True. I was using the term in the standard monthly-fee-game sense as opposed to the Linden anything-goes sense based on the idea that an Active user is someone who has paid and wants to get their money’s worth for the month. Anymore I can imagine there are plenty of people who don’t pay make stuff, sell it, and use the Lindens to pay rent to a Premium member.

csven, your analysis here seems to hinge on the idea that a “subscription” is only the recurring $9.95 monthly, $22.95 quarterly, or $72 annual fee, or recurring tier fees which are separate.

But in the Linden universe, “a subscription” is any registered account. You can get a free subscription. Until June 2006, these free accounts requiring no monthly fee still came with $50 “stipend” per week, and that $50 appears every week, so there’s $200 per subscription. Thus if the data base is structured to give out $200 L each month, it understands these as monthy subscriptions.

A free account today with no $50 post June still counts as a “subscription” AFAIK, looking at the way the templte is set up.

But this is exactly why, every time this subject comes up, I call on the Lindens to tell us the number of *premium* accounts, i.e. accounts with paid monthly subscription fees in the “regular” sense it is understood, and how many of these elect to have tier above the free 512 level. That figure, which I don’t believe to be more than say, 50,000 people tops, and probably a lot less, is growing, but not at the rate imagined, and if anything, precisely due to the island rentals phenomenon, is declining for those who “tier down” to go and rent on an island where they think the quality of life will be better, or for those who merely bought the account to have stipends — it’s now pointless to farm accounts for their free Lindens, as these now can simply be purchased for $6.00 US a month from the LindEx rather than paying $9.95 US.

Also, I think it would be important to know whether teledildonics is a fashion and entertainment and business being promoted by a resident not tied to LL, or who is a Lindesident, i.e. a former resident who became a Linden and now works for Linden Lab. I think when people do highly visible promotional activities like this that are staged to appear as if there is all this innovation from the residents, it’s important for the media and the public to ask whether they are merely Lindens behind their flashy alt or original main avatar.

Don’t know if that would apply here. For example, a big chunk of change going to LL comes from Anshe since she’s such a large landholder (continent holder). Anshe of course rents property on her sims and pays her fees to LL based on that income. Land ownership is tiered so she effectively gets a volume discount. She passes some of the savings on to renters, as do other landowners (which is why many people opted out of monthly premiums). But here she is – one subscription – handling a very very large number of customers who are not monthly subscribers. The numbers don’t account for how much this one subscription contributes to LL coffers.

Thing is, I have to imagine there’s tug of war between LL’s fees for that land (which she discounts to compete with other landowners) and the need to turn a sufficient profit to pay overhead and continue growing. We’re aware she hires people in China to help manage things and that helps. But Anshe has always been involved in other businesses too, and so she’s also likely to be raking in some profit that LL doesn’t touch (unless of course they’re making money on Linden conversions – which iirc they said they weren’t; transaction fees only). So what you have is one person contributing a lot of money to LL, recouping most from land rental and some from in-world businesses… none of which registers as “subscription”.

Consequently, I’m not sure the correspondence holds. I’d venture Prok could provide a much better analysis and correct me on some of this. But I don’t believe it’s prudent to make the assumption that the numbers are worth much more than a metric to entice outsiders (including RW companies) into SL.

Anyone know whether SL has a high or low incidence of alts?

I don’t think those are subscriptions. Those are just avatars; nothing about whether they pay a monthly to have land. Quite a few people dropped the monthly when SL went free and just rent the land now. It’d be an apples and oranges comparison. The money is less about the numbers and more about the landholders.

Mine is bigger than yours!

250k in trailing 60 days. Pity it’s not trailing 30 days, because then we could compare it more directly to subscription bases for other games.

No it isn’t. The front page lists Registered, Active last 60 days, and Currently Logged. Active last 60 is about half the registered iirc. I’m unsure if they publish Pay vs Free accounts. Not sure that it really matters though. Plenty of Pay accounts have downgraded by still log in regularly.

“I wonder if my SL Roomba could somehow control my RL Roomba … that would be something.”

Guys over at Make: might have done this by now. Downloading SL code from virtual versions into RW robots was discussed. There have already been people controlling their home via SL (mostly lights being turned off and on).

I’m not bashing sex or porn, but it’s kinda sad to me that the creativity always seems to end there, for the most part. Kind of have to admire the R/VR crossover here, though.

I wonder if my SL Roomba could somehow control my RL Roomba … that would be something. Wouldn’t get my rocks off, but at least it would be aiming a little higher (or maybe I should say “raising the bar”).

The official term for this stuff is “teledildonics” or “cyberdildonics.” Regina Lynn at Wired has been writing about it for years. For a peek at some of the most… er… popular of the devices, see tiny nibble’s review of same (NSFW).