Hamlet has a post with quotes from Stat Goddess Tyche Shepherd, showing that private estates are being shed from the grid. Tyche reported these losses on her excellent grid survey thread over at SLUniverse, the particular post in question has details of Tyche’s private estate survey, you can read the post here.
Tyche’s comment that raises eyebrows, or causes gasps is:
” Taking these figures a good estimate of private estate tier due each month is US$4,920,000 +/- US$58,000 . (Calculated using known grandfathering rates but excludes any academic reductions and is rounded to the closest US$1000), this figure is down on last month’s estimate of US$5,006,000 by $86,000 , a significant fall of about 1.8%. This is the first time the monthly tier figure has fallen below US$5 Million since I began the private estate surveys and the margin of error indicates this is a significant finding. ”
I’m not going to say Linden Lab shouldn’t worry about this, they absolutely should, but it’s certainly not time to man the lifeboats, just under USD$5 million per month in tier for private estates, is still a healthy figure, especially in these tough economic times. I do think tier is too expensive these days, but to lower it Linden Lab need to boost other income streams, slashing tier now would more than likely give a short term boost, but Linden Lab need to play the long game.