Last week, according to Tyche Shephard of Grid Survey, which gathers publicly available data on Second Life land, the grid gained 69 private islands, many of them from the RFL and Dreamseeker estates.
As Hamlet Au is fond of trumpeting, private islands make up the vast majority of Second Life’s revenue, so this should, if we follow his reasoning, represent a substantial income gain for LL. In fact, to use his exact words, “At standard rates, 69 private regions would annualize out to revenue of over $250,000”.
Of course, we probably won’t see any loud trumpeting from Hamlet on this overall gain in the way he has previously headlined end-of-month losses (not unless this piece shames him into publishing a commentary). Why? Well, because an over net gain in sims does not tally with his view that Second Life is “dying”. As I’ve previously mentioned, this is also why, when trumpeting sim losses and the like, he ignores Tyche’s week-to-week figures for grid size, which demonstrate that large-scale end-of-month sim losses are generally overcome the following month as new sims are added to the grid, leaving us with (overall) a slow but steady increase in the total number of sims available on the grid.
I’ll be curious to see if Hamlet does flag this gain up in any way. If he doesn’t, then it’ll simply confirm his own growing irrelevance when it comes to reporting on Second Life and Linden Lab.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
I’m not sure the data backs up your assertion that “large-scale end-of-month sim losses are generally overcome the following month as new sims are added to the grid, leaving us with (overall) a slow but steady increase in the total number of sims available on the grid.” You can look at the “Historical Grid Size” chart to see for yourself: http://gridsurvey.com/
things are pretty much static at the moment. concurrency also seems to be flat. there is no dramatic growth going on.
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I’m not saying there is dramatic growth – hasn’t been for a while. However, I would like to offset Hamlet’s cherry-picking of data that the grid is in terminal decline. He looks at end-of-month losses and points to them as showing LL are losing revenues. However, as Tyche’s figures demonstrate, week-to-week losses do tend to cancel out month-end losses (giving us the status-quo you describe).
The overall trend since mid-2009 *has* been upward overall, despite the recent levelling; again, this stands at odds with Hamlet’s comments that the grid is shrinking (and massively so, given the way he dramatically paints the picture at times), and that LL cannot sustain the financial “loss” caused by said shrinkage. Take a look at the link to his blog I’ve provided in the body of the piece and you’ll see what I mean.
As to concurrency, things have indeed been flat, but the last few weeks are indicative that there is also a slow rise occurring, possibly as a result of the 16K per day (as reported by LL) new sign-ups that are occurring.
So no, “dramatic” is not the term to describe things, but then I didn’t actually use it, did I? :).
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We’ve discussed this before, drops and then growth, my gut feeling is that there may well be a small decline but nothing to panic over. I am noticing a lot more abandoned land, this was always likely to happen with land prices tanking the way they have, whereas before you could hold on for another month’s tier, that’s no longer the case and of course then there were Linden homes.
Tyche’s next land audit will be interesting.
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My point is really that while Hamlet will go to great lengths to paint a picture (using private sim losses, as per the link to his article) that SL is in massive decline (“74 private regions lost in a week! That’s more than the *whole of last year*!”) while ignoring other aspects of Tyche’s week-to-week findings that point otherwise (such as end-of-month loses largely being countered by mid-month gains), leaving us in the short term with an overall status-quo, in the mid-term with a rise after a very slight decline and in the long term (last 2 years) a very slow overall growth. I guess I should’ve been more satirical in the piece – which was the original intention, but it got lost somewhere along the way. Serves me right for blogging at an ungodly hour of the night!
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Interesting.
Please could you add my SL blog (new updated url) to your blogroll:
http://danielvoyager.wordpress.com/
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Cheeky bit of self-promotion there, Daniel, when I’m on your Friends list :).
Anyway, blogroll obviously updated, and wishing you continued success under the new blog name!
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Thanks.
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