An Open Letter to LL from Content Creators

[Theresa Tennyson]

12 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

For years, Linden and Mole content was superior to residents' content.

Moles are residents.

[Lindal Kidd]

Prok opined, " No, slavish loyalty is indicated in a phrase like "I realize LL has to make money out of SL, or the world goes away."

Uh...that's a simple fact of economics and business, not slavish loyalty.  Sure, we the users created 99% of SL.  But come on, even you can't deny that if LL doesn't make money from SL, they can't pay for the servers, they can't pay their people, and Second Life closes down.

As for your many other ideas of how LL could make money...please stop giving them ideas.  Some of those suckers might actually work, and they'd be a lot more annoying than the increase in process credit fees.

 

[Jennifer Boyle]

This may have already been said.

There is something wrong with people whining about paying a five percent cut to the platform operator when they sell online. Where else can people sell their creations online without paying the platform operator a lot more than five percent? Not Amazon. Not Etsy. Not Ebay. And SL is a much more elaborate platform than any of those.

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

There is something wrong with people whining about paying a five percent cut to the platform operator when they sell online. Where else can people sell their creations online without paying the platform operator a lot more than five percent? Not Amazon. Not Etsy. Not Ebay. And SL is a much more elaborate platform than any of those.

Where else can you buy something that took a week (or more) of iterative multi-discipline design for less than a buck.

Just to really break it down, say you spent 40 hours making a thing from concept to for sale in world. Burger flipping would earn you  $378.20 before tax (based on McD average hourly wage $9.48). If you sell that thing for L$250 (about $1US), you need to sell 378 of them to have made that McWage in raw L$, over the lifespan of the product .. which might be a couple of weeks for an event item up to a year. 

And after all that you're exercising a high skillset for burger flipping pocket money.

If you were looking to earn industry standard wages for a 3d artist (circa $25 an hour), the same product with the same lifespan, it would need either need to sell 1020 at L$250 each, or 378 of them at L$675

And that's all in raw L$, you still have to sell them for US (and pay a fee), move them to paypal (and pay a fee), move them to your bank (maybe pay a fee) and not even thinking about holding back tax, paying for health care or any of the other benefits that come with being an employee.

So ... that $675 product ends up more like L$1000 at the low end. Which is $4US .. still not a lot of actual money, but way more L$ than most people are prepared to spend on a single item

In this instance, a 2.5% increase is very small and easily covered at the specific point of the fee structure that it's calculated, but don't for one second think doing business here is anything like other online platforms, especially when you wouldn't be prepared to pay significantly more for stuff than you already do.

Edited June 28, 2019 by CoffeeDujour

[TheDarkhand]

2.5, not a big deal. If SL closes you have no where else to sell your creations or you would already would packed up and left long ago.

and 3000 digi signs is not a lot of representation on a population well over 100k logging in and out monthly.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

On 6/27/2019 at 9:04 AM, animats said:

On 6/27/2019 at 2:02 AM, CoffeeDujour said:

If fees in SL kick up to anything like a 30% tax on creators

That won't fly. Apple is in trouble in the EU over their attempt to collect 30%.

Bit misleading to make that statement, is it not? The problem isn't the amount, but as you (and the article) said, the problem is that not everybody is subject to that amount.

[Ima Rang]

So basically what you have is a list of 3,000 individuals that either did not read the TOS at all, or read it without comprehension.   The TOS explicitly states that if you do not agree with any part of it (and it does include that they are not your partners nor are you guaranteed an income from your use of the service), that you should not accept the TOS, and you will not be granted access to the service-perhaps that is why the anonymous nature of the post.   

[Alyona Su]

15 hours ago, Ima Rang said:

So basically what you have is a list of 3,000 individuals that either did not read the TOS at all, or read it without comprehension.   The TOS explicitly states that if you do not agree with any part of it (and it does include that they are not your partners nor are you guaranteed an income from your use of the service), that you should not accept the TOS, and you will not be granted access to the service-perhaps that is why the anonymous nature of the post.   

DING! Winning comment of the thread. On top of that, the new Tilia thing means one cannot hide from paying taxes any more, anyone taking a credit refund will be reported to the taxing authority as receiving that money. //Ouch

//edit to fix typo - thanks Love Z!

Edited July 2, 2019 by Alyona Su

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Alyona Su said:

the new Tilia thing means one can hide from paying taxes any more, 

Did you mean “can’t”?

[Alyona Su]

4 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Did you mean “can’t”?

Yes, I did mean that - thanks for pointing that out! ~goes back to fix that~