Alas, Tony, this is a promotion tool for Second Life as a platform to do online business, it does not prove its credibility as a reliable platform.

Their inability to proactively handle outages, actions that have undermined existing businesses in-game, and protection of their core business (selling virtual property), and inability to protect game scripts (the thing that makes SL useful)....

.. also, the stipends are much bigger than the total economic activity - raising questions about how "real" the SL economy is?

Of course the stats don't prove SL's credibility. I [originally] wrote "This is a step towards positioning..." That's hardly a ringing endorsement, but I could have been more specific in my wording to avoid confusion.

I'm going to change the last sentence from
"This is a step towards positioning Second Life as a reliable, transparent business platform."
to something clearer.

It's hardly open and transparent when they don't publish the number of premium accounts who get $500 a week and a free 512, and of these, how many own land. If we could figure out how many people actually come and sign up for a $9.95/mo subscription and buy 512 or more, we could see whether the productive middle class, which tends to create more objects, open more businesses, and buy and sell more land, is growing or not.

At the 40,000 residents mark, we were told that there were only 9,000 premiums, of which only 6,000 bought land. If anything, the number of premiums, if they went up perhaps to 20,000 (who knows?) may go down as in the next patch, it will really become pointless to buy land when it makes more sense to pay either nothing down or a low-cost deed fee and then go on paying tier to Anshe or Hiro in USD on PayPal each month in stable US dollars rather than buy land at rising costs and pay tier to LL in addition to a subscription fee.

I was surprised to see that only $721,740 is spent per month on FIND ($30 per ad). It suggests that many people don't want to have to pay $30 to be in FIND; or many people don't know about it and are confused about the difference between FIND and CLASSIFIEDS -- and it has so little use (only 24,058 parcels), that it should probably be made free. I know I'm listing something like 50 out of that 24,058 for all my public land preserve parcels, public commons (i.e. Brown Chess Pavilion, Free Tibet Game Room), rentals available, etc. FIND seems to be used mainly as low-cost advertising for businesses which people prefer to the Classifieds because they sort not by amount paid per ad, but traffic on land, therefore showing the most popular at least in those terms. FIND, in a game where Philip tells us 10 million objects have been created, is something that has to be developed much, much more.

Compare this cost to the $3,824,573 in payments for Classifieds (these can cost as much as $15,000 per ad to show up on the top), and you wonder why the government can't create a free yellow/white pages. If it were free, that might help drive some of the clutter off the events list and just help people FIND stuff more.

It's interesting how the Lindens won't (yet) touch or reduce the stipends at $49,935,550 (how many of these are basics?), a staggering amount of money to be printing and flushing through the system, but they will pull the $4,865,302 in dwell payouts for traffic on parcels that have activites -- a fraction of that amount. Wouldn't it have made sense to reduce stipends even by $50?

So much of the economy is tied to the $500 stipend -- look at how the lion's share of resident transactions stay below $500 and stay in the $49-199 range because most people don't want to "spend beyond their means" over the $500 and simply buy Lindens.