SLer Survey: Over 1 in 4 Willing to Pay Extra to Change Their Avatar Name

Here's the results of that pre-Thanksgiving survey on Linden Lab's new name change payment option, set to launch early next year. With 373 SLers responding -- a very large sample, relative to surveys like this! --  over 1 in 4 (i.e. 27%) say they will pay extra to change their avatar name. That includes 14.4% who are already paying for a monthly Premium subscriptions (a pre-requisite for the name change option), and are still willing to pay a bit more.

Of course there's alternate, prim-is-half-empty way to read these results:

Over half the respondents (i.e. 54%) say they will not pay extra for a name change option. However, from Linden Lab's point of view, it probably matters less that the majority don't want this option, and matters far more that a significant percentage do. (After all, Linden's main revenue source is still private sims, but only a fraction of SLers pay for those.) It's also good news for SLers who hope the grid can sustain itself, which will require far more revenue streams to replace its fairly steadily declining sim tier.

Speaking of which, another notable data point that comes out of these results: 43% of respondents say they already have a Premium account! That's much more than I expected: Last May, thanks to Tyche Shepherd's annual SL grid survey, we knew that 60,000 SLers were Premium subscribers. This survey strongly suggests the Premium count has significantly grown since then, perhaps even over 100,000. (Which we'll know next year, when Tyche does her next annual survey.)

To be sure, a survey can only approximate consumer intention, and it'll be interesting to see how many SLers actually follow through and pay to change their avatar name. If the offering is successful, expect other "upgrade" options to nudge more and more free-to-play users into becoming subscribers.

Comments

[Han Held]

So...3/4ths aren't willing (or don't care), then?

[roy]

This feature should be available already. Why charge users for just changing avatar name :/