I don't think JonLight Raymaker's assertion that camping is the base of all SL economics carries any weight whatsoever.

I don't like to compare my own earnings with others as the business I run is purely an entertainment exercise and more for roleplay than anything else. I sell a couple of things, and occasionally do custom work for folks at a rate which when I looked at on an hourly basis is frankly token. (I mean custom graphic work for less than 1$US is not running a business for profit.) I only have two products which I haven't updated for a year, advertised, or in any other way maintained.

Even so I make far more in a couple of weeks than Jonlight has made camping in his several months of work (as outlined on his blog). I've got enough that I can quite happily give out maybe a grand a week to newbies and builders, or friends, or simply buy stuff I'll never use in appreciation of the art that went into making them - my way of contributing tier to people who take care in their builds.

This is someone who isn't running a business to make any kind of money, and I'm sure there are many other people out there who are actually TRYING to make money. The small cheese I get from minimal effort makes the rates one gets camping seem absurd.

Considering there's a lot more serious businesses around than mine I find it hard to imagine that camping represents any serious impact on the economy - after all if it takes an hour and fourty minutes to earn enough to take a photograph or upload a texture, or an entire 40 hour week of camping to make enough to buy hair or something for the equivalent of a US buck, I really can't see it ammounting to much.

This camping income as well goes straight back into the economy for the most part, and into legitimate businesses. Even so I imagine the folk who might pay about 75 cents for a bunch of my builds probably didn't earn it camping. Certainly camping income doesn't contribute to businesses that sell say scripted swords - that's a minimum of maybe 6 days straight 24 hour camping for anything tasteful - or in real terms, the price of a big mac value meal.

As it stands the hire-a-crowd of camping is of dubious benefit to the community, businesses, and especially newbies who use it. The choice for "players" is either to devote months of sitting in a virtual mall surrounded by zombies so that they can maybe buy fun stuff down the track, or put pocket change into the economy by buying lindens and make themselves insanely rich, go out and blow it all having fun. They'll not have to wait weeks listening to the wine of their pc while they (and their av) sleep and waste more money in broadband and electricity than they get back in lindens. Lowering the artificial metric of "traffic" in search ranking is probably a good thing in the long term. Zombie avatars sitting in chairs have no value.

I would wager that the network issues lately are effecting many businesses more profoundly than just the camping trade.