Tyche “Statto” Shepherd has published her first private estate survey for over two years and it makes for very interesting reading. Tyche’s last private estate survey was published in November 2013. This survey covers Second Life only.
The methodology for these surveys is, to quote Tyche :
these results are based on a sample of 5000 randomly selected private estate regions designed to estimate full/ Homestead/ Openspace penetration.
So with that said let’s get straight to comparisons.
November 2013
- Full Regions : 2,368
- Homestead Regions : 2,005
- Openspace : 29
- Closed to Public : 598
March 2016
- Full Regions : 2,266
- Homestead Regions : 1,921
- Openspace : 21
- Closed to Public : 792
Now remember that this is a survey, not a comparison of the overall number of regions, the above comparisons designed to gauge an idea of how the land lies regarding the type of regions in terms of the percentage of the grid they occupy.
November 2013 Accessible Regions (4,402)
- Full Regions : 53.8%
- Homestead Regions : 45.5%
- Openspace : 0.7%
March 2016 Accessible Regions (4,208)
- Full Regions : 53.9%
- Homestead Regions : 45.6%
- Openspace : 0.5%
Tyche comments further on the methodology for this survey :
The Margins of Error are +/-1.30% , +/- 1.29% and +/-0.21% respectively for the three figures figure at the 95% confidence level.
Remember the above is part of a survey, not an overall comparison of the number of regions on the grid. Tyche does comment on the numbers overall in her commentary, but we’ll come to that later.
As we can see from the comparisons, the shape of the grid in terms of the percentage of Full, Homestead and Openspace regions has changed very little in the period between November 2013 and March 2016.
Whereas there’s not much of a change in the percentages of the type of region, there are some interesting changes in the terms of Grandfathered regions for Homesteads :
- November 2013 – Non-Grandfathered Homesteads : 17.6%
- March 2016 – Non-Grandfathered Homesteads : 14.68%
This tells us that the vast majority of Homestead regions are already Grandfathered, over 85% would be a good guess. This means that there aren’t likely to be many changes to the Homestead market with Linden Lab’s new Grandfathered pricing.
Tyche doesn’t mention Grandfathered full regions in the survey, but she mentions it in another post over at SLUniverse in response to a question regarding how many full priced regions there are :
About 9450 – of which just over 11% are already grandfathered
This suggests that there could be demand for the new pricing structure for full regions, but interestingly that discussion thread also points out that for small to medium sized estates, the upfront costs could be prohibitive.
Tyche also estimates total monthly tier revenue based on these surveys :
Calculated using known grandfathering rates but excludes any academic reductions and is rounded to the closest US$1000.
The figures there, not surprisingly, show an estimated reduction in tier :
Estimated Monthly Tier
- November 2013 : US$3,857,000 +/- US$52,000
- March 2016 : US$3,385,000 +/- US$43,000
This is an estimated monthly drop of $472,000 or in percentage terms, 12%. When you consider that this is a drop in a period of more than two years, it’s probably not as large a drop as some may have expected. A 12% drop is not great, but it’s also not an end of the world figure. This figure is explained by a net loss of private regions of 1,875 (10.7%) during this period.
One very interesting thing to note in terms of Tyche’s survey is how the larger estates are doing, and here we do see a rather significant change in how much land the large estates hold.
Top 20 Land Owners Holdings
- November 2013 : 39.5% (+/- 1.3%)
- March 2016 : 49.1% (+/- 1.3%)
This means that the top 20 land owners now own almost half of all Second Life private regions, that’s a very significant change. There has also been a change in who the top 20 land owners are, but I’m just going to focus on the top 5.
November 2013 – Top 5 estates by number of regions held
- RGF Estates Inc 4.6%
- Azure Islands 3.6%
- Zoha Islands 3.3%
- Dreamseeker Estates 2.9%
- Weezles Real Estate (WRE) 2.6%
March 2016 – Top 5 estates by number of regions held
- Dreamseeker Estates 6.1%
- Azure Islands (ACS) 5.1%
- Richmond Land Management 4.9%
- Zoha Islands 4.7%
- Jessica Chung (ACS) 3.3%
Finally I’m going to look at class of server, this tells a story regarding the hardware Linden Lab are using to host servers.
Class of Server November 2013
- Class 501 0.1%
- Class 503 10.7%
- Class 701 42.3%
- Class 703 5.4%
- Class 801 41.4%
Class of Server March 2016
- Unknown 0.05%
- Class 701 46.15%
- Class 801 53.78%
- Class 830 0.02%
This shows us that there are no class 5 servers on the grid and that largely class 701 and 801 host regions. What this doesn’t tell us of course, is what class 701 and 801 are in terms of tech specs, but Linden Lab have definitely ditched the older hosts.
I haven’t covered everything in Tyche’s survey, she covers the top 20 estates in more detail in the survey post.
Alternatively, for more of Tyche Shepherd’s statistical goodness, go to http://gridsurvey.com/
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