How's Business?

A guy named garey Solo said interestingly that Second Life struck him as being like a grandfather clock that was winding down.

I said that it wasn't really that, it's just that some of the grandfathers themselves are winding down.

Skating on Thin Ice or in Fact Maybe Freemium Doesn't Work?

The other day I finally got the news that was already on sluniverse.com in March that Moopf Murray had left SL. He was famous for ice skates -- both free and more elaborate for money -- and the bubble gum machine. I got a notice that the bubble gum server was going down (I bought somebody else's replica for $50). Moopf used to have a vender system, too. I liked Moopf's stuff and put them out for people to take or buy, but he himself had that mixture of open source cultism and merchant stuffiness that always proves so unpleasant in SL -- I had several arguments with him about...whatever...he didn't like me and was part of the oldbie crowd of pioneer creators who didn't like brash newcomers like me who criticized the favouritism shown to them. I don't know what made him leave, probably boredom, tier, lack of sales, friends moving on, etc.

But of course, in his place are a 100 other people selling ice skates and making ice skating rinks of every conceivable type for every conceivable community. Life moves on.

So if Moopf Murray leaves, or various other famous oldbies, does it mean business is bad? No. Not when it's from the resident population. Even so, when first Kim Linden, VP of marketing, then FJ Linden, VP of Global Technology leave (FJ was brought in to be essentially the Atlas of the world several years ago, no?), you have to worry. People come and go, talking of Michaelangelo, of course. But two biggies leaving like that within a short period means that they argued with the management. Either Rod, or Mitch or somebody. As they are leaving, we see two things happen, maybe related, maybe not -- Creative Communism being jack-hammered into the SL Marketplace as a "license" and the "builder's boon" of blanket all-perms that creates an enabling environment for open source cultism. Did they fight about *that*? Who knows? Likely not. They probably fought about something more esoteric in their own world of marketing charts and 90-day impact statements.

Dev-within-dev

The whole Linden Realms thing strikes me as a non-starter. It's nice and all, but it seems to me that it's about Rod drifting into just doing his thing, making a platform for white-label production of games for users, something that I don't think there's a huge demand for in the world. Remember Multiverse, and Corey Bridges? That was kind of what he did already, and probably better. I don't really know what he's up to now although he was at the Entertainment Summit.

I guess I just don't think that the user base's interests, and the ability of the servers to hold up, are really the best climate for bringing in game devs to make little games. The Lindens had this idea seven years ago and gave out prizes for games -- then broke the scripts of those games in their next iterations, to the great frustration of people like Jeffrey.

If they were making this game-within-a-game really for its own sake (they're not), I might get behind it. But they're making it to test tools for resident devs to make their games -- and that's the part I'm not getting. I'm actually testing this theory myself now in the next few weeks as I gave Brownlee to be rebuilt by Jer Straaf who has lots of great games already that can work in a sim or part of sim without any special new stuff, games like "Vandalism" where you go around shooting at trash cans and such and watch them satisfyingly blow up.

My sense is that the overwhelming majority of people in SL on the 70,000 concurrency or 1 million uniques monthly don't really want to play games, other than an occasional Greedy Greedy or Whack-a-Mole or maybe a shoot-em-up on a distressed urban vampire type sim -- but not for their whole log-on sessions. Yet, people take part in hunts and Lucky Chairs and Zynga, so maybe they are willing to play *some* games if casual enough. If they can be stopped and saved at any time, so to speak.

Well, all this is interesting to theorize about -- including the return of last names (pseudonymous identity markers!) and "Your World, Your Imagination" (build a game! get more people in the door and get them to stay for us!). But, really, how's business?

Landing Spots

I cringed at first when I heard Rod suggest doing the Vikings 'R Us newbie island to land in, where other Viking RPers would rope them in. But then, as I thought about it, I realize he wasn't quite re-creating the world. His concept wasn't in fact what a lot of the Community Gateways *were*. In fact, some of them were not very exciting. Library World or InfoWorld or whatever the hell -- traffic, 100. There were the Australian and Japanese sims and they were nice and all, but sort of clubby for just the people from those countries. And there wasn't much to do on them except fish and shop.

Of course, there was Caledon, which is a rich-content sort of experience. But that's for people who know how to make their own fun, who can spend hours with pencil and paper games, if they live in the 19th century, or, in our century, can spend hours making Victorian lady tea parties and dances and dress up for them online.

So maybe, indeed, there is a place for landing spots that steer people to more mass generic fun. Like vampires, which is what the Lindens are hawking big-time -- as part of a threatening new galactic movement that even the two Star worlds are joining up to fight.

If the Lindens want to make Vampire stuff, great. I have to say that the single most taken piece of free content I offer every day is the garlic necklace that enables people to opt out of the Vampire game and not get "bite-you" messages.

Traffic and Spenders

A key factor I look at for business is the traffic at the infohubs and welcome areas. It was doing poorly. It's better now. But it's hard to tell, because there are still so many bots.

So I have to go by other factors. Are my cheap newbie rentals filled? Lately, they've filled up again. That's good. But do the people then graduate to higher paying rentals? Some of them.

It always amazes me that I get brand-new people, on that still-cumbersome new viewer, who somehow manage to find their way to my rentals within 30 days of joining SL. What hardy salmon they are, swimming upstream! But advertising...such a problem! How to find these hardy souls? I have advertised more in clubs lately or RP sims, but some of them don't have the kind of ad boards that tell you when people click them, so you can't correlate them easily to rentals or content sales.

As we know from the 3rd quarter metrics, number of people who spend $1 or more inworld is up to now 475,000, heading back up to previous heights of 488,000. Isn't that cool?

What's the Total Inworld Economy GNP?

But, hmmm...on that Linden corporate page, they are still talking about that $75 million profit they make, and putting the number for inworld content sales now by the quarter for Q42010, not the year (it was $450 million, they said, a year ago) now they're giving a figure of $165 million from exchanging currency, and I'm not sure if that's the same number.

That is, saying that in the last quarter of 2010 (nothing later, guys?), "750,000 unique users from around the globe spent more than 105 million hours experiencing Second Life while exchanging Linden dollars, Second Life’s currency, worth more than $165 million (USD) in its economy" isn't quite the same thing as saying "the world yields $450 million in content sales a year" -- they could be counting the total transactions or volume of sales and a lot of that stays inworld. I just don't know if they are talking about the same thing. I'd like to get a number that tells me a) total number of unique transactions inworld in dollars and b) the cashout. If I get $100 in a rental and then pass it to another avatar to cash out who is my business avatar, that could be counted twice.

So, to get back to the question of whether SL is winding down like a grandfather clock.

"How Can You Kill That Which Has No Life?"

I didn't get involved in the ruckus a few weeks ago when Slate.com ran an article about "why Second Life died" to make a larger point about software/social media projects overhyped and how they are shortlived. I didn't answer because it was just time-consuming and pointless, and others like Pooky Amsterdam were already providing good answers.

I actually didn't agree, however, with what most people were saying in fierce loyalty to their second life. In fact, SL, *did* fail in 2006-2007. It failed due to greed and stupidity and selfishness, and not necessarily by Linden Lab, because they were not really in control of the whole situation, but the greed and stupidity and selfishness of two other sets of people: a) the inhouse resident-based consulting companies -- there were six big ones, remember? -- that acted as sherpas to those big companies coming into SL, charging a lot and not always producing a lot, and stepping on their fellow residents in every way on the way to making a buck (like Grid Shepherd, the project of the Electric Sheep Company, devastated people's privacy); and b) the PR firms or media companies or other newfangled social media guru consulting agencies that in fact were they ones who hyped SL. It was they who came into SL, led by the in-house companies, and it was they who pumped it and then dumped it. The companies themselves barely had a chance to figure out was going on, and for them, anyway, it was a rounding error.

IBM came into merely because it was afraid of missing things like it had missed the PC and been late to the first iterations of the Internet and social media; the executives almost seemed to be reliving a second youth or getting themselves new trophy wives in middle age the way they scampered around, even ordering up expensive coffee-table books about their adventures from people like Dejavu.

There were all those other companies from Sears which didn't bother to make washing machines that avatars could buy for their homes, to Intel Inside which didn't bother to make computers that linked to the Internet that avatars could put inside their home, to American Apparel which didn't bother to make clothes that avatars could wear, to Nissan which at least had some oldbies make some cars and made an island where oldbie creators could make stuff for sale. it was at least something... Well you get the idea.

We all understand what wrong -- the companies didn't cater to the commuuuunity. Well, really, the *PR agencies* didn't. The Alphaville Herald called them fucktards, even though the Herald itself was paid by one agency to run a series of goofy adventures of some picaresque character.They didn't get that they had an audience of avatars in a virtual world, not people in the real world -- i.e. they had a really small audience nothing like TV or the larger Internet.

OK, so then there were deeper technical explanations from people like Gary Wisniewski (Treet TV). I hear what he's saying; I respect that it's an educated response. But I still see it was beside the mark. The architecture isn't the problem -- it's been quite a bit improved. The old Joe Linden could explain this to you and the now-departing FJ Linden could as well. So what if there's an asset server and separate log-ons? It's not World of Warcraft. It's user-generated dynamically-generated content. So the scene doesn't load. Have you ever played a Farmville game? Do you know how many times those things actually spit up and crash and lag and become hugely annoying? They all have load bars on them -- the dirty little secret of browser-based games. So what if I have a load bar and a whoosh sound taking me to a destination? And so what if the scene loads a bit? Put it in the download to make that longer and frustrate some people, or put it in the scene to load -- six of one, half dozen of the other. And not really the issue.

Mobile component? Um, is anybody using the Blue Mars mobile component? These are different things. Yes, people live on their phones. But it's a superficial day-in-day-out experience on the fly. It's dinky and you have to keep thumbing and typing stupidly and waiting for stuff to load. Sitting down at a terminal or good laptop and immersing in a virtual world is just a different thing, and that's ok. They don't really need a mobile component. It wouldn't add that much to the customer base, but only kit out further some of the hardcore base.

Hell is Other People

Gary is absolutely right about the griefer/security problem. The firewall issue wasn't the issue, however. IBM was offered a firewall. There was the Nebraska program that had firewalls. There weren't many takers. It's not the purpose of a virtual world. The purpose of a virtual world is to mirror real life and make it better. Real life is not better behind a firewall, in most cases. Firewalls are about work and government, not about social life as most people are living it in SL. Griefers plagued the grid so viciously because the Lindens themselves were in on it. They couldn't seem to get rid of their own hacker culture enough to care about their customers victimized in this fashion. Then they gradually did seem to get rid of some of the most notorious Lindens making common cause with griefers, and began to step up their game on getting rid of the most persistent griefers, and they're doing a lot better.

But, as the saying goes, hell is other people. And as I always say, Second Life is other people, in 3D, streaming in real time. Tateru Nino actually had a very good insight, that in a world like SL, the user experience depends on other users, and that's what makes it so bad for people.

In Second Life, the governance remains poor -- and that's the real problem for the servers, not the architecture or the failure of business to embrace the little world in 2007. The police blotter no longer functions; the special tools that were supposed to be given out to fight grievers "Octoberish" got forgotten; abuse reports so often "go nowhere," and you can't seem to preserve your investment on the mainland because of the big box and stubborn asshole problem in general.

But more than that, people form relationships in SL, very intensive ones, and become terribly vulnerable to hurt and exploitation. I see that over and over again in rentals. Asshole men in particular, often faking to be women, harming women who are too gullible, over and over. Manipulative, mean, vicious, exploitative.

If there were a way to separate out the people who want to date and have Facebook verification from those who want the opposite, secure pseudonymity, that would be great. But it's been a jumble between the two. And if there was a way to have some kind of reputation management system that wouldn't be gamed and run by assholes, too -- well, there probably isn't. If you could rate a person on each transaction, and have it meaningfully add to the world -- but of course, we all remember the days of ratings parties, when the Lindens actually gave people money when their ratings improved. What a racket! What a game! It's too bad avatars don't have "traffic" like land. Numbers of transactions with others shown. And number of positive ratings of such transactions. Would that work?

More to the point, I just don't get why it's impossible to ban the repeat griefing/harming by people using new accounts, easily identified by their same IP log-on (or, if dynamic, same group of IPs or other identifying marks like the location or company name or even hash marks of their computer hardware).

There has been so much hooting and hollering about the Red Zone and others outing people's IP, and endless ranting and bickering on Sluniverse.com in the endless thread about the JLU. It's all stupid. The griefers were ALWAYs worse and still are than the JLU. The JLU isn't the problem. The reason anti-crime is such a vexation is that in the absence of decisive governance by the Lab, freelancers and outsourcers step up and give themselves the job, and they can be as bad or worse than griefers.

If on this blog, the company gives me access to the IP addresses of people leaving nasty comments, so I can chose to block them (I don't on that basis, but that power is there; I only block according to my rules), why can't I have that in SL? It is a conundrum. The reason is simple: because on blogs, people don't live intimate sex lives or engage in other fantasy activities -- they just post stuff. Most of the time no one would have any reason to look them up.

In SL, having the exact same information you have on a blog from those who post is somehow seen as always in "the wrong hands." In the SL context, there is an endless fascination with who someone *really* might be because of the asshole males (mainly) who have made it their sport to harass and harm women (mainly) using anonymity. If it weren't for that vicious climate, people wouldn't feel the need to peer behind the visage so often. But they do, hysterically so.

So, why can't the company make it possible to ban people on the basis of their IP, but without revealing that IP/location/marker? That ought to be possible. It probably is eminently possible. Yet they don'to attempt it. It's not a priority. Taking the steps toward ultimately liberating content with VWR 8049 is more of a priority.

 

Comments

[melponeme_k]

I think it's hard to gauge the success/failure of Second Life because there is nothing quite like it.

One day, someone will know what to do with it and he/she will create something that will take off like wildfire.

The user base all in all is pretty good. Although at times I feel as if I'm in the asylum from "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" or in Harry's bar in "The Iceman Cometh". There is definitely a special kind of crazy that is required to get past the purposeful hurdles in place.

I once tried getting a friend in who had a background in art and marketing. She loved WoW and other games. But she was lost and a little frightened by SL. I don't know why when the place had many aspects that would have appealed to her. Who knows why people stay or like SL.

It's a singularity thing...maybe. LOL

[Amanda Dallin]

Many people, maybe most, want to have their hand held and be guided in what they do. SL is too open ended for them. They want goals and quests not "Your World, Your Imagination." Linden Realms could turn into something that appeals to this mass of people.

[Prokofy Neva]

Oh, I'm all for that, Amanda. I'm totally for the Lindens having a goals and quest game. If they can make it fun, have it earn a few Lindens, and have it be the way people learn how to use SL in a fun way, it would be great.

*If they made it for the purpose of attracting and helping newbies, I'd be thrilled*.

That's in fact why at first I *was* thrilled.

Then I heard Rod explaining that no, it was for resident devs. It was once again a FIC thing. It was once again a theory of fun based on other people making the fun, not the company (paging Raph Koster, and that reminds me, I *must* read his book by that name).

But I think it's a terrible theory of fun. I think the Lindens *should* be in the content business. In fact, they are! Look at all the magnificent work done by the Moles. Look at some of the fun games they have made like Piri. Or look at their activities areas, like the sailing. This is all good, and it should be elevated and appreciated.

That said, I'm for leaving lots of blank canvas for that "your world, your imagination".

[Ann Otoole InSL]

The SL economy will improve as the rl economy improves and rodvik makes changes that help new people acclimate to SL. If one is having a tough time in SL right now then the logical strategy is to downsize, perhaps even to a landless basic account, and wait it out. And while you wait you can learn mesh.

[Rex Cronon]

Don't the lindens have this "linden realms" game?
Have you guys tried it?
here is a link to main page: http://secondlife.com/destinations/realms

[Desmond Shang]

Several points ~

1) Some of the oldbie notables have incredible branding power from being first, either fairly or unfairly. But bunnies, Meeroo's, horses and chickens are essentially professional grade creations. Not in terms of code or art, but in terms of how they enhance the user experience. Many people just simply like them. Whomever provides that kind of user experience will survive over the long term, if they choose to.

2) Another critical point is that estate land has been ranked far lower than mainland in search since about August, and while I don't have hard numbers, I *strongly* suspect this has a lot to do with the loss of dozens of private estate regions most every week lately. Community based estates aren't doing spectacularly, but they haven't suddenly dried up because someone turned off the search spigot either.

3. The real story of SL is that it is still essentially stable, and not shut down long ago, as it closes in on the ten year mark. This is a very big deal.

4. Most users go through an 'I'm new, making friends' phase and then a 'not logging in so much' phase some months later. I've been hearing how the oldbies are leaving SL since 2004. This is a big reason why, and why by my recollection these lamentations seemed the loudest in late 2007.

5. SL has an older userbase of people who don't log in all the time, but in very many instances can afford to spend 15 or 25 bucks a month on their credit card for literally years if they want to. As such many users don't log in for several months, then come back for some weeks before disappearing again. This is okay. It's what they want to do.

6. Clawback. Linden Homes, de~ranking estates in land search and so forth do have the side effect of transferring inworld business income from the resident column to the Linden Research column. They know they won't break the world mining the mountain of resident profits, because the vast majority of residents are social users. If a few oldbies get wiped out, it's generally an isolated issue and often the newer merchants will delight in seeing their competition fail. Expect more clawback.

7. SL isn't facebook, it isn't google or world of warcraft or any of those things. Anyone pretending it is, is naturally going to be disappointed. It is what it is, and it's vaguely stable.

[dos computer]

Business process management (BPM) is a holistic management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. BPM attempts to improve processes continuously. It can therefore be described as a "process optimization process." It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach.

Thanks
Michael

[Starting a New Business]

It takes a process aware organization to achieve this level of agility and and BPM has both the tools and the knowhow to transform you into one.

[Prokofy Neva]

Another critical point is that estate land has been ranked far lower than mainland in search since about August, and while I don't have hard numbers, I *strongly* suspect this has a lot to do with the loss of dozens of private estate regions most every week lately.

Desmond, this sounds completely crazy to me. What possible evidence *do* you have if you don't have numbers? How do you know this is true for ALL estates and not just YOURS? How do you know if your search rankings are lower that you are just moved around on the carousel (the Lindens do that, perhaps?)

And are you saying the Mainland is now the winner of search?

That's just nuts. Classifieds continue of course to be bought by estates, and they show up in search more. I don't know what your actual point is, or how you arrived at it. Estates are showing up less than mainland? That just can't be. That has never been. There are thousands more estate rentals -- huge empires -- than little mainland companies.

Estates are showing up less than Linden Homes? That may be true, but how does that work?

I haven't been able to stand the latest iteration of the viewer long enough to figure out how my rentals are doing in search, and I won't for awhile, with a crappy computer now but I'm just not buying this claim of yours. Makes no sense.

[Desmond Shang]

>>What possible evidence *do* you have if you don't have numbers?

Complaints from other land barons who were happily listing parcels in land search, only to find a sudden and inexplicable dramatic fall in search ranking as compared to mainland parcels. I think it was Ayesha that did a search rank test to verify this, and the post describing the details was on SLUniverse somewhere. This was, roughly, last August. I'm presuming that nothing has changed. It may have.

Furthermore, other things are happening that lend credence to this: a dropoff of estate regions generally 'across the board' (not just big rentals) as per Tyche Sheperd's data. Also, if I understand things correctly, Thex Lecker just sold all his regions to another estate which will continue managing it... that's a fair sized estate (50 regions or so). A move one would expect if land search were suddenly a lot tougher for private estates, and stayed that way a few months. Other significant operators have cut back a bit also (not all of them but a few).

>>How do you know this is true for ALL estates and not just YOURS?

First of all, I don't use land search. Seen "yellow" on the Caledon estate map lately (as in since 2006)? You haven't. Winterfell and Zeppelinheim use it (geographically neighbouring estates) but not Caledon. I saw this coming like a freight train. Directly parallel issue: look what happened to merchants who relied on inworld search 18 months ago. No way was I going to risk dependency on inworld land search. Using Google Adwords back in 2002 taught me _never_ to do that. The market maker (google) via keyword competition eventually forces search to cost advertisers almost exactly what it makes for them, or even a little more. Back to the question ~ search acts pretty much as it does universally; it kind of has to work that way, technically speaking.

>>How do you know if your search rankings are lower that you are just moved around on the carousel (the Lindens do that, perhaps?)

As stated above, I simply don't use the land search feature for land sales. Caledon is still 99% word of mouth.

>>And are you saying the Mainland is now the winner of search?

Yes. As best I understand it, all else equal, a mainland parcel will rank far higher in search now than an estate parcel. Don't take my word for it. Test it. Let's see if it's still the case.

>>That's just nuts. Classifieds continue of course to be bought by estates, and they show up in search more. I don't know what your actual point is, or how you arrived at it. Estates are showing up less than mainland? That just can't be. That has never been. There are thousands more estate rentals -- huge empires -- than little mainland companies.

It has more to do with direct land sales than rental, per se. I'm not a land search specialist (I shun it entirely) but others I trust are, and they noticed the change instantly when it happened. And immediately did an A/B comparison test with estate/mainland test parcels and saw a huge difference. Ayesha knows a lot more about the specifics than I do.

>>Estates are showing up less than Linden Homes? That may be true, but how does that work?

I don't know about Linden Homes, I saw test results with regard to mainland proper.

* * * * *

I would say ~ do your own research, I haven't looked at this too carefully since August. But *something* has caused a significant downtrend of private estate regions in November as per Tyche's data, and this is the only significant change I'm aware of. My guess, is that mainland demand and possibly premium memberships will go up a bit, and estate land demand (for those who rely on search) will stay down *unless* they pay for classifieds &c.

[Prokofy Neva]

Desmond,

I'm just not buying any of this. It sounds like one land owner, not more than one -- Ayesha -- has made this judgement, and that you're speculating about the others.

Estates have begun to go down not because of how land "sales" go in search, but because there is a drop in people willing to spend money. Whatever concurrency numbers there are, whatever even unique log ins there are (and they have dipped somewhat), what really matters is "number who spent more than $1 in world" when it comes to business.

That number went down for a number of quarters and only recently just started going back up. It was at 488,000, now it is at 475,000, up from something lower.

When you have only less than half a million people willing to buy things and a subset of them willing to rent land -- not a million, not whatever -- then you have an economy of X size that can only hold so much. If there are 10,000 rental agents chasing these people -- and there are probably in fact that many! -- you can easily see how little pie there is for everyone.

I don't see the Lindens -- who are controlling this -- would have any reason to deliberately favour mainland sales over estate sales. That makes absolutely no sense. Their tier for mainland is less -- $195 per sim instead of $295 -- so that makes no sense. Unless you think they are somehow hoping to play the retail market of lots of $25 or $40 a month customers who might be paying somewhat less to island owners -- but that strikes me as very volatile and impossible to make money on (but maybe they have different numbers they see on this).

It's much more in their interests to have prosumer consumers who buy their islands and re-rent them and manage their customers, than to create more primary customers draining their customer service with mainland ownership. They're certainly not banking on some big mainland entrepreneurs to buy up lots of mainland to re-rent (unless I missed such people somewhere).

I think *if* the Lindens *are* doing this, it's merely to serve as a corrective to a mainland market they themselves destroyed.

Because by allowing the estates even to be in search, they are allowing $0 sales on estates -- of which there are zillions -- to show up first. Mainland obviously can't have $0 sales.

I don't think they got rid of $0 sales, I'd have to check and I can't risk going on the new viewer now.

Mainland has been shafted for years. You're one of the people who helped shaft it with your very deliberate ad series showing people horrified and going into Victorian faints over the awfulness of the Mainland, and then going to your rentals for salvation and peace.

The Lindens, by allowing ad farm and extortionists for 4 years, decimated the mainland which is only now starting to recover.

But sure, Desmond, go ahead and make it seem like the Mainland of only 4,000 sims or something is really a threat to 30,000 islands.

Who knows, maybe Ayesha kept using repeat words or other gimmicks and now is getting punished in search.

[Desmond Shang]

I've had it confirmed (at least at one point in the past) that mainland makes more than private islands do. Or at least, they did. They certainly have more potential.

Remember the lack of tier discounts ~ mainlanders with less than a full region's worth pay a premium. Also, they may pay that premium, and *not even use* the resources. Just like having 3000 meters on the ground but tier payments for another 1000 or so. That "right to buy more land, even if you didn't" has a monthly fee associated with it.

Add in everyone who goes premium on a quarterly or monthly basis, and you'll soon see that private estates barely tickle the revenue possibilities of mainland.

Also, add on to that, the fact that at least 50% of the private estates have no interest in subleasing land to anyone. Probably more like 70%.

I don't have Tyche's stats handy, but when considering *actual* mainland vs private estate rentals, the numbers are likely on par (roughly). Say 4000 mainland to 4000ish private estates actually available for sublease.

I do agree, mainland has been shafted for years, and this is likely part of their 'do something about it' plan.

I'm curious, Prok, how do *you* explain the rather sudden, roughly 50 regions per week steady drop in private estates over the past month or so? It could simply be the long~expected result of an overpriced product, but I suspect there is more to it, specifically strategic tinkering. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.