Judging By My Inventory, "5% of Second Life Content is Adult" Sounds About Right -- Comment of the Week

Pictured: Cassie Middles' Inventory Management Tutorial

Lots of readers guffawed at a Linden Lab staffer's claim that just 5% of its Second Life revenue comes from Adult-rated content, but reader "irihapeti" took a look at her inventory, and...

5% would probably be about right overall content-wise.

I have 18,884 items in my Inventory.

Of which 12 are NFSW devices. Clothes, hair, shoes, bodies, jewelry and appliers accounts for about 4,300 of which maybe 10 outfits could be considered NSFW in the real world.

And 18,884 is on the low side, for a typical Second Life user! In any case, here's the what the rest of her inventory looks like (and this is probably similar for most other SLers):

The rest is just stuff. I have 12 different AOs. Over 200 dance animations in my various Dance HUDs, About another 300 ordinary animations: sits, stands, poses, etc. And the rest is just stuff. Buildings, trees, rocks, flowers, vegetables, grass, water, building kits, paths, steps, stairs, walls, arches, doors, windows, etc etc etc. Scripts for all sorts of things. Animals: dogs, cats, deer, rabbits, horses, ducks, geese, chickens, butterflies. Vehicles and other rideables. About 600 decoratives: pictures and ornaments, cushions and curtains and kitchen appliances, cutlery, fruit, bowls, plates, etc etc. And about 350 textures that I bought.

I have no idea really what all the 1000s of stuff that I have is. Folders in folders of boxed stuff that I picked up from gosh knows where which I haven't even opened. All which I have helpfully named: Stuff, More Stuff, Newer Stuff, Other newer stuff, Maybe keep stuff, Not sure stuff, and so on. Sometimes I just delete whole folders named Stuff, on the basis that if I haven't opened the folder in a while then whats in it is unimportant, so delete.

I think this is pretty much true of most everyone when it comes to content. Most of their stuff like mine is just ordinary everyday stuff. There might be a few people who have more NSFW stuff than not. But I am pretty sure that would be a small number of people, even of those who are into A-rated activities on a regular basis.

This sounds right at least in terms of content, if not revenue. Because really, how many detachable penises does one really need? We often forget that in a virtual world where pretty much all content is user-made, there's inevitably gonna be a lot of random miscellany. 

Skeptical? Take a look at your own inventory, do a quick audit, and report your results in Comments.

Comments

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

40k items from over a decade of Second Living, I have only about 47 explicitly sexual items and they're all part of one set of a beta test product or leftovers from client projects on fetish lands. Everything else is either totally vanilla or has mixed uses (clothing not specifically designed for sexual uses but may be sexy, furniture that has mainly PG anims and may or may not have actual foreplay/sex anims included, backdrops with imagery that may be suggestive in the right context but is actually not explicit about it, beds you can fornicate in, but just as equally wind up snoring loudly in etc.)

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you think about it hard enough (or you watch porn with actual storylines and production values), you'll realise there's a lot of stuff involved in adult activity that can be considered to be dual-use or even not actually intended for this purpose.

So when LL gives you a 5% figure for the value of adult content vis a vis its entire revenue stream for SL, you have to realise that a lot more of that 'marked' revenue is actually submerged within the other 95% that LL claims belongs in other activities which are considered clean money.

This is not an accusation of LL being dishonest about the real impact of adult entertainment on SL's income stream. Rather, it is a reminder that the industry has knock-on effects on many other industries, as loathe as they may be to admit it, and disentangling the contribution of items as 'adult' revenues or 'clean' revenues on society's balance sheet is a thorny issue even real-world countries haven't satisfactorily negotiated in full ever.

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

Re: earlier comment - I meant to type "content" rather than "value of". I don't really know enough about the cost of fiddlybits from XXX toy companies in SL to compare figures in monetary terms.

But my point still stands: saying something is adult content or not adult content is essentially pushing a black and white dichitomy on a massively deep and wide range of content that quite frankly, can be hard to categorise in its intended uses, and often can be remixed into new uses by purchasers after the fact, which only complicates this calculation.

[Susan Wilson]

Inventory items aren't a good indication. If you were to ask people if there was no sex in SL at all - no way to be naked, no animations that were not PG, no sex furniture, bits always covered, etc. (you get the point) - would they still use SL, I suspect a far larger number than 5% would say no.

[Alex]

I have a little more than 18,000 items and approximately 6% adult, this 6% is consisting of penises, clothes, furniture (I always buy the adult version), HUDs, textures, animations and gestures. Even before checking this I had done a search in the MP filtering the content G and M vs A and the difference is also considerable. SL is not a place that is sustained by sexuality. I have no doubt about that. I think if someone observe a lot of sexuality in SL is not this abounds, I think your searches are certain terms directly or indirectly linked to this, or the Adult content is mixed with M stuff... if you go to a A place you can find maybe a beach, club, gardens and clothes stores... Who is not looking for this?

[Pulsar]

"how many detachable penises does one really need?" is a good point. The typical "noob" horny avatar may have 6000 items and just 1 (freebie) penis and a nude skin, even if he has only that in mind.
That's probably true for the adult places themselves too: if you list all the items inside an erotic place (by using the Firestorm "Area Search" function, for example), it's likely that most of the items rezzed there won't be explicitly adult or NSFW, but the place really is, in its purpose and activities.

Just looking only at the 5% of explicitly adult content is quite misleading.

Meanwhile, while not NSFW, lots of clothes in SL are sexy and quite showing, deep cleavages, miniskirts, short dresses... there are more worn stiletto heels around than other female shoes, even in normal places like London city in SL.

If you check on the marketplace as Alex did, then with an empty search field we get, for the "apparel" category:
- General only: 2 millions result
- Adult only: 200k results
However it looks like merchants categorize their products in a "relaxed" way: the General-only results also shows skimpy tongs etc. and shorting them by best selling - which would give an even better idea of what people buy - it shows: wet shirts, long gowns open up to the belly button and skimpy corset, dresses showing almost all the butt, a button shirt that's not so buttoned and pretty teasing, and so on...
Let's try General and best selling of all the categories? Among the top results it lists also a mouth and tongue animation HUD that doesn't look so PG.

Indeed a while ago I tried out to make a new female avatar and I realized that for a newbie girl it could be difficult to find modest freebie mesh clothes.

Women are hit on by random guys inworld pretty often, although maybe less than years ago and not all the guys do that.
While I'm not sure that SL is used mainly as a flirt / porn game, and perhaps even who is mainly into that eventually spends more time shopping, dressing, clubbing, and doing other things (but maybe still with that idea in mind), than just filling their inventories with genitals and sex furniture, I suspect that there is more than the 5% of the users who have at lest some interest for hooking up, as Susan commented too in the previous article.

I agree with who says that just counting what's listed as adult content or the totals in our inventories isn't indicative enough or misleading: other things may depend or revolve around the adult side indirectly and it doesn't tell you about the purpose of the rest and how and for what it's being used.

[Alex]

Pulsar i am half agree with you. Is true there are a lot of sexy clothes in SL, but is it necessary to classify them as an adult? I dont know too much about clothes and their classification in the store, but I think sexy clothes, which suggestively show certain parts of the body do not lead to nudity should not be listed as an adult. For Example... An extremely small short that you can see 80% of a girl's buttocks show more than a bikini on a beach with the same size? I think No. So a bikini on a beach is G but a shorts of the same size must be A? I find no reasoning or logical proportion to this if the question is "how much the body is shown". this is why I insist and agree with Linden Labs, I think adult content is a small percentage in SL.

[Simple Lemon]

I'd say there is overall a low single-digit percentage of inventory among the residents of SL that is sex-related but judging by the groups and pictures on Flickr for SL I'm pretty sure that having sex is close to the most significant thing going on in SL.

[irihapeti]

a thing about rezzed content vs inventory content

does my bedside lamp count as NSFW content because I can have sex in my RL bed. What about the rug on the floor, pillows, dresser, mirror, chair ? Are this all implicitly NSFW props because I could I suppose have sex on all them

[Tofing ali]

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