Second Life a sophisticated Ponzi scheme ?

SL must grow constantly to be profitable.
3000 servers for 50k simultaneous users - 1/3 of LL's income from selling new servers each month:

We believe Linden Lab is a profitable company, at least since April 2007, because Jeska Linden blundered that out in a SciFi e-zine interview. Speculation on the costs of running a grid and providing the Second Life software have somewhat settled down — except, of course, in the minds of the clueless residents who swamp the Official Linden Blog with whining. For these, Linden Lab "makes millions a month" (or, who knows, a day), is about the size of Microsoft, and should be able to fix any bugs in a few days by hiring a couple of thousand programmers. In fact, the whiners make the usual mistake of mixing up income with profit — for them, earning millions is just what they see, but they have no clue on what the costs are.

On the more thoughtful blogs, however, people analyze the real statistics (at least, the ones that LL is willing to share with us!) and are quite skeptic at LL's claims of "being profitable". In fact, they add the little numbers up from what is LL's income, and see that it's impossible to run the Second Life Grid with so little money.

Between the two extremes — just looking at the income, or just adding up values for the costs — lies the very thin line of Second Life's profitability. So, how much money is Linden Lab really making?

more ...

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