SL by the Numbers

October 3rd, 2006 at 09:59am Nicholas Shaftoe

Celebrity Trollop’s post over at our sister site prompted me to take a look a the Second Life statistics page. Her entry is an interesting discussion about spending patterns and retail pricing.

What caught my eye in the new stats is the “In World Business Owners Monthly Profits.” Yes… I am one of those people that gets excited by statistics because they bring tidy order to the world - if this isn’t you the rest of this may be boring.

Looking at just this past month of September 2006, it is interesting to see that 10,356 residents made any profits from the sale of items. LL defines Monthly profits as:

“The Monthly Profit estimate excludes the sale or acquisition of land investments. Linden Lab fees are not yet charged. Note that some businesses accept payment outside the Linden Dollar economy and those numbers are not included in these reports.”

If we compare these stats to the number of residents that logged in during that same 30 day period (234,898), it shows that 4.4% of the active population are making profits… not bad. However, if we look a little further and break it down, there is a distinctive line drawn in these stats. Looking at the chart you see that the number drops rapidly to only 766 residents making more than US$50 a month in profits, or about 1 third of 1 percent (0.33%) of active residents in the last 30 days.

This flies against all of LL’s marketing of SL as a money making platform, with only the smallest fractions of residents making enough to cover even moderate tier costs. Even in the post by LL announcing the new stats they reiterate this false point:

To put it simply, if you have ever thought, ‘oh, only a few people actually make money in Second Life,’ here is ample evidence to the contrary.

Hopefully new and struggling content creators won’t take this as a disheartening statistic, but rather help them understand that, like Real Life, success does not come easy, and those with talent and drive (and time to spend in-world) can succeed. SL is not a get rich quick scheme and you must apply the same RL entrepreneurial thinking and work hard. The flip side might be that success in SL might portend an acumen for business in RL.

Entry Filed under: Commentary