Important update to last week's survey* of SL merchants : As requested by reader "Dr. Questions", here's the breakdown of 2018 earnings from the SL Marketplace (above). As you can see, only 6% sell nothing in the SL Marketplace, while just 13% make under a fourth of their sales from the Marketplace. By contrast, a large majority of merchants (60%) make most of their income from the SL marketplace. In other words, the economy of the virtual world is mostly driven by the external Linden Lab website. At the same time, only a quarter of merchants make the vast majority (over 75%) of their revenue from the Marketplace, which suggests most merchants still need an in-world shopping presence.
To further highlight the importance of the Marketplace, look at how much traffic to Secondlife.com goes to it:
1 in 5 visits go to the Marketplace, according to SimilarWeb - i.e., in December 2018, about 4 million visits of the roughly 20 million total visits to the site.
* And yes, while this survey is definitely not rigorously scientific, it's the best (or least worst) data we have since Linden Lab stopped reporting Second Life economic stats around 2010 or so. The survey garnered 100 respondents, which is a pretty decent sample for a base of about 400,000 who participate in the SL economy on any given month. (Most professional US political surveys, by comparison, typically extrapolate the opinions of a few thousand people from a country of 325 million.)
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