Where is the Linden Lab Second Life Q2 report?
People maligned M, and certainly I didn’t have a lot of time for some of his *ahem* enthusiasms, but one thing I did appreciate was the quarterly report. Yes, they started out as a work of fiction (does anyone remember the first few where the major fun to be had was picking them apart and demonstrating the inconsistencies and fallacies they indulged in?) but as time went on they were a good indication of just where SL was heading and at least gave some confidence (under all that distracting flannel) that they were managing the decline.
Unfortunately Q2, which by any standards was crucial to understanding the current state of SL, and future quarters, will not be reported on. It looks like those state of the nation reports have gone the way of M. To add to this, Tyche Shepherd doesn’t have time to do her version, which I suppose allows LL to opt out and hope we won’t notice.
Anecdotal information indicates even the solution providers are giving up and a lot of content creators are giving up their land. The decline is feeding the decline – on top of the issues around search, the Xstreet marketplace and all the other things that make people lose heart. Make no mistake, creators are losing heart – I can name two of the larger creators who would usually be quick to take advantage of anything that would boost their exposure and sales are showing signs of despair and defeat and I never thought I’d see the day that either of them would ever behave like that.
However, I wouldn’t read too much into the grid size decline. Those 400+ regions that came online a few months ago distorted the land market and I would have expected the grid to subsequently contract as it’s apparent that the demand wasn’t there for that kind of influx.
The only thing I’m concerned about is who owns the regions going offline. If the shrinkage is being caused by smaller operators reducing their holdings then the question to be considered is just how much impact that deal with the major land owners has had on the smaller estates. The potential for that event to be the estate version of the impact of Zindra is real. For those of you who don’t follow this closely, Zindra demonstrated just how weak SL is – the impact of the adult content landowners trying to sell around 200 regions worth of land (the real number isn’t known because some kept their land, some abandoned it and some sold it) depressed land prices to such an extent that even 12 months later it not only hasn’t recovered but has declined further. 0.05L/sq m is shocking.. I grant you this is for visually unpleasing rocky terrain, but I paid something like 12L/sq m for the same stuff in mid 2007. Even flat and green can be picked up for around 1L/ sq m – I paid 4.2 for the same type of land in February of last year.
What I would pay attention to is the linden sinks. When I looked last week at the numbers for July, there was an average decline of 15% of the sink income over June. This is after factoring frequency of the sink income. What was remarkable was the decline in those parcels set to show in search – that was around 19% compared to last month. Now it could just be that not all parcels had their parcel fee collected or it could be that some businesses consolidated their parcels but on those basic numbers I would hope that there’s some kind of alarm bell ringing somewhere.
But then, Linden Lab has never been very good at the financial management side of the business. You’d like to hope they finally get to grips with the idea that money won’t continue to rain down on them despite their best efforts to stop it but I’m not optimistic.