And as totally predicted...

[Kampu Oyen]

... here comes the plan to revitalize in-world commerce...

... just as LL is getting ready to permanently shut down the Marketplace.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Marketing-Opportunity/td-p/1484001

Baby Boomer nostalgia?

OK, now it's clear they've run out of ideas.

Add "madstyle" and you'll probably be recruited for a select group of in-world marketers.

Otherwise...(um).

 

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Sorry, we must have been posting a thread on the same topic at the same time.

[Kampu Oyen]

Cross-link and see if they both disappear by tomorrow.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Re-Marketing-Opportunity/td-p/1484387

[Spica Inventor]

You know if Linden Labs is really having a problem with keeping up their profits, why don't they just boost up their Marketplace commission to 10% or something. I for one wouldn't mind it at all at that rate. I would much prefer that over L.L. just jacking up exchange rates periodically to compensate for falling income. Jacking up their exchange rates simply resulted in more people abandoning inworld land renting. Of course if they drop their land rental rates, that would be the best thing they could do for all concerned for the long term, but I don't think that's going to happen until there is some real competition to force them to look longer term.

[Kampu Oyen]

> why don't they just boost up their Marketplace commission to 10% or something

That's a no-win for them.

If it doesn't work out (as you intend, that is), it will be easier for people to blame the Lindens for killing the Marketplace, because 10% commission can't be described as a "helpful new feature" the way that the other various deterrents to commerce have been.

And if it does work out (as you intend), that's even worse for the Lindens, because then they'll have a really hard time explaining why the Marketplace ultimately had to be shut down.

[Zanara Zenovka]

---

Spica Inventor wrote:

You know if Linden Labs is really having a problem with keeping up their profits, why don't they just boost up their Marketplace commission to 10% or something. I for one wouldn't mind it at all at that rate. I would much prefer that over L.L. just jacking up exchange rates periodically to compensate for falling income. Jacking up their exchange rates simply resulted in more people abandoning inworld land renting. Of course if they drop their land rental rates, that would be the best thing they could do for all concerned for the long term, but I don't think that's going to happen until there is some real competition to force them to look longer term.

---

Huh? what "jacking up exchange rates"?

And no - screw higher commissions.

[Anaiya Arnold]

---

Kampu Oyen wrote:

... here comes the plan to

revitalize in-world commerce

...

.

 

---

 

Huh?  A nefarious plan to revitalize in-world commerce? I don't have time to discuss that. Apparently we're all supposed to meet up at Bay City Nautilus to let our mad man and feme fatale loose at some fashion event. 

[Medhue Simoni]

---

Spica Inventor wrote:

You know if Linden Labs is really having a problem with keeping up their profits, why don't they just boost up their Marketplace commission to 10% or something. I for one wouldn't mind it at all at that rate. I would much prefer that over L.L. just jacking up exchange rates periodically to compensate for falling income. Jacking up their exchange rates simply resulted in more people abandoning inworld land renting. Of course if they drop their land rental rates, that would be the best thing they could do for all concerned for the long term, but I don't think that's going to happen until there is some real competition to force them to look longer term.

---

What makes you think LL is not keeping up profits? Haha, yeah right, I'm gonna pay LL more for causing me less sales, and screwing up all the time? As far as I know, LL doesn't have anything to do with the exchange rate. LL controls the ammount of Lindens in circulation, not how much they cost, which is controlled by the market. Now, lowering tier would be something to think about. I think the price point is high, especially for the service we get. I think a 20 - 30% drop is the right number to get more people buying land, and less people leaving. Sure, it would be a big hit at first, but in the long run, more profits.

At the very least, LL should cut the set up fee in half. It's such a BS charge anyways.

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Zanara Zenovka wrote:

---

Spica Inventor wrote:

You know if Linden Labs is really having a problem with keeping up their profits, why don't they just boost up their Marketplace commission to 10% or something. I for one wouldn't mind it at all at that rate. I would much prefer that over L.L. just jacking up exchange rates periodically to compensate for falling income. Jacking up their exchange rates simply resulted in more people abandoning inworld land renting. Of course if they drop their land rental rates, that would be the best thing they could do for all concerned for the long term, but I don't think that's going to happen until there is some real competition to force them to look longer term.

---

Huh? what "jacking up exchange rates"?

And no - screw higher commissions.

---

THIS ^^  The last time LL announced they were going to charge a commission for 0L purchases plus some other change - many of the longtime SL resident/merchants left in droves for another virtual world.  They have probably been replaced in numbers by new residents/merchants but I personally know of several large businesses that left SL altogether after that.

Oh, and then LL decided not to go through with it.

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Medhue Simoni wrote:

---

Now, lowering tier would be something to think about. I think the price point is high, especially for the service we get. <snip>

At the very least, LL should cut the set up fee in half. It's such a BS charge anyways.

---

YES!!!!  This has been discussed on the forums for years and I do think changing the tier structure would bring more people back into the land market. 

[Kampu Oyen]

>changing the tier structure would bring more people back into the land market.

Sticks are cheaper than carrots.

[Spica Inventor]

Like a central bank in the real world isn't L.L. keeping the money supply tight to keep the exchange rate elevated? Wouldn't you rather have lower land costs then lower marketplace prices? In fact I wouldn't mind at all if they had a 100% cut from Marketplace sales and at the same time lower land prices to a quarter of what they are right now. ;-)

[Spica Inventor]

hehe. Well L.L. would really have to start getting honest about things, (which it seems they have a habit of not being) , and explain in three dimensional terms what and why they are trying to do the things they do. Obviously L.L. doesn't like The Marketplace because they think it's cutting into short and medium term profits (which I'm sure it is as they have really done nothing to compensate for it it would seem in any significant way). They are probably using Ebay as a model and thusly their commission rates are low along those lines (as would be expected and insisted upon by most of the S.L. members as you have already pointed out, but the virtual world is too different from the real world in my opinion for holding to such models just as price ranges in S.L.  have no real bearing to real world pricing and largely attibuted to a total lack of overhead. But one thing is for sure, 'killing the Marketplace' would be like going from a few nails in their coffin to about filling up the whole lid with nails real quick. ;-)

[Spica Inventor]

Well it's hard to find revenue data for L.L. but revenue growth seems to have stagnated for the last couple of years or so. Since S.L. doesnt have any significant competition yet, that might be looked upon as a bad sign for future profitability. And you're are correct that Linden Labs controls how many Linden dollars are floating around at any given time, so in effect they can indeed control exchange rates that way just like any central bank can in the real world. Just a small tightening of the money supply can in effect keep the exchange rate up 200% for instance.

[Zanara Zenovka]

---

Spica Inventor wrote:

Like a central bank in the real world isn't L.L. keeping the money supply tight to keep the exchange rate elevated? Wouldn't you rather have lower land costs then lower marketplace prices? In fact I wouldn't mind at all if they had a 100% cut from Marketplace sales and at the same time lower land prices to a quarter of what they are right now. ;-)

---

No, not at all. I'd rather see the L$ go higher, esp with the dropping $US. If you're running a profitable business you want the L$ higher.

And land costs are trivial to my own business - in fact I just doubled my land holdings for the hell of it, as a buffer for future expansion. And no I don't have a full sim, but by the time you're buying a full sim you should have sufficient income to justify it. If tier prices are making a massive dint in your business profits, you need to revise your business model. Most people will pay the smallet tier they can get away with - if you dropped prices by a quarter people wouldn't buy 4x as much land.

[Paul Hexem]

No, but some people would buy 4x as much land, and more people overall would buy land- people that currently can't afford it now.

[Spica Inventor]

Ah, then that's where we differ. I'm largely motivated in getting many more folks to hang out in S.L. (and lagging up the servers hehe) then making the most money I can in the short and medium term. I would much rather see volume purchasing rather than largely what a few Rich people can afford. More people in S.L. also equates to more creativity. I would like to see more sims devoted to artwork and creativity (and higher quality) instead of being primed up with market stuff (a necessity to financially support many of the sims out there). Diversity variety and volume must be nurtured by L.L. or S.L. will just continue to stagnate and then inevitably start to shrink like AOL did when competition finally kicks in in earnest.

[Spica Inventor]

Yep, more people buying land and larger sims would be a great improvement. Diversity is a great thing. ;-)

[Kampu Oyen]

>Since S.L. doesnt have any significant competition yet, that might be looked upon as a bad sign for future profitability.

SL has plenty of competition, even without the explosion of other grids over the last 3 years. If something doesn't work right and the people who make money on it act like they don't give a 5h1t, users move on to something else. Drugs. Gambling. Prostitutes. Whatever. Users mostly don't have a proportion of their entertainment budget specifically earmarked for virtual worlds. Money they suddenly don't feel like spending in SL could be used to buy more canned food or shotgun ammunition or God-knows-what-else.... and, yes, IMVU. There are 119,935 people online at IMVU as I write this. How many are in SL?

>And you're are correct that Linden Labs controls how many Linden dollars are floating around at any given time,

People say that. But I don't really see any way they can control the amount of money in-world. They don't seem to set any cap on how much total money users can load in over a 24-hour period, and the means by which such money gets removed from the system practically all seem to be opt-in from the user end. So, really, LL would seem to be at the mercy of the whims of users in terms of how much money users load in without spending all of it. And Linden dollars are essentially a measure of total money owed to users; debts which stand to be either collected or destroyed by users at-will, and without any direct control by the Lindens.

>so in effect they can indeed control exchange rates that way just like any central bank can in the real world.

They CAN control exchange rates. And this can INFLUENCE user behavior.

But LL ultimately DOES NOT control user behavior. If users choose to increase or decrease the total in-world money supply in some way, LL can only make certain tweaks to encourage or discourage the behavior. Rarely, if ever, should they be able to rely on such tweaks to persuade users to collectively reduce the money supply when they would otherwise increase it, or vice-versa.

>Just a small tightening of the money supply can in effect keep the exchange rate up 200% for instance.

That's essentially backwards.

LL can't use the money supply to control exchange rate.

They can only use exchange rate to TRY to control the money supply.

[Kampu Oyen]

>No, not at all. I'd rather see the L$ go higher, esp with the dropping $US. If you're running a profitable business you want the L$ higher.

I don't much care about the precise exchange rate, since it's a variable not all that closely linked to what else determines the RL value of in-world revenues over the long term.

What I do care about is stability or instability of exchange rates.

Comparative stability of exchange rate makes SL a good medium for people who want to make long-term investments and help SL grow and develop as a more and more useful thing for people who might want to use it.

Comparative instability of exchange rate just makes SL a good medium for speculators, and I don't think speculator money is what SL needs in order to progress as an innovative experiential medium.

[Kampu Oyen]

>No, but some people would buy 4x as much land, and more people overall would buy land- people that currently can't afford it now.

You might see that in the short term.

But unless something about total system utility to the user pool changes, the value of the land is the value is the value is the value is the value is the value.

If the market were allowed to adjust land prices to accomodate demand, basically all the same people would end up owning and controlling the same things, regardless of changes to exchange rates.

[Zanara Zenovka]

---

Spica Inventor wrote:

Ah, then that's where we differ. I'm largely motivated in getting many more folks to hang out in S.L. (and lagging up the servers hehe) then making the most money I can in the short and medium term. I would much rather see volume purchasing rather than largely what a few Rich people can afford. More people in S.L. also equates to more creativity. I would like to see more sims devoted to artwork and creativity (and higher quality) instead of being primed up with market stuff (a necessity to financially support many of the sims out there). Diversity variety and volume must be nurtured by L.L. or S.L. will just continue to stagnate and then inevitably start to shrink like AOL did when competition finally kicks in in earnest.

---

There's no need to be rich at all - money is only a barrier to those with no imagination. SL is already free to play and land ownership isn't necessary at all to get started with creative endeavours. I've never put a cent into SL and didn't even have payment info on file for the first three years, yet was cashing out after 6 months via SLX. So much is available for free, and a lot more now than there was in 2007.

I started with contests, games, put together crazy outfits from Yadni's Junkyard and won "Best in xxx" comps, trivia comps. Got into SL photography and uploaded some of my RL paintings, entered art shows which gave free gallery spots and sold artworks. Got offered lots of other gallery spots/shows on commission. Had 6-8 galleries running that way without paying a cent up front. Did some custom photography and logo design on request. Started scripting, made some useful devices for gallery owners initially then business in general, got a small cheap mall rental and put stuff on SLX. Got affiliate vendors in a few spots on commission. Rented land for a decent main store for about $15 a month once i had enough products to fill it and only went premium and bought land in 2010 when my store's sim changed owners. At all times any land/rental expenses were well covered by existing income.

See similar in http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Commerce-Forums-General/Competition-How-hard-can-it-be/td-p/445911

[Kampu Oyen]

>There's no need to be rich at all

This remains true as long as there's a Marketplace website for people to use to get their foot in the door business-wise.

But let's turn back the clock until before XStreet to consider why people of means should want to shut down commerce not in-world, and, certainly, not allow to succeed a delivery system that doesn't even require one to rent a spot for a box.

Assume it's about 2006 and you're laundering weasel dust money for the Esperanto mafia...

Grid expansion sounds like a great idea, because it will probably make your activity less conspicuous. A problem is that in order for this to work, in-world commerce has to expand to fill most of the larger grid.  Gambling gettting shut down already cramps your style, but when the grid expansion finally comes, trying to turn all of SL into a giant shopping mall actually turns off so many new users that total economic activity goes slightly into decline.

Then along comes XStreet.

Because of the more defined set of records maintained by a 3rd party, the use of XStreet for money laundering is a much dicier proposition, and the shift of merchants to Xstreet leaves the activity of in-world merchants ultimately more exposed to scrutiny by interested parties.

If you need to keep using SL to conduct your illegal business, and you have any influence at LL, you better use it.

How? Get them to shut down XStreet and anything else like it.

But they can't just do that, can they?

No, not just like that. What you need them to do is to replace it with some other option for users and then gradually create a set of excuses that will allow that replacement service to be eliminated, or at least sufficiently marginalized.

Of course, although this would also do a lot to explain why it's people connected to large in-world businesses that are constantly defending LL's failures on this forum and asking to have people banned, it remains quite unproven.

OTOH, Rod hasn't really offered any alternate explanation, either.

The default implication of his failure to explain would seem to be that the combined selection of the toxic release dates of 13 September and 14 February is merely coincidental to their high utility risk to Marketplace merchants.

Estimated very charitably to LL, the company is only about 66,000 years ahead of probability schedule to make such a combined set of bad decisions at random, and yet they've made it within the space of about 10 years.

Just considering the mathematics of things, does the influence of money launderers seem more likely or less likely than one chance in 6,600?

If you effectively investigated 6,600 businesses comparable in size to SL, how many would you expect to be in some way influenced by money launderers?

So why not this one, specifically?

I'm not saying this is necessarily what has happened.

But the alternate explanation that is being tacitly offered by others for Rod in his continued silence on the matter really has no greater numerical validity.

The real explanation could be very, very different.

But if Rod anything better to tell us, anywhere, why would he not be telling us?

[Spica Inventor]

'SL has plenty of competition, even without the explosion of other grids over the last 3 years. If something doesn't work right and the people who make money on it act like they don't give a 5h1t, users move on to something else. Drugs. Gambling. Prostitutes. Whatever. Users mostly don't have a proportion of their entertainment budget specifically earmarked for virtual worlds. Money they suddenly don't feel like spending in SL could be used to buy more canned food or shotgun ammunition or God-knows-what-else.... and, yes, IMVU. There are 119,935 people online at IMVU as I write this. How many are in SL'?

 

IMVU, i'm not real familiar with that one. Is that a user created content 'world' think like S.L.?

 

"People say that. But I don't really see any way they can control the amount of money in-world. They don't seem to set any cap on how much total money users can load in over a 24-hour period, and the means by which such money gets removed from the system practically all seem to be opt-in from the user end. So, really, LL would seem to be at the mercy of the whims of users in terms of how much money users load in without spending all of it. And Linden dollars are essentially a measure of total money owed to users; debts which stand to be either collected or destroyed by users at-will, and without any direct control by the Lindens".

 

When people cash out Linden dollars L.L. can then purchase that Linden money with real money and simply retire it just like a company purchasing their own stocks and retiring them causing their stock prices to go up due to reduced supply yet equal or relatively more demand. Central Banks do the same with their money supply in the form of bonds.

 

'But LL ultimately DOES NOT control user behavior'.

 

Well I agree the word 'control' doesnt really fit, but 'influence' might fit much better. And their influences would most likely correlate to where their investments lie.

 

>Just a small tightening of the money supply can in effect keep the exchange rate up 200% for instance.

'That's essentially backwards'.

 

Tightening the money supply increases the value of it, loosening the money supply deflates the value of it. My assertions are that they are keeping it inflated relative to real money by tighening it. (Taking it out of the system).

 

'LL can't use the money supply to control exchange rate.

They can only use exchange rate to TRY to control the money supply'.

 

hehe. That sounds as orwellian as 'doublethink'. ;-D

 

 

 

[Spica Inventor]

Well i agree with your concerns with price stability but the reality is that its just a natural situation that prices must come down over time in a market economy otherwise inovation stagnates. And when inovation stagnates, then so does the economy. Keeping prices artificially elevated ultimately results in a failed economy (one that does not grow) in the long term, and that means a failed Second Life. :-)