Selling your content outsite SL

[Parrish Ashbourne]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

There are certainly 3D artists out there making a good living, but probably mostly by contracting for specific jobs.  And those are the ones who are making stuff that when rendered are indistinguishable from a RL photo. (And presumably do not get calls when someone accidentally retextures the floor.

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LOL   (best comment of 2013)

[Toysoldier Thor]

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Parrish Ashbourne wrote:

great story thanks for sharing

 

When I discovered 3D print for the first time I wasn't even looking for it.  I had been looking online for other places to sell 3D items outside SL and came across an article on the top 10 places to sell 3D items.  In the article what got my attention is that SL is not even listed, and that some thing as new as 3D printing may all ready have a better market for 3D models then SLmarketplace. 

http://3d.about.com/od/Career-Resources/tp/Top-Ten-Places-To-Sell-3D-Models-Online.htm

With the new TOS I can see why SL may not be listed.  It would be interesting to see the amount of sales from Turbo squid vs SL marketplace.  May be SL didn't make the list just because LL dosn't shair that kind of info any more.

BUILD ONCE - SELL COUNTLESS TIMES an other way I like to think about that business modle is "making $ while you sleep" 

 

 

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No problem about me sharing... I wanted to add a couple more slants / avenues on not SL creators and artists could evolve and diversify their market beyond tying their product/services only to - well - a slowly dying and increasingly Creator Poisonous virtual world such as SecondLife.

As for the 3D printing arena for 3D Model Makers to consider as a new revenue stream, there is a lot to entering this market than "hey I am going to start physically printing my models into real life objects for sale".

The FIRST big issue to consider: 

Do the 3D models you are creating now for SL have ANY CONSUMER VALUE if it was printed into a physical object?  i.e great that you created an amazing all mesh house... but who would buy it if you printed it as an object on a table?  I am not saying people wouldnt but you would have to find this target market and market to them that you have a cool new set of 3d model based products that they were looking for. 

i.e. maybe the model railroad hobbyists would love an amazing home for their large trainset layouts using the amazing home designs created for rezzing in SL.  Or those that create REAL model sims like we all terraform and landscape in virtual worlds.   of course they would need little poeple for these real models... Hmmm 3D printouts of avatars in all their fancy clothing designs being worn perhaps?

The thing is that you would have to build, print and then directly market to these Niche target customers related to the products you have created for target virtual world customers.  For me - I am looking at 3D printing art sculptures that could be presented/sold directly or better yet used as a positive mold for ultimately creating bronzed statues.

 

SECONDLY,

There is a net additional learning curve on how to create a model and prep a model to be printed 3D - and this also depends on the type of 3D printer.  The 3D model formats like OBJ and DAE would have to be converted to print formats - unless you are handing the model to a site that does all that work for you - which is a viable option and often recommended.

THIRDLY,

Creating products for upload and sale in SL where the cost side of the business model is massively skewed compared to a business model in RL.  Relatively speaking, there pretty much is almost no "cost of goods sold" since the models you put up for sale in your virtual store or on MP has very little cost per unit - its almost all fixed costs.  ie. You pay LL 5% commission on sales after you spend all your fixed costs to create the model, upload it to SL, and spend what time and $ it takes to list it on MP.  So you basically have a 5% of retail price in costs.  No shipping, no manufacturing costs, no packaging costs per unit, and often no sweat equity costs converted to real labour costs. 

As such, this skewed virtual world business has allowed for crazy merchant situations where beautiful SL content is sold for RL pennies - because in this business environment - it can be.

If this is the only business model you are used to as a SL content creator, then you will be need to do a LOT OF LEARNING about how to take your business into a RL target market business model.  Printing the 3D models will have huge manufacturing costs per unit - lets say $110 / printed model as an example.  Then the product you had created needs to be packaged, labeled, etc. and if the supplier wont do it, you will have to have it shipped to you (added cost) then pacakged for the customer (added cost) then shipped to the customer (added cost).  You model might now cost you about $150.  So you cant be selling this model to your customer for what they might want to pay for it at $50 - you would lose money.  You want a profit, so now the price is $200 to the customer.  Awesome.  but it was valued at only $50 so your business goes under because no one wants to pay $200.

Anyway... something to think about with 3D Printing as a business outside SL.

[Sassy Romano]

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Toysoldier Thor wrote:

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For me - I am looking at 3D printing art sculptures that could be presented/sold directly or better yet used as a positive mold for ultimately creating bronzed statues.

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Patience http://i.materialise.com/materials/bronze

Other powered metal options are available too.

[Parrish Ashbourne]

My favorite is moon soil

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/06/esa-moon-base-3d-printing-_n_2624567.html

and closer to home there's cake

http://3dprinting.com/materials/edibles-food/okay-we-can-print-chocolate-and-cake-now-we-need-the-icing/

and on the other end of the hardness scale there's titanium

http://i.materialise.com/materials/titanium

 

[Toysoldier Thor]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

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Toysoldier Thor wrote:

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For me - I am looking at 3D printing art sculptures that could be presented/sold directly or better yet used as a positive mold for ultimately creating bronzed statues.

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Patience

http://i.materialise.com/materials/bronze

Other powered metal options are available too.

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Ohhhh thanks... i didnt know of this place and in metal materials too!  I will have to research and consider trying one.

[Kitely]

As I'm Kitely's CEO I'll try to keep this informative and avoid making this sound like a sales pitch.

We've spent almost a year developing Kitely Market in order to create an Amazon/Steam-like virtual goods marketplace that would allow merchants to sell their content to multiple virtual worlds from a single online store. We did that because we believe that content IS king and it is currently too difficult for content creators to make real money selling 3D content outside SL (not impossible just not as easy as we believe it can be).

Since the lowest hanging fruit for a marketplace designed for SL merchants is to sell to OpenSim-based grids, we decided to start with enabling content creators to sell to all hypergrid-connected OpenSim grids from a single online store.

The current situation in OpenSim-based grids, especially the ones that are hypergrid-enabled, is that it is relatively very time consuming for people to acquire legally licensed content. This creates a situation where the same freebie content is copied all over these grids and people are tempted (often unknowingly) to buy stolen content that was copybotted in SL. This makes it very hard for SL residents who don't adhere to the "content wants to be free" philosophy to get used to using OpenSim after they've had access to an abundance of professional content inSL. Which in turn, limits the number of people moving over from SL to using OpenSim-based grids.

However, there are quite a few people who do use OpenSim and are eager to buy legally licensed content from the SL merchants that they love. The problem selling to those people is that they are spread out on hundreds of grids (sometimes running on personal computers) which forces merchants to select which grid(s) they'll try to sell to, thus reducing their reach and limiting their ability to target the entire OpenSim customer base.

This is where Kitely Market comes in. By enabling merchants to list in a single online shop and deliver to all hypergrid-connected grids, we create a central location OpenSim users can come to buy legally-licensed content for use in their grid of choice.

This in effect makes the entire OpenSim ecosystem into a single addressable market. A market that is currently starved for content and, unlike in SL, where only a handful of content creators are currently addressing that need. This makes OpenSim users more likely to buy from the merchants who adopt the marketplace and, as OzwellWayfarer commented, more willing to pay a premium for high quality content.

To learn more about Kitely Market see the presentation I gave in the OpenSim Community Conference last month: http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-news/2013/09/08/kitely-market-presented-in-opensim-community-conference-2013/

[Amiryu Hosoi]

First of all it is good to see some old friends here ;-) I was reading this topic and feel the need to give some feedback on this. Oz has it right, I am also exporting my complete product line to Kitely.  I am updating my complete collection on both SL and Kitely. So far I have done about 200 items and already sold for about 250 USD in a few days, despite Kitely Market just opened her doors and not a lot ppl know about it.

It is not especially about the changes in the SL Tos that I decided to also try out Kitely. I have been registering accounts in other virtual world for a while now under the same name I have in SL. Hosoi Ichiba and Amiryu Hosoi are a well known brand and name I dare to say and I like to keep them to myself.

A few days agoo I decided to reinvestigate Kitely and it didn't take me to long to see they are ready now for the real game;-) Their support is great, the Marketplace is a breeze to work with, the value you get is unbelievable. I see great opportunities in other virtual worlds for us merchants and content providers. The Kitely Marketplace is not just another attempt to start a virtual goods marketplace. This is different! Kitely will start to deliver to other grids in short time via Hyper grid. Now thats big news. Just one marketplace to serve all other grids out there. Emagine the growth of your customer base...

For now, I am one of the few merchants that sell high quality, high priced products in Kitely but I surely hope that other content providers and merchants will join me. Their is good money to make and the people need your content. Just register, and if you are smart use your existing name and brand. Come on in and see what I am talking about, give it a try and see for yourselves. 

Oh, did I mention listing your products on Kitely is totally free of charge?

You can follow my progress on the Hosoi Ichiba blog here: http://hosoi-ichiba.blogspot.nl

Amiryu Hosoi

[Chic Aeon]

Just a note that the Cloud Party "island clouds" have been gone since late sumer and have been replaced with 1 kilometer (yes really) expanses with no neighbors in view. There are readymade templates to start from if you aren'd a builder. You can also delete everything in a template (there is one with just a humongous green field and "sky" so pretty much empty) and do your own thing completely.

I know that some folks have issues with not being able to terraform but when you can make a one square kilometer "surround" of hills and valleys that costs almost nothing against your usage -- really, I don't care at all. Much easier and faster than terraforming if you have 3D skills.

 

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Thanks for clearing that up about Kitely and your stand on merchants and goods.

I've never bought into that particular brand of hypocrisy that code or content should be free but that services shouldn't. The people that say this are always all about monetizing "something" their way, and if it's not their way it should be free.

"Free as in speech, not as in beer" is like the Dr. Seuss version of business. By that reasoning, everything should be free that isn't a service or support, which they're happy to sell you.

Content will always be king because it isn't made in a vaccuum, it comes with humans attached. And human creators that buy from other human creators. In fact, the first market in a new world are generally merchants selling to each other until the customer-only crowd appears, if management can market their way out of a paper bag.

The right to decide to sell or provide something for free or at a cost is an individual choice, not an organizations.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Always been a big believer in not doing at all or putting off something that needs time to perfect in a product. Tried to tell LL this many times. Sim crossings are a problem, therefore don't do sim crossings do variable size land masses.

Being able to preview a neighbor doesn't depend on the mechanism of walking across a border. Variable size land masses that you teleport to, eliminate the overhead needed to maintain "sim crossings". If the load time to transport to a new area can be minimized, it matters not if you can walk across a border.

In my mind this is an advantage of CP.

[Kitely]

Hi Dartagan,

I just want to point out that Kitely also has land mases that are up to 1km by 1km (1024m by 1024m) and behave like a big region with no sim crossings. We call them Advanced Megaregions (they don't suffer from the limitations of regular OpenSim megaregions).

For details see: http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-news/2012/08/24/advanced-megaregions-up-to-5x-faster-and-working-parcel-media/

[Madeliefste Oh]

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Kitely wrote:

This is where Kitely Market comes in. By enabling merchants to list in a single online shop and deliver to all hypergrid-connected grids, we create a central location OpenSim users can come to buy legally-licensed content for use in their grid of choice.

 

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For me this is a reason not to sell at Kitely Market. We sell full perm items, our licenses grant our customers the right to use our products in Second Life. But we do have customers who open a second shop in another grid, or simply move to another grid. Since some of their products depend on our sculpties or meshes, we are willing to sell additional licenses. Those additional licenses go per grid. (When someone opens a shop in for example both InWorldz and Avination, he has to become two additionals licenses, to be able to sell content based on our items in both grids.)

 

I joined Kitely about a year ago or such, mainly to investigate if it a grid we want approve for use of our products, in case we would get this question. I decided is was okay. But we never got any requests for licenses for Kitely since then.

 

But now with this marketplace concept, I'm going to pass. I'm only willing to provide licenses for distribution that is limited to the world of Kitely. So this would mean that our costumers are not able to sell their content on the Kitely Marketplace, because we are not licensing copying, publication or distribution outsite the Kitely grid. I think that is a situation that will lead to a lot of confusion, because it will be unusual. So now I'm glad that I did not get any requests for licenses in Kitely yet. I don't want my content to go to grids that are out of my control. 

But compliments for the way the marketplace is organised, with multiple color items and demo's attached to the item itself. You listened well to all the things LL didn't want to hear

[Amiryu Hosoi]

Hi Madeliefste,

I think above all the decision you take to sell your items to other grids then SL is an emotional one. We all would like to stay in control of who buys our items and where our items will be sold. Moving to Kitely can make you feel loose control and can make you a little bit scared because you can never know what happens with your products once they are out there.

You talk about licenses but In SL you are also not able to "see" or "track" if customers respect your licenses. Same in Kitely and other virtual environment. The idea Ilan Tochner from Kitely explained to me is not about licenses but about trust.

All items in SL as in any grid can be copied. Also there will also be a small userbase of people that wont respect any rule and will copy any item they can get their hands on and use it outside or even inside SL. I know, I have ben there. Nothing you can do about that except relying on your customer base to warn you when they find copied items.

The idea is about making your items available for anyone with a few clicks. "Make its as easy as the iTunes Store Ilan said" and most people that want to "steal" your items wont go through all the hassle and will buy  your items legally. I think Ilan has a good point here.

I decided to join Kitely and offer all my items full permission with export license and just hope for the best;-) At lease my items will travel the grids with my brand name and my avatar name in them. That cannot be said about ripped content. Honest people will click, ask and inspect your items and see who the creator is. That will bring them to your store.

What you can do is set up a store in Kitely and offer a limited range of items. Then after a while you can decide what to do with your complete store inventory. At least give the Open Sim community some of your trust and an honest chance.

Amiryu Hosoi

 

[Kitely]

I want to clarify a couple of points that may make you change your mind about listing in our marketplace:

You can define the exportability of each item you list in Kitely Market and this Export permission sticks with objects and assets as long as they're inside Kitely (even if you give them to other people, rezz them inworld, modify them, or include them in other items). Items that you sell as Kitely only (no-export) will be prevented from being taken out of Kitely to other grids using any of the options our system provides for exporting data. They'll be automatically filtered out of OAR files (OpenSim Archives) people create of worlds containing those items and they'll be automatically prevented from being taken out to other grids via hypergrid. This won't stop copybot software from ripping off your content, but you already sell content inSL where that kind of illegal copying for use in other grids can take place with impunity. In other words, selling Kitely-only items won't increase the risk of your content being illegally copied and it won't confuse your customers.

As you've mentioned Kitely Market includes the concept of product variations which enables you to list multiple variations of the same item (e.g. different color options) in the same product listing (we also support including demo items for each included variation). We're seeing quite a few merchants use the variations feature to sell each of their items with and without the Export permission. Listing items that are Kitely-only for one price (usually in KC) and listing a variation that is exportable to other grids for a higher price (usually in USD only).

You can use this strategy to sell your products for appropriately higher prices when people want to be able to use them outside Kitely. You'll find that you can increase your sales revenue that way, people are willing to pay more to have the option to use items in multiple grids even if they don't need that feature immediately.

With the current way you're selling licenses you only profit when people buy licenses for one grid at a time. They also need to get that content over to that grid (either themselves or wait for you to do it for them). These are barriers you're creating to people buying your content in all the places they may wish to use it in. The less barriers they have the more people will buy and the more they will be willing to pay for what you sell them. Our marketplace enables you to sell and deliver to multiple grids from one online store (no manual or bureaucratic work for either you or your customers). I suggest you consider the benefits of using this system to your advantage.

Since KC aren't convertible and the only way to make real money in our grid was to sell via PayPal on your own site and manually deliver in Kitely there wasn't a lot of commercial activity in Kitely before we opened our marketplace (which supports selling in USD directly). Now that the marketplace is open there is a growing demand for buying building components for use in other products.

Please note that we act as a middleman in all PayPal transactions so neither the buyer not the seller can see the other party's real life information. Transactions are done between avatar identities - which we found is important for many people who aren't willing to divulge their real life identities to merchants (and merchants were not too keen to having customers know their real life identities as well). The Proprietary Rights section of our TOS explains the details of how this all works.

[mtwtfss71]

Sweet Distractions is moving most of it's inventory over to Kitely now as well. We're not leaving SL but making our offerings available to the larger and growing market. I have to say, the folks I've met so far are amazing and the ease of uploading to the grid as well as the marketplace trumps SL by far.

You can choose to only sell to Kitely residents if you like. That way, you have the same protection as you have in SL. You actually have to choose to allow people to be able to export your products. 

So far, so good. 

[Madeliefste Oh]

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Kitely wrote:

 

With the current way you're selling licenses you only profit when people buy licenses for one grid at a time. They also need to get that content over to that grid (either themselves or wait for you to do it for them). These are barriers you're creating to people buying your content in all the places they may wish to use it in. The less barriers they have the more people will buy and the more they will be willing to pay for what you sell them. Our marketplace enables you to sell and deliver to multiple grids from one online store (no manual or bureaucratic work for either you or your customers). I suggest you consider the benefits of using this system to your advantage.

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I want to be able to check the TOS of a grid before I bring in my content. I also want to be the first uploader of my content, so I ask my customers to wait for me to prepare their license(s) and the requested content. This has never been a problem so far. Of course it is a bit of work every time I get a request. But setting up a store and uploading content to fill that store, update that store with new products is way more work compared to my current method.

 

For me all virtual worlds except SL are still too small to justify my time investment of running a business in those grids. But we have large customer base in SL of builders and creators, people that attach their own creativity to our products. It's because of this added value, that people cannot take to other grids when we don't allow them to use the sculpt or mesh, that we decided for licensing our products to grids that we approve. 

 

We work with this method for a few years now, and we do keep a license administration. This shows clearly where the creators are going. One day we might follow them and open a shop there, but not yet. It's still too marginally.

 

My question is now: When we would approve the Kitely grid for our licenses, and I am always the first uploader, can I set full perm products in a way that they can only be redistributed within Kitely by my buyers? Do these 'only Kitely' permissions white out the possibility for my customers to sell in the marketplace to other grids outside Kitely?

 

I also read somewhere that you are going to permit download from inventory to ones own computer. How about that?

 

[OzwellWayfarer]

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Madeliefste Oh wrote:

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My question is now: When we would approve the Kitely grid for our licenses, and I am always the first uploader, can I set full perm products in a way that they can only be redistributed within Kitely by my buyers? Do these 'only Kitely' permissions white out the possibility for my customers to sell in the marketplace to other grids outside Kitely?

 

I also read somewhere that you are going to permit download from inventory to ones own computer. How about that?

 

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Hey Madeliefste

 

Yes, you can sell full perm allowing builders in Kitely to use your products without allowing export. In every case YOU get to choose if people can export to other grids or download. What myself and Ami have done is enabled export on some of our products for a much higher price. A price we feel is worth the risk.

 

I also sell a mesh pack of tudor walls which were actually created by Zelest Fall of Zelection here in SL (I bought the license to resell). She was not comfortable with the export perm, so I dont sell it like that and it remains in Kitely, just as secure as if it were in SL.

 

Bottom line, its all YOUR choice if people can export.

[Parrish Ashbourne]

An other thing to think about is as SL keeps losing regions the amount of regions, other grids are growing, SL for a few months now has been smaller then the top 40 opensim grids combined.

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2013/10/october-stats-report/

The way I look at selling on the Kitely market is just the same as selling say textures on the web, what's the most likely thing some one steeling textures from the web to resell going to do... Sell them in SL

and in Kitely market you can decide to sell for Real $ only, then it's not just a DMCA violation if some one steals your items.

[OzwellWayfarer]

It also strikes me that we as creators in SL are a little bit backward when compared to the rest of the internet. Pretty much all popular technology these days is DRM free. People sell their 3D assets on a number of internet marketplaces and they have NO IDEA where that asset ends up beyond the transaction details of the sale itself.

I often chuckle to myself how people on one hand paint opensim as a copybotter paradise, and then turn around and say everything looks like SL in 2008. So everyone is ripping stuff from 2008 and importing it to opensim are they? lol

The reason it looks like 2008 is because most OS users are honest, and make the best they can, but would LOVE to have a legitimate place they could buy some better skins, a nice AO or some better looking trees.

Nearly every industry that started with restrictive DRM has now dropped it as a bad idea. I believe that if you make content available at a good price, the people that want it will buy it. People want legit copies. They dont want to live in fear of all their stuff gound up in digital smoke if the original creator catches them.

The thieves are always going to find a way to get your stuff, and you will never change them or make them go away. Your business models should work with this fact, not play into its hands.

[Kitely]

Each item you list in Kitely Market is either explicitly flagged Export or no-Export. This Export perm applies to all the objects and assets that make up the sold item and remains attached to them even if the bought item is copied, transfered, modified or rezzed. You control those options, the default is no-Export and your customers can't add Export perm to an item acquired from Kitely Market with no-Export.

Thje Export perm can be used with any combination of Copy/Modify/Transfer permissions. Our export control system manages all content export functions provided by our service. You can see what license the various combinations provide your customers in the Proprietary Rights section of our TOS.

Exporting inventory was mentioned in this blog post: http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-news/2013/10/05/the-content-liberation-front/

 

You'll note that this feature is for merchants exporting content from their Kitely Market stores and that it is also managed by our export control system.

[Kitely]

Kitely Market has a 45-day withholding period that acts as a time buffer preventing copybotters from profiting from sales they try to make in our marketplace. This delay gives people time to notice the copybotted content and notify us before the fraudster has time to withdraw the money he or she earned from selling stolen content.

As the only way to get real money from Kitely is using the marketplace our withholding period makes it very unlikely that people will be able to abuse our system to make any worthwhile profit - thus making our marketplace a much less attractive venue for selling stolen content.

[Madeliefste Oh]

Kitely,

As I explained I only provide licenses at request. When I upload content for our customers to other grids, the product and the license goes from my inventory to the customers inventory.

In your TOS I see: "Items not delivered by Kitely Market have an implicit Export Permission if they (A) have Copy Permission; and (B) have Transfer Permission; and © do not contain or use any No-Export items.

Our items have copy, trans and mod permission. So this means that the system does allow our customers to redistribute on the marketplace with export permission, when we sell from inventory to inventory.

 

[Kitely]

As I explained , each item you sell in Kitely Market is explicitly assigned either the Export or the No-Export flag and this flag remains attached to the objects and assets that make up that item no matter if they are copied, modified, transfered or rezzed inside Kitely.

You are the one who makes this export/no-export choice when you list your items in the marketplace. If you set your items to be No-Export then even if you sell them full perm (CMT) our system would still prevent people from exporting them via any of the export options that we offer. The license provided by our TOS would also prohibit people from exporting them from Kitely using other means:

"Items delivered by Kitely Market (as the term is defined below) are either explicitly licensed for use outside of Kitely Services (grant you "Export Permission") or are explicitly barred from use outside of Kitely Services (are marked "No-Export"). Items not delivered by Kitely Market have an implicit Export Permission if they (A) have Copy Permission; and (B) have Transfer Permission; and © do not contain or use any No-Export items."

In other words if someone creates an item that contains or uses an object or asset that originated from a sale of one of your No-Export items then that item will become No-Export as well until it no longer includes or uses your No-Export component.

Does that help clarify how our export control system works?

[Madeliefste Oh]

So the only option that rests for me is selling the object and license through the marketplace. Therefore I would need the possibility to set our item for sale for one specific costumer.

But I think our business model is an exception compared to most other merchants. A part of our products (the Photoshop files) is not delivered in SL, we have our own download service for that part of the product. We did not transport this download service to any third party grid yet, and are not planning to do so soon. Downloading is done with our SL device. Additional licenses for other grids can be ordered in SL and paid in L$.

But maybe it goes too far for this thread to discuss my exceptional situation much further. I think Kitely Market is an oppertunity for people who don't license their content for specific grids, and are happy to reach a larger audience this way.

[Chic Aeon]

Especially sellers of full perm items may want to take a look at this new thread:  http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Content-Piracy-and-the-New-TOS/td-p/2281869

This has been mentioned here and there but most of us have been mostly concerned with 2.3.