New World Notes

25% of Second Life Land Mass Now Adult-Rated for Extreme Sex & Violence

A recent report by Tyche Shepherd, a top statistician for a major multinational whose quirky hobby is tracking Second Life land ownership on Grid Survey, has a notable milestone: "Adult rated regions were up by 20 to 6000 (25.3% of the grid) while General Rated were up 7 to 2951 (12.4%)." As far as I know, this is the first time that a full quarter of Second Life's total landmass is Adult-rated. That includes private islands like the unsubtly named "Nude", which when you arrive (above), offers you the wonderful promise of something called LifeHump.

Back in 2013, Adult-rated sims represented about 17% of the world, but that percentage has been slowly creeping upward since then. "Adult", of course, does not necessarily mean the place is swamped by virtual porn or  is solely devoted to porn, just that extremely graphic sexual and violent content is allowed within it -- a feature often integrated into "dark roleplay" areas popular in Second Life that are sort of NC-17 versions of Grand Theft Auto, Game of Thrones, and Fallout (i.e. urban/crime, fantasy, and sci-fi roleplay). 

What this data point mean depends on your perspective:

SL Merchant Survey: 60% Make Most Revenue from Web-Based Marketplace

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:

SL Merchant Survey: Seven Surprising Insights Into the Virtual Economy

Here's the results of the survey I took last week, asking Second Life-based merchants for their summary of their 2018 sales and their 2019 expectations. (103 responded.) Here's seven key takeaways:

1. Nearly half the SL merchants deal in avatars and avatar enhancements.

48% sell content related to avatars (including skins, bodies, and Bento) and avatar fashion, enhancements, and accessories. In the second largest category, 1 in 4 create and sells homes, buildings, furniture, and furnishings. (Which come to think of it, are also a kind of avatar accessory.)

2. Over 1 in 10 make a full-time income ($50,000+ year) from selling Second Life items -- 8% earn over $100,000 a year.

Another 12% make an income between $21,000 and $50,000, which also qualifies as a full-time income in many parts of the wold. Also notable that for 1 in 3, selling Second Life content is more like a beer money enterprise -- they earned less than $1000 total for 2018.

Five more takeaways below. Is there a virtual world recession? Is copybotting a top problem? Read on!

Second Life Merchants: Please Take New World Notes' Short Survey on Your 2018 Performance & Your 2019 Expectations

Displayed below! Should only take two-three minutes to complete, and the more people who do take it, the clearer picture everyone will have about the virtual world economy. Last week some readers were having trouble scrolling down to see every question, so here's a compact version with the scroll bar on the right:

SimilarWeb's Top 25 Visits to SecondLife.com By Country in 2018 - Guess Which One is #1 Right Now

SimilarWeb has a new report on traffic and usage of Secondlife.com, so I reached out to the analytics company to know more. Overall, user traffic remains stable (21 million visits in December 2018, somewhat more than July 2018, with 19 million), but the biggest surprise is where the visits are coming from: The United States is not the largest visitor in recent months.

As it turns, an analyst with SimilarWeb Marketing Solutions tells me, the highest traffic in November and December is from Brazil. This is based on comparing traffic from the first half of 2018 (January - June) and the second half of the year (July- December): "The direct traffic between the two time periods increased by 21%, along with significant increases in paid search, social, and referrals. All of these combined, likely increased the brand awareness, driving users to directly seek out the site. Display ads actually saw a 49% decrease between the two time periods." In other words, Brazilian aren't primarily visiting SecondLife.com after clicking on an ad, but going there directly. So it's likely we've seen an organic growth in Brazil users in the last several months.

Now here's SimilarWeb's Top 25 visits to SecondLife.com by country for the whole of 2018, which also contains some surprises: 

Second Life Merchants: Please Take This Short Survey on Your Sales in 2018 & Your Forecast for 2019

As promised last year, here's a survey for SL-based merchants -- eight questions (plus one bonus) on your virtual world business in 2018, and your forecasts for 2019. PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ALL QUESTIONS:

Please share with other merchants -- and, of course, comment below to discuss your answers, and suggest how the next survey can be improved.

2018 Was the 1st Year Second Life Saw Positive Private Sim Growth Since 2011

"So in 2018," reports senior statistician Tyche Shepherd, "Second Life grew by 474 regions." Most of that were regions owned by Linden Lab, but in terms of private estates owned by users -- where Linden Lab makes most of its money from SL -- there was positive growth. "First year of growth," Tyche notes, "since 2011." The net change was just +14 regions (0.1% of the total), but this makes 2018 the first year in many years in which private sim ownership did not end in a loss. (It's been declining steadily since at least 2012.)  

"It looks like The Lab's changes in Maintenance [fees] managed to significantly halt the steady decline we've been witnessing over previous years," Tyche tells me. But she's not optimistic that this trend will continue into this new year:

Want to See How Resource Heavy SL Mesh Bodies Really Are? Use Black Dragon's Advanced Complexity Tool

Above -- human avatar with Maitreya body, polycount total circled

My report earlier this month that some of the top-selling mesh bodies in Second Life -- such as Maitreya, Belleza and SLINK -- are extremely resource heavy, and degrading SL performance for everyone around them, has caused a lot of conversation. Many readers claim the polycounts being reported can't possibly be that much. So here's an easy way to check for yourself:

Download the acclaimed, graphics-optimized Black Dragon SL viewer, then select Dragon > My Useful Features > Performance Tools > Advanced Complexity Window. As you can see above, the Maitreya body here uses well over 100,000 polygons.

How much is that? By contrast, a character in Red Dead Redemption 2, the latest AAA hit, has polycounts estimated in the 40,000-60,000 polygon range. (Here's a handy site showing character polycounts for other top AAA games with high-end graphics.) 

You want to see something insane? Here's a Belleza body with over 500,000 polygons:

Cassie's Clips: Cutie Collective's Holiday Ho Ho Hunt for SL Bargains -- And Bringing Back Mainstore Events!

NWN Cassie Middles has a peek at the Cutie Collective's new holiday-themed hunt for bargain shoppers in search of great content -- and as she puts it, aims to help reverse a worrying trend in the Second Life economy:

"Ho Ho Hunt is an amazing hunt to the grid that is bringing events back to the mainstores. There's been a slight epidemic lately where stores really only make profit at major events, making it hard for their other products to be known, making creators constantly only work on deadlines for projects, and feel pressure. I'd love to see more hunts like this that might help people relax, help new people discover stores, including the fact that new SLers can find cheaper items to make their avatars look updated and wonderful."

Click here to directly teleport, and look for this storefront to get started:

Well-Optimized Alternatives to Resource-Heavy Mesh Bodies for SL

Last week's post on the leading mesh bodies for Second Life causing major performance issues has provoked a pretty heated conversation in comments, with some blaming users (get a better computer!), others blaming Linden Lab (if high poly mesh is a problem, the Lindens shouldn't have allowed it!), to blaming big brands like Maitreya, Belleza and SLINK* (they have a monopoly on the market!),. Others helpfully pointed out some mesh body alternatives that are much better optimized than the market leaders. For instance, writes Fred Beckhusen:

We now have the free Bento Ruth [pictured above] and Roth avatars. They have far fewer polys, and are very good looking, with body, nail and skin HUDSs. Both are free and Open Source with extremely permissive AGPL licensing. Avatars use only two levels of details. For Ruth, these are:
Level of Detail Settings (LOD)
High - Triangles: 11444 Vertices: 8442
Medium - Triangles: 5563 Vertices: 4960

For more details, see this Github page.

SL Marketpage listings here.

Reader Sarali has a whole hosts of suggestions: