wrable Amat Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 mine was slow for about a month (Jan) and came back x 2 the past 2 months. Most my products are sold under my partners name as she likes to DL all the numbers every month and track every thing. I never own much land or have much of a MP shop as I am way to lazy lima bean to deal with it all..... that is why I love scripting..every one I meet has a need for me and has no problem giving me a % of their sales if I bring them to life..over the years it has serve me well but I will say I feel sorry for every one invested in land or have hours and hours and hours of MP labor to keep their producs up in the selling ranks. I duno why........I just know I like chicken!!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pamela Galli Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 wrable Amat wrote: mine was slow for about a month (Jan) and came back x 2 the past 2 months. I duno why........I just know I like chicken!!!!! Which months were those now? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wrable Amat Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 last month and the start of this month have been awsome. Jan was really slow for me.and yes..it is the 5th..so that would be consider a 2nd month..I never said "complete full 30 day months..." I have done more by the 5th of this month then I did in half of Jan. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pamela Galli Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 Ah. So closer to one month than two. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madeliefste Oh Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 A point is also that you have much more competition now then five years ago. I did a bit of research on this and found these figures: 2007: total businesses in SL 42.597 2010: total businesses in SL 64.651 More recent figures are not available, but I guess the number of businesses is still growing, while the hours spent online by all residents are declining. The number of items for sale grows and grows. When every merchant releases one item per week and it comes in for example 3 color variations or permission variations, this means about 200.000 new items available per week for customers. In this pile of new goods your item is burried soon. Not even to mention the items that are available already and that have gained visibility on the marketplace or by being rezzed in many places in world. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anaiya Arnold Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 I represent scenario two. I have very low sales of mostly low value items. I paid for my first year of subscription am in my second, have enough to pay when I come up for newel, have cashed out once already and will cash out again soon. I'm not putting money in and am cashing out and I have low sales volumes of mostly low value items. If LL is counting on scenario 2, I'm not convinved that's overly smart of them. Accounts like mine are a nice little bonus, but no replacement for sim holders. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zanara Zenovka Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 Luna Bliss wrote: Scenario 1 - Take a content creator like you or me Pamela, with say one full sim (I know we both have more). Scenario 2 - Compare that to say 30 or 40 creators living in Linden homes and paying premium tier to LL. The people in Scenario 1 are sucking money out of the game each month (LL is sending us a paycheck) while Scenario 2 people never take money from the game. ........LL wants the Scenario 2 people. Lindex transactions are user-user. LL takes a cut anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luna Bliss Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 What I'm saying is that I think LL believes it's more advantageous for them to attract a lot of people paying tier vs a few businesses paying for full sims and taking a lot of money out of the game. For one ,forty residents living on one sim in a Linden home gives them 600 usd a month for that sim (if premium tier is 15 a month), whereas private sims only gives them 200 or 300 usd. That's less maintenace cost for the sim, and less customer support issues (us oldbie rabble-rousers are much more demanding). Second, to fill up these Linden home sims they need residents who feel confident they can at least earn a little money, and if not motivated by creating and selling they certainly are motivated by purchasing our content AS CHEAPLY AS POSSIBLE. So, when larger businesses reduce the possibility of new residents making any money (by taking it out of the game rather than redistributing the wealth in-world), and when they don't sell content cheaply, then it reduces the chance Linden home residents will stay in the game - paying LL the highly valued monthly tier. Hence there simply is no benefit for LL to support people who want to develop a business beyond a hobby level, or to develop their content creation skills to higher levels - and maybe this is why businesses receive little support here and why businesses with sims aren't really valued anymore. Perhaps the hemorrhaging of sims is of no concern to them as long as Linden home sims are increasing - didn't they add about 80 the other week? Does anybody else have some ideas why LL doesn't support in-world stores and seem concerned that sims are being lost at an alarming rate? I think LL believes they have all the content they need, and then some - merchants who take business seriously here are of no value anymore. If we were, wouldn't they put more than one person working on the code for the Marketplace? Wouldn't they have more support staff for the MP? Wouldn't they advertise in-world stores too? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zanara Zenovka Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 I get what you're saying Luna, and I don't discount it all - I just don't think LL care who their customers are, as long as people are joining and staying and paying money. The more money that moves in and out, the more they make. And a healthy economy has people at all levels, rich/poor, old/new etc, and as with many SL issues, I really don't think they think about it that hard - as long as there's stuff for people to do and things for them to buy, they don't care about the details. If anything I think the reason there would be more focus on newer arrivals would be precisely because they are new. They've already got us. We're the fat old spouses sitting at home who ain't going anywhere - they don't have to dress up for us. It's the pretty new things whose attention they're trying to keep Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pamela Galli Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 Yes, they take a pretty significant cut when I cash out -- and this is after they have already taken a cut out in MP commissions and tier, etc. LL is getting a nice chunk of change from me. But they still let me keep even more, so I am okay with that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ilyra Chardin Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 The SL metaverse is a microcosm of the real world (with a twist, of course *grins*) But still, it does mirror the economic conditions in the real world. When RL land was in a bubble, so was SL's and the land business buying was booming. It's not surprising that sim ownership counts are lower (statistics posted by someone else on another thread.) They're merely a reflection of the external real estate market. The world-wide economy a) fluctuates and b) is not doing well. So why would you expect it to be any different in world? When the external economy is doing better then people have more money for leisure and can invest more in things like SL. And even i good economic times, markets fluctuate. Sales will ebb and flow depending on the time of year, the type of products, etc. As for LL's push towards MP over in world stores, they're getting a cut of every sales transaction. MP is set up so that just about anyone can put products out as long as they have a spot to put their magic box (which could be a linden home, a rental plot or their friends' sim. And a lot more people have entered into that market than had ever set up in world stores because they can be a merchant on MP with little investment - more so because there is little to no governance of MP. There is a percentage of merchants who are not content creators at all and are merely selling those freebie full perm (or at least copy / trans) items that they've picked up along the way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wrable Amat Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 I agree with Zanara that most of this is played by ear and they are no at one end calculating which move will cause the most mass anger. here today gone tomorrow..who knows how long this will be around,count your blessings if you have 5 years of profit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zanara Zenovka Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 Yes, 3.5% of every cashout, plus 5% of MP before that - and that's cash income. As Josh pointed out (yes, heavens to Betsy, I'm agreeing with Josh) >>Money entering SL gives LL something to play with, but if they may have it pay it back out, it's not really revenue yet. >>In fact, it's essentially debt. They're not actually allowed to treat this as income, not unless they want to end up in a Full Tilt Poker situation Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anaiya Arnold Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 Luna Bliss wrote: What I'm saying is that I think LL believes it's more advantageous for them to attract a lot of people paying tier vs a few businesses paying for full sims and taking a lot of money out of the game. And I am saying I think that's a really, really, silly idea. I convert less than 80 dollars worth of potential earnings into actual Linden Lab income per year. A sim holder converts significantly more potential earnings into actual income for LL every single month, and that's if they only own one sim. By the way, I have no use whatsoever for a cruddy old linden home and would give up my subscription rather than be stuck with one. And subscription is not 10 dollars a month. It's less than half that if you pay by the year and from memory (although I admit I could have this bit wrong) less than 10 dollars a month if you take the most expensive option. I'm not convinced an experienced person running a single sim uses more support than 40 newish and confused members who have access to live chat. Not that live chat offers any identifiable support, but someone has to be paid to tell us to lodge a ticket and I suspect many newer members seek support for issues that the average sim owner can solve on their own. For instance who is more likely to contact support to ask how to get a skin they took off back on? A major creator who happens to sell enough to pay for an entire sim or more each and every month, or a linden home owner who joined a week ago? Most sim owners probably never need support unless something is wrong on LL's end, in which case they'd still have to do something whether it's a private sim that has gone awry or an area holding 40 homes of users who all have access to live support. The only difference there is whether they have to deal with one single, probably technically astute or SL-familiar owner, or 40 probably very confused, probably very SL-unfamiliar, and probably rather newish accounts all with access to live support. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Medhue Simoni Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 Luna Bliss wrote: What I'm saying is that I think LL believes it's more advantageous for them to attract a lot of people paying tier vs a few businesses paying for full sims and taking a lot of money out of the game. For one ,forty residents living on one sim in a Linden home gives them 600 usd a month for that sim (if premium tier is 15 a month), whereas private sims only gives them 200 or 300 usd. That's less maintenace cost for the sim, and less customer support issues (us oldbie rabble-rousers are much more demanding). Second, to fill up these Linden home sims they need residents who feel confident they can at least earn a little money, and if not motivated by creating and selling they certainly are motivated by purchasing our content AS CHEAPLY AS POSSIBLE. So, when larger businesses reduce the possibility of new residents making any money (by taking it out of the game rather than redistributing the wealth in-world), and when they don't sell content cheaply, then it reduces the chance Linden home residents will stay in the game - paying LL the highly valued monthly tier. Hence there simply is no benefit for LL to support people who want to develop a business beyond a hobby level, or to develop their content creation skills to higher levels - and maybe this is why businesses receive little support here and why businesses with sims aren't really valued anymore. Perhaps the hemorrhaging of sims is of no concern to them as long as Linden home sims are increasing - didn't they add about 80 the other week? Does anybody else have some ideas why LL doesn't support in-world stores and seem concerned that sims are being lost at an alarming rate? I think LL believes they have all the content they need, and then some - merchants who take business seriously here are of no value anymore. If we were, wouldn't they put more than one person working on the code for the Marketplace? Wouldn't they have more support staff for the MP? Wouldn't they advertise in-world stores too? Although you have an interesting theory, there are many things that LL is doing currently that discounts it all. Plus, I can think of quite a few other reasons. Personally, I think it is funny that some people think those that cashout decent amounts of money are some how a drain on the economy. It is the people that cashout the most that create the most valuable products in SL, hence giving the customers the biggest reason to come back. Whatever money those creators take out of SL, is pennies compared to economic activity it spurs. Take any large merchant that works fulltime in SL, and you will find hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller affiliates, or other businesses created from that creator's products. It would almost be impossible for any merchant to get large enough to work fulltime in SL without creating thousands of other dependents. Every single 1 of those dependents are paying their tiers with money generated by that original merchant/creator. The other side, is the cost to LL. If LL had to pay fulltime creators to make things comparable to some of the pricest items in SL, they would be spending a ton of money. Most high end creators in SL spend way more time on their products than any 1 person or company would/could ever pay for that work. The SL merchant is taking on all the risk on whether something sells enough to be profitable at all. This is a big difference than having to pay some1 by the hour to be creative. Plus, things change, and trends change. Just to the cost to keep up would be way more than LL or any company can bare. Heck, just me alone. I've done 5 major updates for 1 AO, and I plan on, at least, a few more. The last update took me almost a full month of work. I know it is worth it tho, and the customers love getting the updates. As far as what LL is doing that contradicts your theory, just look at MESH. How about Pathfinding? LL know's that for SL to move forward, the content has to get better, and more efficient. This will likely bring in more professional content creators, who are definitely going to expect to cashout. When I stated earlier that LL made a conscious decision to market Land more, I was not implying that they were maliciously hurting merchants. I don't really think LL can comprehend how the things they do hurt the merchants. Plus, we basically had 1 CEO in charge when everything was destroyed, and now we have another that doesn't know anything about how things were before. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luna Bliss Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 LOL I like your analogy Zanara. I imagine they do see us in the way you desribed - I'm not sure they 'have us' sitting on the sofa however - many are moving to other grids, and we lost almost 200 sims last week. They need to appeal to the core base more and not just the new shinies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luna Bliss Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 I agree with everything you've said Medhue (that our content is valuable, and that it's important for innovative content to continue to manifest) but I'm not convinced that upper management views it that way. The reason? It doesn't take a lot of content to satisfy residents in Linden homes, and it seems that's what they're gearing up for - making SL into a kind of IMVU of chatrooms with minimal immersive experience (except for the cartoonlands of Linden Realms). Maybe they believe most will abandon the high cost of land and head for opensims anyway, and so see the Linden home experience as the only way to survive financially. Yes the devlopment of mesh and pathfinding seems to indicate otherwise, but there could be other reasons for it - reasons other than a true sign they have a committment to an immersive world - maybe they are only trying to get the $ from sim owners as long as they can and so respond to our requests minimally, or maybe they just think those new shinies are fun to play with. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jamie Cheeky Posted March 7, 2012 Author Share Posted March 7, 2012 I have read all this, I think your right after 5 years of struggling with the shop we have gone from the boom of 2006/7 to it being hard to get your store even visible - that is most definately down to more competition and simply because there are more people in SL willing to put time and effort into a shop - my stock yeah I need to incrrease massively I literally just deleted all the old stock and restarted so point taken on that I will just continue to create. Marketplace is a significant area to market your products and yeah it doesnt encourage people to have in world stores any more. We never used to be on the old xtreet site and we still managed to keep our heads above water so to speak even without that. Now its a necessity if you want to sell anything you NEED to have a store on there. It may be that my island will go soon if some strategies dont work ....unless I am willing to fork out rl money to keep it going and I may just have a plot on someone elses island which is something that would upset me greatly after my partner and I worked so hard for 5 years to get and run an island to then have to get rid of it and literally go back to where we first started and renting from others. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pamela Galli Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 jamie Cheeky wrote: I have read all this, I think your right after 5 years of struggling with the shop we have gone from the boom of 2006/7 to it being hard to get your store even visible - that is most definately down to more competition and simply because there are more people in SL willing to put time and effort into a shop - my stock yeah I need to incrrease massively I literally just deleted all the old stock and restarted so point taken on that I will just continue to create. Marketplace is a significant area to market your products and yeah it doesnt encourage people to have in world stores any more. We never used to be on the old xtreet site and we still managed to keep our heads above water so to speak even without that. Now its a necessity if you want to sell anything you NEED to have a store on there. It may be that my island will go soon if some strategies dont work ....unless I am willing to fork out rl money to keep it going and I may just have a plot on someone elses island which is something that would upset me greatly after my partner and I worked so hard for 5 years to get and run an island to then have to get rid of it and literally go back to where we first started and renting from others. You said your store was "kinda dormant" for 3 years. So you have a balance of 5 years working hard and 3 -- I presume the last three? -- letting your store go "dormant" which I assume means not working so hard. I would not find it surprising at all if I could not support a sim after three years of not tending to my business. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 >Yes, 3.5% of every cashout, plus 5% of MP before that - and that's cash income. >As Josh pointed out (yes, heavens to Betsy, I'm agreeing with Josh) >>>Money entering SL gives LL something to play with, but if they may have it pay it back out, it's not really revenue yet. >>>In fact, it's essentially debt. >They're not actually allowed to treat this as income, not unless they want to end up in a Full Tilt Poker situation I'm as shocked as you are, Zanara, and pleasantly so. The fact that we both see something as working the same way is a pretty good hint that it might be close to being correct. The money is SL is not an LL asset, even if, as intellectual property, some control over it belongs to them in that way. The monetary value of these assets, because it remains in user accounts, is essentially no different from money that bank customers lend to banks, which the banks then lend out while retaining a fractional reserve of deposits (does LL keep a coupla's gold bars handy or sumthin´?). If there were a run on Second Life, like a run on a bank, I have no reason to think they'd be able to liquidate quickly enough or completely enough to pay up all users as consistent with their service agreement. Let's hope that they have their insurance and liability loopholes in order. But if I were a claims adjusted and I were reading everything that Josh Susanto (among others) has pointed out about LL had conducted itself up until the (upcoming?) mass cash-out effort, I probably wouldn't end up feeling especially generous at the end of the process. I like the Full Tilt Poker analogy, Zanara. Enron also comes to mind to me as someone who saw people trapped in elevators due to Enron's shenanigans. Enron basically used a form of accounting that allowed them to show debts as profits. I'm not saying that LL does that. I assume their own accountants are clear on not allowing this effect in legal terms. But users can be easily confused by the way LL financials are reported. Volume of L$ is not how much money LL has; it's how much money they have borrowed for which they still need to provide some kind of value in order to meet their obligations to users. And every time someone puts money into SL that is not immediately destroyed, the proportion of LL's liabilities to LL's assets increases. This is not necessarily good or necessarily bad. In fact, it would seem to be necessary in order for SL to exist and to provide all the value it provides to consumers who choose to use it. But don't let's confuse ourselves about what the real numbers really mean. If the SL economy is big, it's because LL's debt to users is big. What, if anything, exists to be liquidated as necessary, is a totally separate question. How much do you think a bankruptcy auction would pull for a sim on a completely abandoned grid? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Medhue Simoni Posted March 8, 2012 Share Posted March 8, 2012 Actually, there is not debt in the system, outside of the debt created to acquire the original dollar or whatever official State santioned legal tender you are using. You are confusing the standard fiat money system that nations use to what LL is doing. See, when you goto your standard bank for a loan, the money the bank loans you did not exist before you got the loan. The Bank creates the money into existance. This is not at all what LL is doing, nor does it resemble what LL is doing. There need not be any reserves because LL does not act as a bank, just as a means for exchange. When some1 like myself cashes out, some1 else is actually trading me real money for lindens, hence no debt was created. Now, you could argue that the dollar, or what not is actually debt, and therefore the linden is also as a linden can't buy you food or whatnot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ilyra Chardin Posted March 8, 2012 Share Posted March 8, 2012 You can view linden dollars as fiat money on steroids. When SL was established originally, linden dollars were just game money and you could not purchase or sell it. Then residents started buying it from one another and some even began to sell it on ebay. It was an unforeseen, unplanned for side effect. This prompted linden labs to allow the purchase and sale of the game currency. Still TOS referred to and continues to refer to linden dollars as game money, essentially play money. The problem for them is that this supposed play money can be used in lieu of real dollars to pay tier, purchase goods on marketplace, etc. Giving linden dollar exchange rates for real world costs (like server support; i.e. tier) or for virtual goods, means that their "game money" is much more like casino tokens with a legal tender cash value. The problem for everyone else is that this currency is fiat on steroids (because it has no real asset backing,) and the exchange rate is determined exclusively by linden labs. If you're in this to have fun, which is what i am, then this really doesn't matter. I'm not looking to make a real world living in SL. But if you are, it can be a problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pamela Galli Posted March 9, 2012 Share Posted March 9, 2012 Ilyra Chardin wrote: You can view linden dollars as fiat money on steroids. When SL was established originally, linden dollars were just game money and you could not purchase or sell it. Then residents started buying it from one another and some even began to sell it on ebay. It was an unforeseen, unplanned for side effect. This prompted linden labs to allow the purchase and sale of the game currency. Interesting, did not know that bit of history. Something as significant source of income as those fees, and they did not anticipate it. That should tell LL something about the value of studying and observing how the economy works, and taking advantage of opportunities. Should. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted March 9, 2012 Share Posted March 9, 2012 >This is not at all what LL is doing, nor does it resemble what LL is doing Unless all the company's operational costs are all coming out of destroyed Linden money, it is what they are doing. Spending money that also shows as remaining in someone's account is one of the things that banks do, although they also lend out imaginary money, ostensibly backed up in some fraction by whatever money in the accounts is actually in the bank's temporary possession. Do you want me to believe that all of LL's operational costs are coming out of destroyed Linden money? Why should I believe that? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zanara Zenovka Posted March 9, 2012 Share Posted March 9, 2012 Ilyra Chardin wrote: When SL was established originally, linden dollars were just game money and you could not purchase or sell it. Then residents started buying it from one another and some even began to sell it on ebay. It was an unforeseen, unplanned for side effect. This prompted linden labs to allow the purchase and sale of the game currency. Interesting - do you have a reference for that? I'd been looking for some L$ history and havent been able to find anything. Altho entertainingly enough, I did manage to find this Wired summary of SL from 2006, which, apart from the outdated figures, is still uncannily accurate overall. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube
Flickr
Recommended Posts
Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now