Second Life Stat of the Day: Only 6% of SL Land Is "Adult" Rated For Pornographic Content

Awhile ago I mentioned the invaluable work of Tyche Shepherd, a Resident who meticulously tracks in-world Second Life data such as "Incident" reports. In a recent report posted on the SL Universe Forum, she has exhaustive details on the full scope of Second Life land, summarized according to content rating (PG, Mature, and Adult, a relatively new designation for SL content with graphic sex and violence). Here they are:

• Estate - Adult: 1303
• Estate - Mature: 19264
• Estate - Offline: 9
• Estate - PG: 3222
• Linden - Adult: 348
• Linden - Mature: 3835
• Linden - PG: 1422

"Adult regions," Tyche notes, "grew by 27 to 1651 (5.6%), PG Regions grew by 5 to 4644 (15.8%)."

[Update, 11/9: Some readers in Comments dispute how I'm interpreting these numbers in the following paragraph, see conversation below.] Or put another way, if Tyche's numbers are correct, Pixar-friendly land is being added to SL at three times the rate as land better suited for Second Life depictions of Hostel or Antichrist. It's possible the imposition of a credit card verification block has impeded the growth of Adult land; whatever the case, it seems to be shrinking as a proportion. Back in 2007, Philip Linden said total Adult-rated landmass was 18% -- now presuming Tyche Shepherd's data is accurate (and I've no reason to doubt it), it's evidently a third that size. Hat tip: Opensource Obscure.

Comments

[Ciaran Laval]

I'm not quite sure how you're drawing the conclusions you are here Hamlet. Whereas PG outnumbers adult, more adult sims are appearing than PG in terms of pure numbers (27 adult added as opposed to 5 PG added).

Also the comment regarding adult land being a third of what it once was is not going to stand up to scrutiny as adult land is new and there's still plenty of "adult" in mature land.

Then of course there's the point that not all adult land is being used for what would be deemed adult activties, some people like flagging adult as they feel it deters griefers.

[Earth Primbee]

What I like about these numbers is they show that anyone whose presumes sl is lined with rows ans rows of red light districts is out of touch with reality. Clearly the majority of content is not pornographic. Great find.

[Samantha Poindexter]

"Or put another way, if Tyche's numbers are correct, Pixar-friendly land is being added to SL at three times the rate as land better suited for Second Life depictions of Hostel or Antichrist"

No, what she's saying is that there are three times the number of PG sims as there are Adult sims. The growth rate of the latter is much higher. (Less than .1% for the former, 1.7% for the latter, in the week measured.)

[AnnOtooleInSL]

A lot of people figured out the policy was not exactly clearly stated and they didn't have to go adult. A lot of people are leaving Zindra to go back to mature because LL appears unwilling to enforce the adult oriented policy on certain well known people's operations therefore they cannot enforce it on anyone without yet another potential legal situation. Bad bet. I think in these cases the policy will eventually be enforced and guess what? That free zindra swap is no longer an option and land there goes for L$20 per sq meter now. So really the less adult regions there are the more valuable that griefer free land is.

I have a 4096 I may convert to a part time club. Isn't really doing anything else and is in a sweet location. Must be account verified to enter, "Adult Activities" allowed... Great club land.

[Nexus Burbclave]

Supply is only half of the puzzle. Try performing a mainland land search with all three options selected, then repeat that search with just adult selected. You'll notice that even on the low end, adult land prices are roughly 3 times what they are on the rest of the mainland. If you take a random mainland survey, you will find that a lot of the land on the mainland is abandoned or for sale. Demand for PG and Mature has dropped through the floor, and there is no sign of recovery in sight.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Once a stigmatized group is segregated and isolated, history shows time and again what the next step is. Why stick around for it?

[Galatea Gynoid]

Hamlet, step away from the calculator. XD

In addition to all the errors cited above (confusing raw counts with rates, etc.), you're also incorrectly said in 2007 18% of land was adult rated. In fact, the figure you're citing is the number of parcels in 2007 that had the "Mature" checkbox checked. You're comparing apples and oranges here. You can't compare that figure to anything other than how many parcels today have the "Mature" checkbox checked, although if you to try to twist some sort of invalid comparison out of these numbers, a more appropriate comparison would be to compare that number to the number of Mature and Adult rated regions today, which would suggest that in fact the amount has increased rather than decreased by more than a factor of three. (But, as indicated, this too would be a bad comparison, just not quite as bad as the one you made.)

[Eddi Haskell]

The problem here is the huge number of "mature" rated private estates which are actually hosting adult content. The entire Linden lack of enforcement of the new content policy, and ability of the new viewer to penalize adult businesses who have complied with Linden requirements, has devastated the attendance of the vast majority of businesses who have moved to Zindra, the new adult content continent. Businesses are reporting attendance declines of 40 -50%. Although age verification is also an issue, people are simply not 'checking" adult content as an option -- checking anything always has a drop off.

If content rules were effectively enforced, the number of adult sims would double.

[Archie Lukas]

It's as clear as fresh mud

[Hamlet Au]

FWIW, I noted problems with my interpretation of the numbers in an update. Far as Philip's 18% figure, that's the amount of land which owners effectively self-rated as Adult, i.e. having pornographic content, so I think it's a generally fair comparison point. Not oranges to oranges, to be sure, but maybe more like oranges to tangerines.