[...] Raph’s Website » Second Life hard numbers Says: February 9th, 2007 at 4:06 PM [...]

[...] delighted when, following the release of some detailed Second Life stats by Linden Lab people like Raph Koster and Darren Herman shared some interesting graphs and visualisations of the raw [...]

[...] http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/02/09/second-life-hard-numbers/ [...]

[...] Raph Koster points us that the technology is probably based on taking snapshots of the Second Life environment [...]

[...] open-sourced the client (Susan’s take) and just released some really great, detailed numbers (Raph’s analysis is useful). On the latter, my estimates of their revenue were higher than Raph (I probably booched the math) [...]

Given the fact that the SL registration process doesn’t even require a real email address (try it — you can register an account using “asdf@asdf.com” or whatever other garbage email address you’d care to try), I’d say the number of alts are *vastly* undercounted.

[...] Raph’s Website » Second Life hard numbers [...]

They’re all annual though, so it’s $6 per month per account, not $9.95, so that’s spoiled that metric.

I also pay (on one account) $40 per month in mainland tier fees.

Added to that I pay $195 per month on island tier, but 3/4 of that I get from the other people I share it with, in L$ which I sell for USD to cover the tier. I am assuming the people buying my L$ are doing so to use it to buy land or shoes or poseballs. They may or may not be premium subscribers. They may also PayPal Anshe for their virtual beach homes.

I just don’t see a way to say “this many $9.95 per month” because that misses what must be the biggest income for LL- tier charges.

It’s like someone saying if I rent out 99 houses through one letting management company, and one directly to a person, I only have two tenants.

So by all means look at land owners/premium subs but you *have* to assume that those land owners paying big tier are effectively middle-men for money coming from non-subscribers to Linden Lab. Someone renting from a landlord at $50 per month is effectively paying Linden Lab more than someone who pays %9.95 per month and sits on a 512sqm parcel of land.

I think some observers just don’t get this part of the equation. They just see it in terms of “who is paying to whack rats at a flat $15 per month”. It doesn’t work like that in SL. One person paying $200 per month can represent 16 people in money coming to the company.

Of these, the number of alts could be 20 percent or more, of course.

I don’t care if he eliminated some duplicates, I feel he is being dishonest.

My feeling is this is misleading on purpose so there will be media reports about this spreadsheet now. The reporter says “residents”, her readers think “people,” and that drives me up the wall because there’s no new information here.

When I read Zee Linden’s post, I saw she said this was a “drive toward complete transparency and openness!” Then when I saw my download, my jaw dropped.

If you were telling me about your game, Raph, and you could confuse me at will, into posting to my blog the most untrue but flattering words about you…

You wouldn’t technically be lying, but…

…would you do it?

My feeling is that it is very deceitful. How could Linden not be doing this on purpose now?