Cha-ching! Another $19.90 for Linden Lab

It’s been over a year since I put any of my own $USD into Second Life but decided recently I wanted to create a couple new avatars. One of them I told the group during our meeting yesterday I’m going to keep secret and use for investigative reporting. There’s not anything I want to do with this secret avatar that would violate the Linden Lab Terms of Service or Community Guidelines but I want to experiment and explore with a secret identity.

The other avatar I want to take through the process of being a new resident in much slower, more detailed and deliberate fashion. Since neither of my other two SL avatars are new (both are over one year old now) I didn’t have the ability to see through the eyes of a new resident. I’m going to try and use one of these new residents as a newbie and take advantage of everything available to newbies that I have time to do.

One thing I noticed is that there are special deals for residents less than a certain number of days which means those who don’t login right away are missing out.

During the registration process I couldn’t help wondering how many people were registering alternate avatars and lying that they are new to avoid paying the $9.95 one time fee for adding an additional account? The detailed stats put out by Zee Linden yesterday don’t tell this story, although they do tell open up the numbers for further critical review (listening Clay Shirky?):

January was another record month for Second Life in many ways. The size of the world, as measured by the virtual square kilometers of simulation, expanded 23% over December to 361 square kilometers. In fact, continued brisk sales have left us with roughly a two-week backlog for new Island order delivery.

This transparency generated a fairly positive post at the mighty TechCrunch that ends on a sour note:

And it’s no wonder that Second Life is disclosing this information. The company is rolling. The only point of weakness is online users at any given time. If that number doesn’t rise, the other stats will eventually collapse.

Concurrent online residents is a stat we’ve covered critically several times here at VTOR most recently Weirdharold’s post Did Over 30,000 signup yesterday? which had Tateru Nino stop by in the comments and remark:

Near as I can tell at least an eighth of people who sign up do not even log in. Not within 60 days at least, if ever.

After paying $19.90, I definitely logged in. With both new avatars. This leads me back to pondering how many are paid the $9.95 for every additional account? I don’t expect those who didn’t to rush to the comments to admit their guilt, but would anybody care to speculate what percentage haven’t paid the $9.95? 25%? Less? 50%? More? It’s kind of like those office honor bars, which I always paid into that for the candy but found a disturbing number of others didn’t.

Any guesses?