Second Life's In-World Spending For Q1 2010 Shows 3.5% Rise From Last Quarter, Resident Analyst Says

Graph copyright Tyche Shephard, Gridsurvey.com

Second Life's internal economy showed "a small rise" in activity last quarter, according to Tyche Shepherd, a Resident analyst who compiles and displays data on her invaluable site, Grid Survey. Last week she posted an extensive report on the Second Life community forum SL Universe, which you can read here. To me the most meaningful economic metric is the graph you see above: the amount of SL customers spending Linden Dollars in-world. For last quarter, that number mostly continued a slow but steady upward trend, reaching about 520,000 last month. For comparison's sake, in March 2009, that number was about 460,000; in March 2008, it was 350,000. This represents, reports Tyche, "a small increase in the number of customers spending L$1 or more, up 3.5% on last quarter to a new peak monthly average of 498461." And as more Residents spend L$, there are more in-world companies making a profit: Last month, "71168 per month, up 4.1% on Q4 2009."

Comments

[soror nishi]

Hmmm...do we know this isn't passing money back and forth between alts??

[soror nastyish]

Just checking in to see if this place still attracted the failtrolls, and wow...look at the first reply.

I don't log onto SL anymore much, but I am nevertheless struck at the extant of the SL bitchoverse. Really, it is the saddest thing about SL: that it attracts people who seem to have no other hobbies beyond bashing it.

[Frans]

How come you both have the same firstname?

I doubt passing money back and forth between alts makes any significant difference. It is not like people would do that for their amusement. It would be pretty tedious.

[Ann Otoole]

Still a ways to go. Not out of the woods yet.

The long transition to alpha masks and the new tattoo layers will be annoying. Hopefully a third party viewer will be released that gives us the good from v2 so we can begin concentrating on that conversion work. The new features are useless until the vast majority of SL converts over.

[Ziki Questi]

@soror nishi ... c'mon, that's silly.

@soror nastyish ... don't worry, your namesake soror nishi is a person of the highest calibre! go see her work inworld. and no, i'm not a troll. :)

@Ann Otoole ... i'm not sure what the "long transition to alpha masks and the new tattoo layers" has to do with in-world spending (what does your comment even have to do with the blog post??), but i do think we need a tvp that makes use of v2's bells and whistles in a classic viewer environment ... sounds like emerald is working on it.

[M Linden]

Hi. I thought I'd jump in and share my perspective and some context.

Second Life is growing. We added more than 50K Active Users (defined as those who spend more time than one hour inworld in a month) December through March, and they are staying with us. Sure some are alts but the vast majority are new users. I've been greeting them in Welcome Island and its always easy to see who is an an alt and who isn't.

Linden Homes are doing very well -- particularly with people who've never had Land before. The intent of Linden Home was to introduce new users to the pleasure of having a place of their own and I am happy to report that we've succeeded there. But it doesn't end there. The ultimate goal is to flow Residents into the IW Land market which is Resident-controlled once they've outgrown their Linden Homes.

The new user experience (Viewer and Welcome Island) just came out two weeks ago so you're not going to see wild swings in numbers. Yet. Second Life is huge and changes take a while to work their way through the system. Both the new Viewer and Welcome Island tested well pre-launch. In fact -- and this will be incredible to the harshest critics of Viewer 2.0 -- the quantitative research we did showed that users were more likely to recommend Viewer 2.0 to friends/colleagues than Viewer 1.23. That being said, both Viewer 2.0 and Welcome Island need substantial refinement as you'd expect in a .0 release and that's what we're working on right now.

@Paisley -- The Viewer does indeed use more processing power and we will improve performance in future releases. Search is not where we want it to be either. We all use Second Life at Linden Lab so we feel the same performance/experience challenges you all do. And if we miss something, there is absolutely no doubt Residents will point it out in blog comments, note cards and emails. Watch the Second Life blog because we'll have a 2.01 beta out today with some quick performance fixes (top crashes, fixes to texture threading to reduce CPU usage and voice connection fixes). At the same time, we are working on more broad-based performance and usability improvements -- particularly around communications, search and build tools. Yes, we interrupted the workflow that many builders are accustomed and added keystrokes which is not good. We'll fix that and other things.

@Anne -- you're right that we need a tutorial on Welcome Island to help new avatars change their appearance. I noticed that straight away as I watched new avatars rez, ignore the first lesson and begin trying to change their appearance. One thing that works much better in Viewer 2.0 is the focus on Outfits. It's much easier to tell a new Resident to click on a tab and drag a folder onto their body or highlight it and click wear. We'll have an appearance editing tutorial in the next release of Welcome Island. The good news is that WI is modular and easy to update so we will optimize, optimize, optimize. In fact, we'll have a new WI out in test tomorrow. Changing out modules wasn't feasible in the old Help Island experience because there wasn't a linear flow, or any structure to speak of. Learning is something that can be structured. Play is something else all together. ;)

@Andy -- This was a very, very complex design assignment. While I'd love to say, "OK, we're done!" the truth is that we are just getting started. This was a .0 (dot-O) release and there are more coming...2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. It took dozens of releases to get 1.23 to the most beloved viewer status. We've been going through all the feedback from Residents to assemble the immediate "must fixes" and the viewer team will blog on this shortly. For those who are uncomfortable with Viewer 2.0 -- and there are definitely a good number who are -- you still have 1.23.

@Nalates -- We are reworking the homepage of the website to help people develop a clearer understanding of what Second Life is. IMHO Second Life defies description it simply must be experienced. :)

To close, I won't say that everything is over the top fantastic in Second Life but we are adding real new users who are acquiring Linden Dollars and participating in the economy, the economy is growing, Residents are making money, people are buying Land, new artists are joining Second Life and creating beautiful things. Yes, some are leaving. So is the wheel of life...of Second Life. And, importantly, we are listening.

Thank you.

[samantha E]

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

I would burn a dozen accounts to meet this "man" in a welcome area and deform him and orbit him til his pc crashes.

VIEWER 2.0 is a pile of shit!! got it? I dont want facebook I dont want,, ahh fuck it, its useless to complain.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

@Mark - I'm pleased to see this change in emphasis on Viewer 2.0 - from the "hey, this is really awesome" to more of a "this is very much a first step and we have a long way to go" approach. I think if you'd started out like that then the residents would have been more willing to excuse the obvious problems with the new Viewer.

@Samantha - have you even tried using it?

[Hitomi Tiponi]

Oh - and it would be really nice if the Release Notes were actually released at the same time as a new release - just for a change.

[Tateru Nino]

"We added more than 50K Active Users (defined as those who spend more time than one hour inworld in a month) December through March, and they are staying with us."

Assuming we're talking 1 January to 31 March inclusive, that's a retention ratio of 4.7%

[Wizard Gynoid]

/me wonders if I am a "failtroll." In this instance I am rather pleased at M's frank responses. Soror's comment is valid of course. She is merely pointing out that alt transfers are not mentioned, and they can be significant. Those of us who belong to the "bitchoverse" love to bitch about SL and LL, but we are also the first to defend them to outsiders.

[Tycho Beresford]

"That being said, both Viewer 2.0 and Welcome Island need substantial refinement as you'd expect in a .0 release and that's what we're working on right now." Umm, it's TWO point oh, not a point oh release. Although to be fair, it's obvious that you've forgotten every lesson learned in the 1.x series when you were making the 2.x viewer, so maybe calling it a point oh release is accurate after all...

[Hitomi Tiponi]

OK - so it is now a day later - there is no 2.01 in the Downloads area and Q Linden's announcement of it (http://blogs.secondlife.com/community/technology/blog/2010/04/15/viewer-201-beta-1-a-performance-and-stability-release) is not appearing in the Technology Blog index.

And, of course, no release notes for it, but probably because it seems to have been unreleased!

[Coughran]

Tateru wrote:

"We added more than 50K Active Users (defined as those who spend more time than one hour inworld in a month) December through March, and they are staying with us."

Assuming we're talking 1 January to 31 March inclusive, that's a retention ratio of 4.7%

Hey! that's as good as direct mail! Seriously it would be interesting to see if LL has a benchmark for retention. Maybe this is double what they hope for, maybe only 10% who knows?