Madeliefste Oh

Abby10 Lenroy wrote: Nobody looks at the RL markets to try to compare them with the SL markets. Let me explain: People that play Second Life are humans. These humans have jobs. These jobs bring money. Now, with the real world economy in the recovery mode(depending which case) the unemployment rate goes down. People have less money to spend for VW's because they need to cover the costs of the real world in order to survive the real world to be able to play in a virtual world. With the inflation, things cost more. And the more the food costs, the more you need to spend, the more you take out of your SL budget to cover the basic needs. I am not saying it's their fault and I am not saying it's not their fault. If your sales are low, i dont think you can blame LL for it. Look in the RL, and see whats going on there. Because once again, IT IS the Real Life economy that fuels the Second Life economy. But the strange thing is that other virtual worlds do grow during this RL economy. For example IMVU grew more then 600% during the last three years. Habbo Hotel grew significant as well. So, I doubt it's just the RL economy that causes the stagnation of SL. I can be a factor that plays a role, but why is that SL is suffering from the RL economy while other worlds are not? There must be more factors, than just the RL economy. A remarkable difference between IMVU and SL is that IMVU is advertising her world, you see them on many sites when you browse the internet for virtual world related content. But do you ever see an advertisement for SL? Another factor is that LL still did not find a way to bind people once they have signed up. There are about 10.000 new residents coming in each day, but still the concurrency is not growing. This simply means that people don't stay.

Thanks for the possibility to sign up for a testing program, Brooke. I'm glad to see that you are going to take time to test this new delivery program before you release it for the complete marketplace. To me it looks decent with the alpha on a test server and the beta on the actual marketplace. I'm in doubt about participating or not. On one site I think it's a good opportunity to get prepared for the new system, on the other hand I'm scared to expose my merchandise to possible delivery problems and bugs, I might loose sales or I might get troubles with buyers. I have been in two beta testing programs before and I don't have problems signing a NDA, I had to do this for the other programs as well. But with those other programs I didn't feel I put anything at risk. Actually I hope there are enough people who are willing to take the risk and participate so I can start with using the system when all is solid tested and completely safe to use.

Kuda Oh wrote: So today I decide to mess around with neons I made out of boredom. In one I find a notecard stating an Intellectual Property Complaint. No idea who made the complaint as I did not see any email for it. So I look up on market place, Bacardi neon; and I see 2 listings with a Bacardi neon. Being sold by 2 different people, one just by itself and the other with a Budwieser Chinese dragon neon and a non brand double mug neon. Think one of the two would have filed a complaint on the other right there. Neon I made for myself is the Bacardi bat but in red with out the label on the bat's chest, very plain. Quite a difference there right? Besides I didn't know someone else had made a bacardi bat neon as it was although different in look/style. So I don't know who filed the complaint, was it Bacardi or was it the one of the two who have the same neon listed in marketplace. That is to be seen when ever I get an email response from Linden Lab. Unless you had made a deal with Bacardi that you can use their logo in SL, you are simply not allowed to sell the neon. It is against TOS to upload copyrighted content, unless you have permission from the IP right holder. Same counts for the other two sellers.

What is a NDA?

SECOND WIFE (discover your secret love life)

In one of her posts Brooke wrote about an expected seasonal dip in March. According to stats about user currency I found on Tateru Nino's blog, I must conclude that the sales dip in March is (at least not only) a matter of expected seasonals differences. You can see an overal decline in concurrency since february this year. Next statistic chard shows the median daily user-concurrency, charted by day, from last year. source: Dwell on it The less residents that are active in SL, the less need to buy virtual goods. I hear other people talking about an average of 10.000 people who sign up for a SL account on daily base. But this chard shows that there are more people who stop using SL, than there are people that start using SL. According to these figures we cannot expect that April will be a good sales month again...

It will all depend, Zhoie, on how mesh will be accepted by the community. Wether mesh will be a succes and a competition to existing businesses depends on the power of the masses. When for example only v2 users can see meshes properly and populair 3rd party viewers are not able to support mesh properly, then mesh will only have a low influence in SL. But when all viewers can support it, and the masses will love mesh, well in that case you will loose a lot (of not all) of your business. In this stage it's just speculations and gambling, cause we don't know yet if the majority of the SL participants will love mesh or find it not intesting at all.

Babel Translation (from Peter Stindberg) did some good translation jobs for me in the past.

I have never heared that LL takes content down because of IP policy when they did not receive a dmca from the legit holder of the IP right. In your case it might be an agent of the movie compagny who filed this dmca. When you file a counter dmca you are not only giving them your name and adress, you also must state that you consent to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which you reside (or San Francisco, California if your address is outside of the United States). And state that you will accept service of process from the person who provided notification to LL. When I was in your shoes I would not take the risk to be taken to court by a movie compagny. It might end with you loosing much more money then you ever made by selling those gestures.

Entschuldigen Sie :smileysurprised:

Vielen Dank für das Kompliment, Herr Yardley :smileyhappy:

I became a merchant, but by heart I'm a creator. The part I love most about being a merchant is the creating of new products. I love the whole proces from getting an idea, starting to work at it, making choices, and the actual creating, seeing the item grow under my hands. I'm intensive involved in this proces, but when it comes to an end, I must watch out not to loose my interest. With a fair 95% of my creations I manage to bring them so far that they can become a product in SL. The rest is sitting somewhere on my computer waiting to be picked up again, one day.... (for most of them this day never arrives). Once you have made the object it's just a little trouble to start selling your object. But for me the most things that have to do with selling the products are the dull part of the story. I'm not a merchant because I love being a merchant, but I became one because I love to create and discovered that people are willing to pay for my creations. But the actual work that comes with selling, like packing the boxes and setting permissions, list your merchandise on the marketplace, sending out group notices about the new product and so on, what I like less about being a merchant. I do it, because I know it helps to bring in money. But what I on the other hand like about being a merchant is the part of customerservice. I like to hear from my clients, whether it is to hear how they love the product, didn't receive the object, have questions or need support or give feed back about the product, it's all okay for me. Customerservice interests me because it is about how people relate to your product. I learn a lot from it and often enough it gives me a feeling of pride and satisfaction.

A few days ago I received a message from the SL Business Mailing list. The message is not written by LL, but by a third party (Sitearm). Basicly the mail is a lobby to get more RL business interested to participate in SL. It sums up the advantages of SL for RL business. Among them are some expressed in the following paragraph: "Another factor is that Linden Lab seems to have gotten Second Life technology done right. That is, with the appropriate balance of performance versus resource demand necessary to run the product on a normal computer and be connected in a 24.7 “cloud” world. Competitors have yet to develop a working alternative that comes close to the Second Life server engine and thin client technology combination. And, lord knows, competitors are trying. Linden Lab also has developer tools built into the public Second Life package for free use by all. This means that, while LL provides the platform, residents provide the content. And there are a lot of residents; skilled, savvy, and creative. No 3D Web competitor with a proprietary developer kit can compete – the cost to try to privately clone SL’s “free labor pool” is out of reach." (for the whole message see: Sitearm blog) So that is how we are promoted to RL businesses, as a free labor pool. How do you as a content creator of SL look upon this?

Hi Dartagan, You name in your list one thing now (advertise on 3rd party websites (blogs, SL magazine, etc.)), while I actually think those are split up in 3 different marktening possibilities. 1. Advertise on 3rd party websites. 2. Advertise in magazines spread in world. Most magazines have an in world and website version. In world magazines are spread in kiosks. These in world magazines are often the first contact with the reader. Because of picking up the magazine from a kiosk people find out about the website version of it. Magazines do not only offer advertisement space on their website, but also in the magazine itsself.The price you pay depends on what page you want your advertisement to show up. It also depends per magazine, the bigger the readergroup the magazine serves the higher the price of advertising in it. 3. Get the SL press interested to write about you. This one is not about advertising, but about free publicity. Bloggers and reporters of magazines need something to write about. Creating press moments and building up contact with bloggers and editors can be very helpfull for your business, specially when you are participating the fashion industry. But also other sectors can profit from the urge people have to write about SL. But as long as they don't know about your business they won't write about it. Let them know about your existance, your new collection, your sim rebuild and so on. But do your homework well before you start inviting press people, and concentrate on those that really relate to what your business is about.

Sassy Dirval wrote: How long did it take everyone else to place their first order for $L ? I'm here for 4 years now, and still have to place my first order :smileytongue: In my newbie days camping was a wide spread way of making money for newbies. I made my first L$ by camping and I was not older then one week when I did spend my first L$ (on hair). I didn't take long before I discovered that my Photoshop skills were even a better moneymaker then camping. While I worked on textures, my avatar was camping to cover the upload costs. What I remember from my first hours, is that I landed somewhere in a training place, where you could do something with a ball. I discovered that you could fly. I flied around a whole time, and then could not find the trainingplace back. I landed somethere where I was alone. Then I discoverd I could shape my own avatar, and I spend the rest of the time of my first visit on moving sliders of my eye size, my head shape, my hands, my legs and so on. It highly fascinated me. My 'dead point' where I easily could have stopped using SL was the second time I came back. I just did not know what to do then flying around a bit more to find the place back where I could learn how this game was played. But I did not find it. I stayed in SL thanks to Google. I had seen a documentairy some time before I first logged in, and I remember I had seen some people talking Dutch there (my language). I used Google to find out about this, and Google brought me to a Dutch SL forum. There I found out about Dutch places in SL and how to get there. And at those places I made my first friends. I found people very willing to help you with your first steps in SL. They thought me all, from how to IM to how to TP and how to use search, how you could make start up money with camping, where you could find free skins, clothes, hair, shoes, and so on. While I was camping I could amuse myself with digging out my inventory. I could fit the free clothes, hairs, shoes, I had found and make outfits and put those in a folder. Dressing up my avatar could keep my attention for hours. Apart from other people who are absolutely number 1 on the list of reasons 'why to stay in SL?', the second thing that made me stay was this possibility to dress and finetune my avatar. I was not aware at the moment, but when I look back now at this period, I think something very important has happened while I was playing with the looks of my avatar. At psychological level it was a proces of accepting the avatar as being me. Not that I tried to make a RL look-a-like, not at all. But the distance between the 'unknown puppet' that is the visual presentation of my account and myself became smaller, while I invested time to make this puppet my own. In stead of looking at is as 'I play with a puppet called Madeliefste Oh' I started thinking 'I am Madeliefste Oh'. Isn't that an important factor to keep you involved?

Another one: - banners on SL related websites with link to your IW store.

Brooke Linden wrote: March experienced an expected seasonal dip and some shift in purchase dynamics resulting from the maturity related changes. Hi Brooke, Would you be so kind to publish your years schedule with the expected seasonal dips and peaks, please. We have never heared before that LL expected seasonal dips. Until LL stopped giving us figures about the economy all we heared was: sales in this quarter were all times high.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: Betty, you can offer 800% Refund to your Customer that accidently bought the same product twice - most often because of a SLM Delivery delay... more power to you on that if that is how you want to run your business. When I have two sales right behind each other of the same (full perms or copy) item, I always check what happened. Sometimes the customer buys the same item as a gift. When it's not a gift I IM the customer with the open question "I saw you purchased item X twice. Did something go wrong with the purchase?" The answer I get 95% of the time is: I accidently declined the item when I received it in world. Also striking is that the majority of people don't ask you for a refund, because they see this as their own fault. Still I do refund them for the double purchase. I choose to refund them 100% and consider the 5% I loose on the item as expenses for my customer service. People highly appreciate this and not seldom become repeat buyers.

You could also add: - (advertise in) SL magazines - SL Bloggers

I have the idea that the 'all time sales' is a factor of weight now, while it was not before. For example, I have sold quit a lot Christmas ornaments in oct/nov/dec. Now those pop up above some items that did well in the last few weeks. But recent sales (last few days) come up even higher.

The idea is not to blacklist the banks, Innula. The idea is to ask Dutch banks to block payments to and from those illegal gambling sites. It's on volunteery base, the banks can choose to cooperate or not.

It has not much to do with SL, Vick. Fred Teeven want to earn more money for the government by allowing 'controlled gambling'. Now he needs some measures to get rid of the competition from sites abroad. 'But the aim is to allow playing Poker in 'sportkantines' and such. See also: NRC_TeevenPoker

Peacock Park/162/235/62/

Well actually the marketplace takes 5%, but sinds there are no half L$ LL rounds it in their own advantage.

I have put in in the 'links of intrest' sticky. I think it belongs there :smileyhappy: