Tyche “Statto” Shepherd’s private region survey for February 2013 revealed a couple of stark points:
- The large estates now hold a bigger percentage of the grid.
- Older hardware in the shape of class 5 regions is declining, whilst newer class 7 and 8 regions rise.
As this is a survey there are margins of error in the results, so they may be slightly out, but not by much …. I think I’ve got that right! Now February continued the decline in private regions on the grid, there was a net loss of 146 regions, so if you held steady during February you’d hold a larger perentage of the grid. Let’s take a hypothetical example here, imagine you owned 10 regions and there were 100 regions on the grid, you’d hold 10% of the share. However if 10 regions disappeared, you’d now own 10 regions out of 90, making your share 11.1%, so without doing anything yourself, your percentage of land holdings increases when there’s a decline.
However February’s overall decline was 0.7%, which is healthier than January’s 1.5%. However when it comes to the top twenty landowners, their holdings went up by 3.8% (+/- 1.3%) in February, giving them 38.9% of private regions. Tyche also comments that taking list prices, their holdings are up 2.3%, meaning they pay around 31% of all private region tier.
Tyche also looks at the top 10 owners and figures out that they hold 29.1% (+/- 1.2%) of regions and pay 21.4% of private region tier. This backs up Tyche’s statement that larger estates own more homesteads than smaller estates.
The big mover in February was the ACS owned Azure Islands, up 0.8%. Anshe’s estate holdings don’t show so well in the full list as there are individual estates, but overall they amount to 14.7% ( +/-0.9%) which is up 1.6% on January.
The Top 10 Estates:
- RGF Estates Inc 5.0%
- Azure Islands 3.6%
- Zoha Islands 3.1%
- Dreamseeker Estates 2.8%
- Victoria Chung 2.6%
- Jessica Chung 2.6%
- Weezles Real Estate (WRE) 2.3%
- Miriam Chung 2.3%
- Fruit Islands Estate 1.9%
- Lala Rentals 1.5%
If you want to see the top 20 you’ll need to visit the post from Tyche, I’m using enough of her material already! Now the important score on the board when it comes to private islands is actual tier revenue and Tyche estimates that monthly tier genrates US$4,106,000 +/- US$52,000 . (Calculated using known grandfathering rates but excludes any academic reductions and is rounded to the closest US$1000). Of course the $64,000 question is how does this estimate compare to last month? Well it’s down by about $64,000! I’m sorry I couldn’t resist, but in terms of tier the estimate from Tyche is that it’s down around 1.6%.I’ve waffled on long enough but I do want to address the hardware server class, because this demonstrates Linden Lab’s commitment to improving hardware for Second Life and is therefore important to point out, so here are the scores on the doors for server class, with last month’s figure in the first bracket and December 2012 figure in the second:
- Class 501 1.0% (Jan – 4.0%) (Dec – 7.8%)
- Class 503 21.5% (Jan – 22.5%) (Dec – 23.0%)
- Class 701 35.3% (Jan – 34.2%) (Dec – 34.2%)
- Class 703 27.5% ( Jan – 26.3%) (Dec – 26.3%)
- Class 730 0.0% (Jan – Not around) (Dec – Not Around)
- Class 801 14.7% (Jan – 11.9%) (Dec – 8.7%)
So hopefully you can see that Class 801 sims are very much on the rise, up from 8.7% in December 2012 to 11.9% in January 2013 and in February 2013 hitting `14.7%, whereas Class 501 sims are down from 7.8% in December 2013 to 4.0% in January 2013 and then 1.0% in February 2013. This is evidence of the capital investment Linden Lab have been making in Second Life to purchase new and hopefully improved hardware.
I have no idea what the class 730 regions are.
For more goodness from Tyche, visit her site at Gridsurvey.com where there are all sorts of stats and stuff.