Economy In Summer Slump?

by Jessica Holyoke on 20/08/09 at 8:08 am

Q2 in-world economic results

by Jessica Holyoke

If you haven't noticed on the log-on screen, the Lab has released their numbers for the economy this past week. Now the Herald Stat Department is able to provide the results of the SL Economy. 

User to User Transactions are the big story for T Linden as it shows a 94% growth over this time last year in amounts, and everyone mentions this growth as a sign of the strength of the SL economy.  But to the Herald, the important figure is Positive Monthly Linden Flow as a sign of in-world profits.  There are two numbers for PMLF, weighted and raw.  The weighted multiplies each category of PMLF by a number to reflect the effect of high wage earners against low wage earners.  Or in LL terms, the less than $10 USD per month users versus the greater than $5,000 USD wage earners.  When you compare the weighted over last quarter and Q2 08, we see a negative growth of 3.67% and a over year growth of 13%.  This matches the normal summer slump.  Q2 08 was 3.56% growth from Q1 08 which saw growth of 11.16% when comparing weighted PMLF.  When looking at raw numbers for PMLF, which is just numbers of users who experienced PMLF, there is -1.94% growth and 16% growth over this quarter last year. 

The big story for Q2 09 and the Herald's QPC (quarterly profit per capita) is the camping ban.  T Linden addressed this somewhat describing it as a bot camping policy.  T Linden examined the issue by taking a sampling of the 300 plus logged in hours users and analyzing whether or not they are using a specialized viewer.  Looking at 1186 users, they extrapolated whether they used a non-official viewer into 86% of those high end users were probably bots because 85% of the users of SL uses an official viewer. 

Here's the problems with that analysis.  The charts provided by Linden Lab shows that there were 742,000 unique users of which 3% were users who used SL over 300 hours.  Their sample size reflected 5% of that user base.  With some of the power users we have on SL, I believe it is possible for a user to be on SL for 10 hours a day every day.  So I see a sample size problem already.  Then there is the viewer extrapolation issue.  There are a number of other viewers out there that provide other functionality, such as mass permission systems or different building capabilities.  Its reasonable to say that someone who uses SL 10 hours a day every day might be using a specialized program.  

Lastly, the camping policy affected bots and camping chairs.  Camping chairs were used by regular users that might have used the official viewer, just with the afk log off turned off.  Therefore, that population is not counted into the analysis provided by LL. 

When all the numbers are brought together under QPC, we see a slight uptick on the graph, but a QPC of 0.16, holding steady from the last quarter.  So while we see some loss of PMLF, the loss of Total Hours Logged in show the same ratio between user hours and money spent.