Chairman of the Board is on LabGab

[Qie Niangao]

1 minute ago, Phil Deakins said:

I agree that shopping has changed. It's exactly what I said. The marketplace changed the fundamental nature of SL, from a world where you mainly bought what you want from shops in the world, to mainly buying what you want from an online system that's not in the world. That's a fundamental change to SL. The change being that the SL world isn't a whole world any more, where everything is available in the world.

This history seems correct, but only as far as it goes. As I see it, SL commerce has changed again, with a huge share of the shopping done at dozens and dozens of events, not on Marketplace.

This is more a failure of Marketplace—it's truly a dreadful experience—and not the appeal of crowding into events to find and buy stuff as it slowly emerges from the rezzing cloud.

So there's still plenty of room for SL commerce to evolve, to shed friction, and I personally think the shopping blogs (mostly Seraphim) are the current crest of the wave. As Marketplace shopping changed, event-shopping is changing now, with fewer people showing up to browse every kiosk and more hunting a handful of items they found on the event's blog page.

It's not rocket science to see where this "wants" to go next, and Seraphim, Marketplace, or somebody else could take that next step. And I'm not betting on Marketplace.

[Mollymews]

18 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Nothing international here https://www.tiliapay.com/licenses/

a quick look shows that the list doesn't include the following US states

Indiana
Massachusetts
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
Wisconsin

surmise that these States don't require a state-specific Money Transmitter License authorised by the State. And that the federal requirements are sufficient for these states

as I remember from the last time I read up on this, any transmissions between a US money transmitter and a foreign domiciled entity is governed by the federal regulations

[Phil Deakins]

6 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

This history seems correct, but only as far as it goes. As I see it, SL commerce has changed again, with a huge share of the shopping done at dozens and dozens of events, not on Marketplace.

Yes. That's the reason I posted in the other thread - your thread, about shopping events. I suggested that sellers go into them to get eyes in front of their products, because most day-to-day shopping is done in the marketplace.

[Innula Zenovka]

On 6/29/2021 at 2:24 PM, Charlotte Bartlett said:

Agree with this.

They did the right thing separating their Money Service Business for the reasons above.  I think it was key particularly with the increased scrutiny over their legal definition of token (not yet tested before a regulator) to ensure they did not venture into the virtual currency definition.     T

The other reason for banning all those other exchanges was again to carefully avoid the definition of a convertible virtual currency in my humble opinion.



 

Because, for some unaccountable reason, L$/US$ conversions have never really featured of the radar of people who draw up cash transfer compliance regulations, Lindex has always seemed to me to to represent a very expensive legal and regulatory minefield waiting to happen, if ever compliance became an issue.   

Far, far, safer and easier to dispose of the problem by changing Lindex from something that was kinda-sorta-maybe-this kind of legal thing into something that's very definitely this particular kind of legal thing, doing business in complete compliance with all its legal obligations.

Edited June 30, 2021 by Innula Zenovka

[Arielle Popstar]

On 6/28/2021 at 5:53 PM, animats said:

Far more people can mod than can start with a blank screen and make something good.

This! I've spent countless hours in years past fiddling with different items that I purchased which I could mod, even mesh items. Tweaking size, color, textures, alphas, materials, scripts etc. So much now is no mod that I just go to my regions on Opensim where I have that ability and just use S/L for clubbing and some shopping. Even if the Lab doesn't change anything as far as inworld building is concerned, creators easing up on the no mod restriction would be a nice boon that would prompt me to spend more time in S/L.

[Coffee Pancake]

This is why I don't mind gacha .. they are often full of useful decorative tat and tend to have mod permissions.

Everything I make is mod, even toss in the AO maps just in case someone wants to roll their own textures.

Edited June 30, 2021 by Coffee Pancake

[Extrude Ragu]

On 6/28/2021 at 4:40 PM, ChinRey said:

Nor it it a leveler at all. Listings on MP drown in the masses and the search algorithm is very much set up to favor the old established merchants. You still have to do your marketing through other channels, MP is hardly of any help there.

I'd have to say my experience does not match this statement.

Creating for the anime community, as a small time seller during my early years I would say that about 90 -95% of my profit came from MP purchases. I had two in-world stores in the main anime shopping destinations.

I experienced big success using the Marketplace and very little with an in-world store.

[ChinRey]

14 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Creating for the anime community, as a small time seller during my early years I would say that about 90 -95% of my profit came from MP purchases.

The early years maybe. Today there are 7,804,919 listings on MP.

[Coffee Pancake]

15 hours ago, ChinRey said:

The early years maybe. Today there are 7,804,919 listings on MP.

My experiences with the SLM performing well from from the last 12 months.

SLM has been very good to me, to the point that if I do ever open a store in SL again, it will be because I want to have a store and someplace to show things rezzed, not because I feel I have to.

[Innula Zenovka]

To my mind, the Marketplace is simply an economic environment, in which thousands of different merchants serving different (though sometimes intersecting) communities operate.   It's good for some people and not for others.   

I'm not  sure to what extent anyone can generalise about what effect it's had on SL business as a whole, or at least not in any meaningful way.

[Silent Mistwalker]

9 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

To my mind, the Marketplace is simply an economic environment, in which thousands of different merchants serving different (though sometimes intersecting) communities operate.   It's good for some people and not for others.   

I'm not  sure to what extent anyone can generalise about what effect it's had on SL business as a whole, or at least not in any meaningful way.

 

Thinking out loud here:

MP sales only

Inworld sales only

MP & Inworld sales 

Those would be the top three IMO. But in order for it to be be meaningful it would require 3 creators to sell the exact same items? Not from an accounting POV which I think would be the most meaningful to any and all.

Am I missing the boat, Innula? Throw me a life preserver!

[Innula Zenovka]

2 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

 

Thinking out loud here:

MP sales only

Inworld sales only

MP & Inworld sales 

Those would be the top three IMO. But in order for it to be be meaningful it would require 3 creators to sell the exact same items? Not from an accounting POV which I think would be the most meaningful to any and all.

Am I missing the boat, Innula? Throw me a life preserver!

I just don't think there's anything there to compare -- particular merchants may look at their marketplace vs store vs ...  sales, and they may tell a meaningful story about that merchant, but beyond that, you've got so many different merchants selling different products to different groups of customers over time, so there's nothing to compare.

We like to attribute explanations to everything -- if something succeeds, we look reasons for why it succeeded, and if it fails, we look for reasons why it failed.    That's right and necessary, but it tends to obscure the fact that much of the outcome, success or failure, was the result of sheer chance and things outside our control (for example, things our competitors did or didn't do).

What we're mostly doing, it seems to me, is thinking back to how we think we remember SL being before the Marketplace (so a long  time ago) or at least before we opened our store, and how we think we see it now.  

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

On 6/22/2021 at 6:16 PM, animats said:

(I sketched out a design for NFTs for Second Life/Open Simulator. It could work, and without LL involvement. There'd be vendors, like CasperVend, in both SL and other compatible virtual worlds, such as Open Simulator. You'd buy an object, using some cryptocurrency, from a vendor, and get it delivered to your inventory. You could go to another world on Open Simulator, go to a redelivery terminal, and get a copy of it in a different world. But you could only have it rezzed in one world at a time. Objects would connect to a blockchain node to check that you owned the object and it wasn't rezzed anywhere else. Duplicates would put out an error message and self-delete. Objects would thus become portable across multiple worlds. There's more to this concept, but that's enough for now.)

That's one of my pet projects. After a discussion on Hypergrid Business, I learned that the biggest issue is not really the technology, but rather the legal framework to exchange cryptocurrency for fiat currency. The rest, actually, are minor details. I'm still implementing a conceptual, proof-of-work system (not using NFTs, though, because of the legal issues...) in what passes for my 'spare time'... I expect that I will only have something to show in the next decade or so, though...

[Phil Deakins]

17 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

To my mind, the Marketplace is simply an economic environment, in which thousands of different merchants serving different (though sometimes intersecting) communities operate.   It's good for some people and not for others.   

I'm not  sure to what extent anyone can generalise about what effect it's had on SL business as a whole, or at least not in any meaningful way.

If you're thinking about what I've written, then you haven't understood it. I didn't even suggest that the marketplace had an effect on "SL business". I said that it caused  an absolute myriad of inworld shops to close and, in so doing, it changed a large part of the fundamental nature of SL. That is not the same as saying that it had an effect on SL business. For all I know, it might well have increased SL business. It certainly did for LL due to the commissions on almost all SL sales   It's the missing inworld shops that I've written about.

Edited July 2, 2021 by Phil Deakins

[Innula Zenovka]

20 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

I said that it caused  an absolute myriad of inworld shops to close and, in so doing, it changed a large part of the fundamental nature of SL.

And what I'm saying is that shops in SL open and close all the time, for all sorts of different reasons (the owner loses interest in SL, or in running a shop, or makes some bad design decisions, or a new competitor starts up, or all sorts).     I think it's called "churn," but, anyway, I'm sure that when the Marketplace opened, and as it developed, that had a big effect on SL, as did all sorts of things -- SL was changing pretty rapidly at the time -- but trying to say with any confidence which change caused what consequence seems to me impossible.     

How, for example, would you distinguish between the role played by the marketplace in the development of SL vs  the roles played by a multitude of external economic developments (movement of the US$ vs other currencies, the 2008 banking crisis and its subsequent effects in the Eurozone, the decision to impose VAT on tier and so on on, all of which certainly affected me and my SL at one time or another, directly or indirectly, and must also have affected you, too)?     

I don't think it's possible, quite simply.  

Edited July 2, 2021 by Innula Zenovka

[Phil Deakins]

@Innula Zenovka

I don't have any opinions on any of the other things you asked about, Innula. For many years I have been of the opinion that both the marketplace and mesh drastically changed the fundamental nature of SL. That's all I'm saying, and, for anyone who has been in SL long enough, it's been self-evident. SL was pretty much a self-contained world until those came along, and it hasn't been a self-contained world ever since they came along. They changed the fundamental nature of SL.

[Silent Mistwalker]

5 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

And what I'm saying is that shops in SL open and close all the time, for all sorts of different reasons (the owner loses interest in SL, or in running a shop, or makes some bad design decisions, or a new competitor starts up, or all sorts).     I think it's called "churn," but, anyway, I'm sure that when the Marketplace opened, and as it developed, that had a big effect on SL, as did all sorts of things -- SL was changing pretty rapidly at the time -- but trying to say with any confidence which change caused what consequence seems to me impossible.     

How, for example, would you distinguish between the role played by the marketplace in the development of SL vs  the roles played by a multitude of external economic developments (movement of the US$ vs other currencies, the 2008 banking crisis and its subsequent effects in the Eurozone, the decision to impose VAT on tier and so on on, all of which certainly affected me and my SL at one time or another, directly or indirectly, and must also have affected you, too)?     

I don't think it's possible, quite simply.  

 

I do recall, when LL first opened the MP after acquiring XStreet and the others, a lot of store owners not only talked about shutting down their inworld stores to reduce overhead, they did shut down their inworld stores. Many more than what I would have expected to shut down. At the time, I refused to shop on the MP and only shopped inworld so when those creators shut their inworld stores down and went MP only, they lost me as a customer. Quite a few of them disappeared off the grid (and MP) not long after. I suspect it was because not only did they reduce their overhead, they reduced their profits by going  MP only. 

At the time a good portion of the grid didn't want the MP. Or more accurately, they didn't want LL running it. Sometimes well enough should be left alone.

[Innula Zenovka]

2 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Quite a few of them disappeared off the grid (and MP) not long after. I suspect it was because not only did they reduce their overhead, they reduced their profits by going  MP only. 

Though quite possibly at least some of them, since they were trying to reduce overhead,  were failing anyway, which might be why they closed their inworld stores rather than supplementing them with the Marketplace,  and would have closed anyway a few months later,  Marketplace or no Marketplace.    

There's just no way of knowing -- I'm sure the Marketplace had a large effect on some people's shops, a small one on some others, and not much effect at all on others yet still.    What the cumulative effect was of all these micro effects, and whether they tended to amplify each other or cancel each other out, or were outweighed by other effects, is anyone's guess.

As  the effect it all had on SL, I'm not so sure.   Only yesterday I was chatting with my oldest friend in SL, whom I first met a few weeks after I joined in 2007, and we're been friends ever since.     Obviously her and my SL have changed in lots of ways, but at another level we're still doing the same thing -- hanging out with each other and other friends,  and decorating our homes and avatars, and attending clubs and concerts, and exploring, and I'm still scripting stuff that I find interesting to do, or people ask me for, so in that sense things haven't much changed, in that we're doing pretty much what both of us did back in 2007--08.

[Sid Nagy]

Before the LL MP opened there was mall after mall in SL and business district after business district for main stores.
In a relative short period a lot of those disappeared after the MP opened.
That can't be just a coincidence IMHO.
There is a correlation between those two events.

[Coffee Pancake]

7 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Before the LL MP opened there was mall after mall in SL and business district after business district for main stores.
In a relative short period a lot of those disappeared after the MP opened.
That can't be just a coincidence IMHO.
There is a correlation between those two events.

and yet nothing of value was lost .. and now we have events !

[Luna Bliss]

21 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Before the LL MP opened there was mall after mall in SL and business district after business district for main stores.
In a relative short period a lot of those disappeared after the MP opened.
That can't be just a coincidence IMHO.
There is a correlation between those two events.

Yes, and though we may not know precisely why their businesses failed in the shift to the MP over inworld shopping, it's still sad that many could not figure out (if it would have been possible for their particular product) how to leverage the MP in the way they managed for their inworld stores.

There was a definite loss for those particular people.

Edited July 2, 2021 by Luna Bliss

[Silent Mistwalker]

24 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Though quite possibly at least some of them, since they were trying to reduce overhead,  were failing anyway, which might be why they closed their inworld stores rather than supplementing them with the Marketplace,  and would have closed anyway a few months later,  Marketplace or no Marketplace.    

There's just no way of knowing -- I'm sure the Marketplace had a large effect on some people's shops, a small one on some others, and not much effect at all on others yet still.    What the cumulative effect was of all these micro effects, and whether they tended to amplify each other or cancel each other out, or were outweighed by other effects, is anyone's guess.

As  the effect it all had on SL, I'm not so sure.   Only yesterday I was chatting with my oldest friend in SL, whom I first met a few weeks after I joined in 2007, and we're been friends ever since.     Obviously her and my SL have changed in lots of ways, but at another level we're still doing the same thing -- hanging out with each other and other friends,  and decorating our homes and avatars, and attending clubs and concerts, and exploring, and I'm still scripting stuff that I find interesting to do, or people ask me for, so in that sense things haven't much changed, in that we're doing pretty much what both of us did back in 2007--08.

Of a certainty, some of those were already failing, if they ever even got off the ground. I would never dispute that.

No, there is no way of knowing. Now. The time for doing the research and all has long passed. That doesn't negate the fact that what should have been done (from a business POV) was never done. That falls squarely on LL.

Creators come and go all the time. What makes the difference is the "mass exodus" that has occurred a couple of times I know of in the past 15 or so years. Those two times, the new creators coming in were far outnumbered by the ones that left. 

In the long run thing usually tend to balance themselves out but with LL's laissez faire approach I'm not so sure that will happen.

[Innula Zenovka]

8 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

That doesn't negate the fact that what should have been done (from a business POV) was never done. That falls squarely on LL.

Whose business point of view, though?   LL's primary sources of income are tier and premium membership.    They need creators, certainly,  but there's never going to be a shortage of good creators in SL to provide high-quality content that people want to buy and which will keep them here.

[Silent Mistwalker]

3 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Whose business point of view, though?   LL's primary sources of income are tier and premium membership.    They need creators, certainly,  but there's never going to be a shortage of good creators in SL to provide high-quality content that people want to buy and which will keep them here.

Generally Accepted Business Practices is the lens I'm using so from a merchant's POV. Since LL's primary sources of income are tier and premium, that explains a lot of things LL hasn't done that has left me scratching my head. If more creators didn't depend solely on the MP for sales (some do) and had inworld stores, that would up the tier income for LL and for those who want "free" land can go for premium and grab some mainland. Which, in turn increases premium income and leads to expansion requiring more land, increasing tier income.

I've always felt the MP should have been a supplement to inworld stores, not the other way around. Like it was when it was still XStreet. If that makes sense.

Edited July 2, 2021 by Silent Mistwalker

[Innula Zenovka]

On 7/2/2021 at 5:24 PM, Sid Nagy said:

Before the LL MP opened there was mall after mall in SL and business district after business district for main stores.
In a relative short period a lot of those disappeared after the MP opened.
That can't be just a coincidence IMHO.
There is a correlation between those two events.

I'm sure there is, but what I'm not sure about is how many people's experience of SL, other than that of the landowners and merchants concerned, it actually affected or in what way.

ETA:   Having spent part of the last 18 months reading about mathematics and probability as they apply to viruses and viral activity (conspiracy theories, twitter challenges, stock market bubbles and the like), I wonder if the correlation is not simply what you'd expect to see with any new and rapidly expanding trend -- rapid expansion of the platform in 2006--7/8, as more and more people hear of SL, whether from friends or the media, who weren't previously aware of it followed by a slow decline and contraction to a more steady and sustainable level of interest.

 

Edited July 3, 2021 by Innula Zenovka