SL Money Spent Spiked

SL money spikeThat graph looks pretty impessive huh? It shows the US Dollars spent in Second Life over last 24 hours at $1,726,930 as of 9:00am PST today (10th Nov 2006).

Well, it turns out that something many people has thought is true – the daily dollar amount which Linden Lab tout as spent is actually (simply) total transactions in world.

This ‘spike/cliff’ was caused by an anonymous resident who wrote a script which passed some Linden dollars back and forth between two avatars. After an hour of running it had generated over one million Linden dollars of transactions, but no money was spent. The avatars which this was running on ended up with the same amount they started with. Zero sum.

I’m sure this is bound to come up at the next Town Hall Meeting with Linden CEO Philip Rosedale/Linden on November 16th. Many companies that arrive in SL are doing so due to all this ‘real’ money being ‘spent’ – hmmm. I wander what they will think. People will want better figures – like the ‘over one million residents’ stat. We want to know how many unique and ACTIVE users there are. Linden record the ‘MAC’ address of your network card, so they have the data.

(Graph saved from secondlife.reuters.com )

4 comments

  • using the mac is all very well but how many use sl at work and home – i have 2 connections to the net – one through a router to an a wifi access point and one through a direct a wifi panel to a diffrent station a few miles away, depending on which is better at the time

    i dont see how the mac addressing is relevant 🙂

  • They would be able to say – OK this user logs in from many places. But they also say – this machine is used to log in to 20 accounts.

    You know you can get the MAC address of the actual PC network card? It doesnt stop at the router – you are running installed software – once you have that, it’s pretty easy.

    With some software I could create quite easily – if you installed it – I could get the serial of your hard disks if I really wanted. ;p

  • i know that 🙂

    anyway ive thought about this – i dont think any co. is going to rely on the stats on the front of sl.com before commiting to money in sl 😉

    so the point is moot really and to be honest the stats serve absolutely no purpose

  • True – but with all those goosed figures front and centre, which people quote to people who have never heard of SL, they might not know how skewed they are.