November metrics for Linden Lab's virtual environment, Second Life are available for examination. September and October were relatively poor months, and November's results don't look great at all.
In fact every one of Linden Lab's key metrics fell in November. Land size, user-hours, transactions, PMLF. The only gain is an infinitesimal increase in the Linden Dollar exchange rate of 0.3%.
Stable:
- User-to-user transactions are down an additional 0.3% from October's fall ( by 34 million Linden Dollars), but this figure does not appear to provide any useful measure of economic activity, and Linden Lab cautions us against inferring any such activity from it.
The losses:
- PMLF (accounts with a positive monthly Linden Dollar flow) is down by 3.32% to 59,422, falling much further than in October.
- The amount of USD exchanged during October fell for the fourth month running. The previous three months saw a fall of 4.8% (US$459,000). In November, it fell another 4.8% (US$440,000) in only 30 days, now at its lowest since February 2008.
- Premium accounts seem to be in free-fall. The decline continues to accelerate each month with no end in sight. Another 2.1% fall during the month (that's 1,758 accounts) bringing the remaining premium accounts to 79,721. Linden Lab's new CEO, Mark Kingdon says that 'Premium subscriptions are immaterial in our overall business,' however, Linden Lab is trying to find ways to make premium accounts more appealing.
- Land area fell by 142 million square metres (7.05%) representing the first decline on record. This appears to be purely from the repackaging of void simulators into reduced-specification products, to become effective in January 2009.
Basically while September and October weren't good months, November represented a much worse proposition.
Demographically there seems to be little change. Second Life is still firmly in the hands of Baby Boomers and Generation X as far as active users go, and younger users statistically remaining unengaged. The percentage of user-hours consumed by users under 25 rose slightly to 15.39% (including Teen Second Life).
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