Marketplace shouldn´t allow freebies or dollarbies anymore

[Josh Susanto]

I think the assumptions are that both higher concurrency and higher land value are always desireable, regardless of how they are to be acheived. If you want to see these guys' heads explode, ask them whether they would prefer to sacrifice concurrency for land value or land value for concurrency.

[Josh Susanto]

My messages are in paragraph form when I press the reply button. And before I tried the quote button, you can see that they also used to come out as paragraphs on the other end. So, again, thanks for that.

[Gavin Hird]

Seriously, for how long are anyone gonna sit quietly enjoying their new sofa alone (while listening to the fan of their crap-top going full tilt.)

... no wonder agent login times are declining. 

[Mickey Vandeverre]

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Gavin Hird wrote:

Seriously, for how long are anyone gonna sit quietly enjoying their new sofa alone (while listening to the fan of their crap-top going full tilt.)

... no wonder agent login times are declining. 

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I'm not really sure what that means.

Just expressing that people log in and use their time in different ways.  I used to log in and sit on a sofa for hours, while at work.  We all use it differently.

[Gavin Hird]

Concurrency currently varies between about 32k and 65k throughout the day. There are about 32k sims or so, running on 5-6000 servers. This means that on the best times of the day there are a maximum of 2 user agents per sim on the grid. 

Anything that would bring the concurrency up to the double, or gasp - even 10 user agents per sim at peak would be a tremendous boost for SecondLife and the SL economy. 

[Mickey Vandeverre]

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Rene Erlanger wrote:

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Mickey Vandeverre wrote:

then you are living in another year.  2010 perhaps.  People use the marketplace for convenience to save time and to shop from their home or office in physical world.  They do it all day long.

If you cannot grasp that, from a change in numbers, then you are not using marketplace.

Good luck trying to convince customers to give up that convenience.

You can call me ignorant all day long, but when you keep posting that you don't have a clue what the numbers are on the marketplace.....one has to wonder.

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Linden Lab has a history of changing strategies....I haven't give up on In-world commerce yet, even though it's looking bleaker than say this time last year..

You make out Marketplace is some sort of new phenomena....i'd like to remind you we could buy items offline and have them delivered (or at least place in "Favourite" folder to buy later) as far back as 2006 with SL Exchange. The only difference between the the two, is that LL owns MP and promote it in their official Viewers which naturally they never did for SLEX.

Ironically SLEX was a far better all round shopping site than Marketplace...when you add in "Land  Sales", "Auctions", "Currency Exchange with immediate transfer to Paypal" and a vibrant "Forum Community" listed by categories much like it is now.

 

What numbers are these Mickey?....the ones that Linden Lab published for Q3 or Q4 Financial Reviews....or are you privy to some secret Financials only accessible to the "knowledgable one"?

 

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I'm talking about my own numbers and from reading some other numbers that merchants have dropped into the forums now and then.  Generally, it's in the form of a percentage.  Generally around 75% or above, sales from marketplace.  Of course, that will vary depending upon product and how you are controlling your marketing.

I don't pay much attention to the financial reviews.  Have to go by my own stuff.

[Gavin Hird]

You just said people would do this when getting home from work after having shopped on the marketplace.  So which is it? ;-)

But you (perhaps unknowingly) hit the nail on the head:

People used to do things like that, they used to sit camping or have some other presense in SecondLife while they worked, or slept or something. That is how many of them earned their Lindens to afford your sofa. The effect was also that the grid was not a ghost town, so when a noob entered the scene, they saw others they could ask "how can I make money". 

Now people don't need to do that. They just sign up, hit the marketplace in the viewer, and go spending for free! With direct delivery, they don't even need to rezz anything – coming to a viewer near you any day now – another incentive less for owning land. This free spending spree gets old very fast, so they leave bored. 

Hey, did you know that at the rate LL takes daily signups, the SL population takes on over 5.8 million new accounts every year, while at the same time, time spent in-world goes down. Concurrency goes down. Go figure!

[Josh Susanto]

>Anything that would bring the concurrency up to the double, or gasp - even 10 user agents per sim at peak would be a tremendous boost for SecondLife and the SL economy. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Couldn't we do both that AND increase land value just by having a smaller grid?

[Gavin Hird]

Yes, we could, but then it does not help that LL adds hundreds of Linden home sims to the grid or have fire sales of private sims while the grid already is close to empty at times of the day.

Again, "If You Do Not Change, You Can Become Extinct" applies. 

[Mickey Vandeverre]

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Gavin Hird wrote:

You just said people would do this when getting home from work after having shopped on the marketplace.  So which is it? ;-)

But you (perhaps unknowingly) hit the nail on the head:

People used to do things like that, they used to sit camping or have some other presense in SecondLife while they worked, or slept or something. That is how many of them earned their Lindens to afford your sofa. The effect was also that the grid was not a ghost town, so when a noob entered the scene, they saw others they could ask "how can I make money". 

Now people don't need to do that. They just sign up, hit the marketplace in the viewer, and go spending for free! With direct delivery, they don't even need to rezz anything – coming to a viewer near you any day now – another incentive less for owning land. This free spending spree gets old very fast, so they leave bored. 

Hey, did you know that at the rate LL takes daily signups, the SL population takes on over 5.8 million new accounts every year, while at the same time, time spent in-world goes down. Concurrency goes down. Go figure!

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Which is it?  It's a lot of different things for a lot of different people.  Just clarifying that we all use it differently.  I use it differently at different times of the week.  Not always a "merchant." 

I'm not sure why they would purchase things if they are not going to rezz it.  But granted, have quite a few of those things in my inventory, will get to them eventually.  I bought a really cute valentine T-shirt the other day for 10L - does that make me a criminal?  for not spending 75L?  It was the only one I could find that was not too risque to wear in a promo photo! 

I'm selling some 9 or 10L items today - because that is the price that worked for that item.  Criminal?  Is that Free?  I bet most would consider so.  It's the price that worked for that item.

Not really sure what the concurrency thing is about in this conversation. 

 

[Gavin Hird]

No criminal at all. 

LL should set a minimum price it was allowed to list something at in the marketplace for it to be returned by regular search for products. 

Demo items should be linked to a real product, and would only show when viewed from the product (so they had to look at the priced product to get to it.)

Free items should be lumped into a big sack with the search result randomized for each search so that nobody could take advantage of spamming or gaming the free items listings. 

[Mickey Vandeverre]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

I think the assumptions are that both higher concurrency and higher land value are always desireable, regardless of how they are to be acheived. If you want to see these guys' heads explode, ask them whether they would prefer to sacrifice concurrency for land value or land value for concurrency.

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I think they are already exploding, Josh.  I think that I would choose land value.  Used to have a ton of fun selling land.  But it SL was marketed a bit different back then.  It was promoted (not sure if intentionally or by accident) as a place to buy virtual land and start a lucrative business, and that's what people were logging in to do.

 

[Mickey Vandeverre]

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Gavin Hird wrote:

No criminal at all. 

LL should set a minimum price it was allowed to list something at in the marketplace for it to be returned by regular search for products. 

Demo items should be linked to a real product, and would only show when viewed from the product (so they had to look at the priced product to get to it.)

Free items should be lumped into a big sack with the search result randomized for each search so that nobody could take advantage of spamming or gaming the free listings. 

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When I did that search I do not recall freebies - it did not matter - it was the design of shirt that mattered.  Price did not matter - just had to be the right shirt.  Probably would not have paid 300L for a T-shirt - just depends on how quick I needed it and whether it was right T-shirt.  Freebies did not enter into equation.  Unless you consider 10L a freebie - and if so - that's the other creators' problem for not having a T-shirt that was not "sweet" enough.

If you had lumped that into a separate search, then I would not have a suitable T-shirt and I would not have been introduced to a merchant that I did not know.  I know a new shop because of the T-shirt - it was labeled correctly and it stood out, as the others' were too racy.  People think that every category is full with every product.  It is not.

[Josh Susanto]

>Yes, we could, but then it does not help that LL adds hundreds of Linden home sims to the grid or have fire sales of private sims while the grid already is close to empty at times of the day._________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________But, hey- don't worry... we can fully compensate by making it harder for people to offer freebies or use the SLM... right?

[Gavin Hird]

From a commercial standpoint, a L$10 item is not worth it. 

It does not even cover the cost of storing it on the server disk-farm and transmit the product record to the website for display to you. 

From the (commercial)  creator's standpoint – how many would you have to sell to even get to a minimum wage hourly rate for the time you spent creating it?

[Gavin Hird]

Harder to offer freebies – yes. Harder to use SLM – no.

... that includes easier for the merchants to use SLM, like proper reporting, seasonal product support, campaign management, support for varieties and the ability for one merchant (avatar) to have multiple brands. 

[Mickey Vandeverre]

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Gavin Hird wrote:

From a commercial standpoint, a L$10 item is not worth it. 

It does not even cover the cost of storing it on the server disk-farm and transmit the product record to the website for display to you. 

From the (commercial)  creator's standpoint – how many would you have to sell to even get to a minimum wage hourly rate for the time you spent creating it?

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I'm not giving any more marketing advice.  In fact, erased some that I dropped.  In any other venue, when I drop marketing advice, people are appreciative.  Here, they call you drunk and ignorant.  Waste of time.  If they don't want to be helped or encouraged, fine.

Explaining that would require more marketing advice.  And you all can rail on me all you want for that.  But when you encourage an atmosphere of "battle" as opposed to "cooperation"....that's what you get.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

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Gavin Hird wrote:

You just said people would do this when getting home from work after having shopped on the marketplace.  So which is it? ;-)

But you (perhaps unknowingly) hit the nail on the head:

People used to do things like that, they used to sit camping or have some other presense in SecondLife while they worked, or slept or something. That is how many of them earned their Lindens to afford your sofa. The effect was also that the grid was not a ghost town, so when a noob entered the scene, they saw others they could ask "how can I make money". 

Now people don't need to do that. They just sign up, hit the marketplace in the viewer, and go spending for free! With direct delivery, they don't even need to rezz anything – coming to a viewer near you any day now – another incentive less for owning land. This free spending spree gets old very fast, so they leave bored. 

Hey, did you know that at the rate LL takes daily signups, the SL population takes on over 5.8 million new accounts every year, while at the same time, time spent in-world goes down. Concurrency goes down. Go figure!

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Lots of indicators that it's being optimized to minimize in-world activity (more expensive to maintain than web/out-world), a long term plan to take more business from independent ventures with a strong hold on SL, cause maximum spending with LL for minimal resources in-world.

Keep concurrency at or near current levels, amount of sims at their current levels and to coast as usual.

Suspecting that it's unrealistic and too costly to scale in-world resources, so rather than solve the problem, there's just enough forward momentum to add features that come with accompanying new sinks and costs.

I tend to relate the Marketplace to that formula as well. Enough free and low cost to keep it hopping, balanced so that merchant profit is a spread rather than features that work on the individual level.

LL comfort zone, profit is good, size is acceptable, slow phases to more control and more costs.

I don't see real growth anywhere in that formula. Growth isn't necessary. Would love to be proven wrong.

 

[Madeliefste Oh]

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Gavin Hird wrote:

 

With all the free stuff around on the marketplace, that amount can stay right where is was when they first signed up – at ZERO. So no money enters the system. 

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When I first signed up, i didn't buy L$ either. I first wanted to get a clue what this whole thing was actually about. And while I was getting it, I also found out that you didn't need to invest to get money. There were a lot of posibilities for residents at the beginning of their SL carrier to make some money. There were money trees, there were camping spots, there were free xploders and apart from that is was not difficult to find a paid job, almost every club was looking for dancers. 

Specialy camping was attractive, because you could make a good som of money with it. I paid for my first skin, hair, etc. with money I made with camping. I also paid my texture uploads with it. And after a few weeks I started my first shop in SL. I had to camp for 8 hours a week to be able to pay for the rent. But I also started making textures for people. And soon enough I didn't depend on camping anymore to pay for my shop rent. I simply could make more by making custome textures for people. 

I think that removing camping from the grid has had a big influence on the long tail of the market. The majority of the SL residents are not willing to spend any real money in SL. In those day when it was so easy for new residents to make some small amounts, there was a large newbie market to sell to. Because even the people that didn't bring in money, made at least money roll.

By forbidding camping LL cut of a piece of this long tail.. that part of the market where small guys make small bucks. When a happy camper in 2007 or so was willing to pay 20 L$ for a funny t-shirt, but this funny shirt started to loose it's value, when this easy way of money making for newcomers was no longer around.

It is the biggest group of residents there is: the people who don't put rl money in SL. But when there are ways for them to get some money in hands, that money will be spent. When this possibility is taken away, no money will be spend any longer in the segments of the market that were attractive for newcomers and freeloaders in advance.

Or people had to improve their products to be able to reach a different kind of audience, or they could as well stop selling and just give their stuff away, because nobody seemed to want it anymore.

Now here we have the beginning of the story of a lot of freebies. Not only a lot of stuf became worthless because nobody wanted to buy it anymore, because the source of income from their target group dried up due to LL, but also people had to find other ways to attract traffic. Giving away freebies is a widely adopted marketing strategy by merchants as a way to attract traffic to their parcel.

And actually I see no difference between no money entering because people are hunting for freebies in world or no money entering because they take freebies them from the marketplace. The netto result for the economy is exactly the same.

 

[Rene Erlanger]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

>Josh - you don't expect me to read your Story? You have my messages mixed in with yours, without any paragraphs. Learn to use the "Quote" button and write in short sentences or use paragraphs. I have tried and failed to reformat that, but I'll certainly get it done before I expect you to respond in any serious way, which is only reasonable. The quote button is still producing error messages, the other format functions are still gone, and I still don't know why this interface has changed when I haven't done anything to change it. OTOH, it's not the first time I've been met with such weird kinds of "coincidences" when saying something critical of LL.

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Try one of the other Browsers...I'm using Firefox at the moment with none of your issues. I know Chrome is able to handle it. I haven't tried it on Opera as yet..... and try to avoid using I.E

[Gavin Hird]

The problem with your analysis is two fold:

 

1. Linden Lab hardly owns any content at all. Take the content creators out of the equation and it all crash and burns.
2. With no incentive for content creators to pay for the sims, Linden Lab's (almost entire) source of income dries up very fast

[Gavin Hird]

The net effect is not the same, because it keeps concurrency low and therefore new signups (16k per day) largely find a ghost town, where there before were campers (and such.) – So they leave, never to return. – Over 5 million per year turn their backs within the first hour. 

I agree that getting rid of camping was a big mistake. 

[Rene Erlanger]

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Madeliefste Oh wrote:

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Rene Erlanger wrote:

 

You make out Marketplace is some sort of new phenomena....i'd like to remind you we could buy items offline and have them delivered (or at least place in "Favourite" folder to buy later) as far back as 2006 with SL Exchange. The only difference between the the two, is that LL owns MP and promote it in their official Viewers which naturally they never did for SLEX.

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No no, this is not the only difference and certainly not the most important. To be able to shop on Slex you had to put money in your slex account. So you had to go to these terminals first subscribe there, put money in your account, before you could buy anything on slex. Though slex was populair, it was something you only discovered when you were around for a while in SL.

And because the marketplace doesn't need subcription, shopping online became possible for all residents in stead of only a group who was willing to subscribe.

Now the most important difference is, that a shopper doesn't have to create a shopping wallet at the marketplace first before he can buy there. They can simple use the availabe amount on their account to shop, both for in world and on marketplace. 

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Ahh yes, i forgot about those ATM Terminals and putting money into SLEX....my bad! :matte-motes-bashful-cute:

Aside from that very important factor ....imo SLEX was the better shopping website.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Didn't say it made sense, it's not my model

But they do own 5% of income from web sales. I'd expect the next phase to include in-world sales after Direct Delivery is done, the mechanisms are now there for LL owned/operated vendors (something sadly I suggested they do in a former life).

Agree there isn't enough incentive to own land, unless you're finding ways to make it more attractive for pure consumers to own land rather than merchants and land barons.

Then again, if you're willing to accept that SL has a shelf life of another 5 years while you explore alternative new products, it's a plan.

[Madeliefste Oh]

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Gavin Hird wrote:

The net effect is not the same, because it keeps concurrency low and therefore new signups (16k per day) largely find a ghost town, where there before were campers (and such.) – So they leave, never to return. – Over 5 million per year turn their backs within the first hour. 

I agree that getting rid of camping was a big mistake. 

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Yeah, getting rid of camping keeps the concurrency low. But how do freebies on the marketplace keep the concurrency low?