Mostly due to my own curiosity, but also to keep a closer eye on the performance of the Second Life economy since the announcement about Linden Research's new grid, I decided to maintain and publish statistical information based on the data collected from the sales of CasperVend merchants.

Some important facts about the data

• This data only shows what CasperVend sees. These are sales via CasperVend directly, or on SL Marketplace via the CasperVend Marketplace Link system. They may not accurately reflect the state of the SL economy, but considering the size of the CasperVend network, I personally consider it a decent indicator, at least.
  
  
• The actual figures used to draw this graph are based on a "performance index". The real L$ values are normalised to protect commercial interests, however the shape of the graph is identical. The "index" value is calculated as: round((value / max value in dataset) * 1000)
  
  
• The most important figures are the "per merchant" figures, since these are adjusted to account for the number of active merchants tracked by our system.
  
  
• An "active merchant" is any avatar with at least one sale of more than L$9 within that month.
  
  
• Self-sales (where a merchant purchases and receives their own products) are excluded.
  
  
• Sales under L$10 are considered "loss leaders" and are excluded,including gift-card purchases of higher value products where no money changed hands.
  
  

IMPORTANT: These data sets (lines) are not to the same scale, and can't be compared against each other. They are only intended to show movements and trends relative to themselves. You can touch any index in the legend to toggle that data set on or off. Accuracy of the "average" values toward the start of the chart is significantly worse than later on, because of the much smaller sample size.