Dartagan Shepherd

I just finished reading an article that detailed the continued decline of a what once was a profitable business model here in SL. Said establishment had been in SL since 2004. Rather than excessively blame SL, they were rather thoughtful in explaining their situation, and how their closing here came to pass. Article here: http://elfclanvr.grouply.com/message/2233 It points to all of the key elements that are root causes to the slow decline of Second Life. A Marketplace that never needed to be owned by Linden Lab (whether this truely serves as a sink, or ways to cash in on L$ or use it to pay employees salary or bonuses), thereby destroying not only many in-world businesses, but also leads to the decline of land sales and tier. It also ripped the potential for users to establish profitable commerce ventures of their own. Increased and obtuse Land impact (previously called Prim Equivanlency) costs to serve as more sinks, thereby taking more money away from users, and further decreasing Merchants profit margins. Scripts have nothing to do with prims. Size has nothing to do with prims. Your lack of hardware resources that you provide for sims have something to do with the impact of prims and their "cost" to the user. A flat "pro" fee on top of a premium account would have scratched your profit itch alongside a very modest upload fee. Reference the original article pointed to here to see how even L$10 uploads impact some of your merchants to the tune of hundreds of dollars. Yes you need to store larger files with Mesh, so be it. For $30/month for a pro account and a L$10 upload sink, you can find a way to afford it. Repeated attempts to participate in the economy yourselves always fails. (Again, reference the included link.) This latest land sale resulted in roughly 600 new sims for LL. Land barons are not happy, ACS removed nearly 200 sims. Expect this to bite you more as time goes by. Or go whole hog and reduce an already rediculously priced tier down to something reasonable for what people actually get. $300/month is outrageous. Don't fire-sale it, lower the price across the board and create more opportunity, not less. And upgrade the hardware while you're at this, please. A $195 setup and $100/month fee should buy a sim on a dedicated machine at your level of purchasing power. It may not pay as many employees, but then again you don't need so many that don't get their hands dirty with the job of direct maintanence and development. Commodity #2 Despite these high costs and excessive sinks you continue to decline. Note this is not a sky is falling post, but you do need to start taking notice and action at this stage. Adding features will not help unless they directly relate to the core product, which is one of your key commodities. People bought into SL as it existed for the most part in the 2006-2007 era. A couple of examples. Lag is often explained away as opposed to games because games are downloaded, pre-rendered content. Then solve this ... once I go to a sim and download the content it should be as fast as a game. If that slows down travel from region to region, bite it on this one. Surely you can get where I'm going with this ... there's room for speed improvement if you change the way you're handling this. Longer download times and pre-processing may break the illusion of contiguous and immediate spaces, but will lead to smarter choices and longer times spent in places travelled to. Development. The limits on memory, the amount of data able to be transferred into/out of SL is rediculous. Improve the scripting. After 10 years, you should have had a nice little object oriented, stable scripting language capable of developing some pretty sophisticated applications and open pipes to data and various formats. Stop being so stingy, I feel like I'm developing MUD scripts back in 1992. Go Diku. MUSH code and MUF were better at this 15 years ago, and had less of a memory footprint. The UI. Just ... ugg. Think game. Think fun. Product managers who know product design dictating to coders, not coders writing for end users. I got behind Viewer2 with open arms. It's still more beastly than any enterprise application on my machine. Commodity #1 The People. You're not listening. At all. You kind of do, piecemeal, but for the most part, majority says you don't get it after 10 years. Boiled down it relates to the above. Make what works work better. Stay out of the economy. Lower prices. Make people who are here happier to be here. When they get happier they tell more people. Stop getting involved in the world. When your employees want to come up with lots of bright ideas on how to make this thing even cooler? ... Stop them and tell them to get back to work at either keeping things running or get back to developing. People are here because the most amount of people are here. You have history to fall back on, with worlds that have come and gone and why they didn't work or stagnated. A dozen VRML worlds, Blue Mars, There. Are profiles the next big thing? I tend to think no, they weren't worth the effort, or a particularly brilliant idea to try to capture social networking aspects, yet you blew money on this. No one asked for them. Learn from your mistakes. Ad placement on the Marketplace is even remotely important when core features don't work? Bring back banners and call it done, and focus on the functionality. Don't spam google. Don't face-tweet product listings. Just make it work. Users outside of SL don't buy SL goods and users inside of SL don't need your help selling and advertising it if goods get displayed, searched and delivered properly. The in-world experience is the most important aspect of your product, the people who populate it would go elsewhere quickly if enough other people were there to dance with them and buy their goods, the resentment comes from a lack of interest in your core product and your true commodities, which are few and simple to focus on. After that's done, think about re-branding. Second Life sends a message to outsiders not into virtual worlds that we're a bunch of losers who can't cope with first life. Try reading blog comments by non-SL users sometime, it's the majority response. Go. Do.

Sorry Pam, heheh. Still believe in SL and the potential, we're not nearly done yet. Tried to get behind it 100%, stay positive and I think buy them some time to work out the kinks. Problem is that the big payoff never really happened. And it was getting "really" hard to advocate a moving target with no backup on the delivery. Ready to shave those legs and don that cheerleader outfit at a moments notice, if they can get this thing on track though!

Can understand about the lack of thrill about the game aspect of it. The plus there is that no matter what side of the fence you're on whether SL is like a game or isn't, the practical application comes down to the fact that no one out there has experience that's more closely related to SL than people with game industry experience. It's a 3D world, it has all the same basic elements of a game. On the technical side it has all of the same issues. Even we users are more akin to players as a whole mind you, not just the merchant/customer aspect of SL, than say an online marketplace. So those people at top levels are a perfect fit. Agree with you that we need someone with serious online marketplace experience. We actually did have one, ex Pink Linden came to us from eBay. Not sure that she was high up in the scheme of things over there, but she seemed like a fit, and aside from that whole listing fee thing, most people seemed to agree that she had a handle on what merchants needed, and she and M seemed to be on the right track there. Don't know what happened there, when they let all those employees go, Pink went with them. There might have been good reason. One of the problems is that no matter how good that commerce leader might be, if they can't get the people who build the software to do their job and provide the tools swiftly and meet the kind of needs merchants have, it's going to be more hurry up and wait. Also, the supply and demand thing requires steady growth. Not another boom, one of our own wrote a great blog post about what we need is linear growith with new users, not exponential growth. I think she nailed that bit perfectly and had some great insights there. I don't remember the name of the person or blog offhand, but absolutely worth the read. With you on the "Farmville" thing, although there's a big draw to that kind of simulation environment. Those kind of virtual goods on the rise still, so that's great to tap into. Although if they try to "own" too much of the "game", they'll close the doors on user opportunity and continue to decline, not quite comfortable that they understand that. And they'll never compete going head to head with "game" ... SL just isn't that and it's done much better elsewhere for far cheaper to the end user. And aside from things like WoW, the shelf life is shorter. Their greatest strength is a "share the wealth" strategy, but they need to get how to pull that off, rather than come up with new sinks and an outdated economy that serves to take away wealth from their users. They don't quite seem to get that their users don't consider it an exceptional value. Maybe they're seeing the light a bit after their weekend of discount sales on regions. But in the end, no on can justify a $1k setup and a $300/month fee for a region that doesn't come with a dedicated machine, while out of the other side of their mouth they talk about overtaxed resources, script limits, mesh limits, etc. What resources? Stuffing regions on machines like sardines aren't resources and most of their customers know that. So they'd have to be less greedy and bite it on less of a profit margin on the hardware. All of this contributes to drawing in more users ... if you want to hook the gamers, or Farmville, or Facebook or modern mobile users, you can't throw these kind of price tags at them ... they won't bite. Or the lack of value for dollar, or the multiple ways SL has of parting you from your real or virtual money. Less greed, more value, more service, cooler tools that sing and dance. And lower entry cost on regions, forget mainland parcels, let them have their $99 limited regions without needing to own full regions ... that's where you get to stuff a whole bunch of them on sub-par machines. Land barons are capable of providing the smaller parcels on their own without mainland. That means more sales for merchants, more sales for them. You'd think with a board that knows money makes the world go 'round, they'd get that money makes "this" world go round for us as much as them, but that seems to elude them in favor of some experimental management and culture. Screw their culture, get some managers that dictate product requirements and deadlines and find people that can code to those deadlines or show them the door, plenty of companies out there in the world make this happen with less employees. Pretending you're in logistics or manufacturing would help, where if you don't get something from point A to point B on time, you don't get paid. Or that if you get an order for X amount of widgets and you don't deliver those widgets on time, you don't get paid. Absolutely shameful that users just raised $5k to get an "ex Linden who's not quite an ex" to get him to code what LL should have listened to and done themselves for mesh stuff, not sure if you followed that. Those poor saps parting with even more of their money to cover ineptness. Sims had commerce in a way sure, but this should be a more unique model than the Sims by far, and it is. With you a thousand percent on tools, give people ways to re-sell, afilliates, partner stores, support for partners, multiple storefronts, auctions, reporting and tracking, marketing and merchants will do what they do best, but before we can get there, we have to get past the quirky bits of a company that just can't develop the tools in a timely manner, or get a handle on what their customers want. Nix the concept of self governed "teams" at LL. If these people were managers they'd be managers not peers and wouldn't be working at LL, they'd be doing well ... management stuff at some other company. There's good reason for a difference between mooks and managers, mooks mook and managers manage. This isn't rocket science. No offence to mooks who make things work. And then let the world know once you've got the tools that you can come here and sell everything from your real life product to your virtual goods. They'd double their revenue in a year. But don't even try it without being able to deliver on the tools, you'll just flush money down the toilet, you can't fool the new generation for long with hurry up and wait ... they don't wait for anything.

Oh, the first one being our fearless founder, Phil Rosedale ... you know, the one that did the white knight thing and appeared to fire M. Linden just moments before he was supposed to give a speech at SLBB. Said savior then proceeded to go on about ushering in a new era of "Fast, Easy and Fun", which equated to a return as a CEO for a few months. My translation: Damage control over Viewer 2. Damage control for allowing a CEO to over spend. Failure to back some good ideas with a real budget or to back basically a good marketing guy with a real marketing budget and getting him to stick to what he's good at. After a few months of presumably telling employees to get back to work on lag and sim crossings, (shouldn't they have been doing this all along?), firing a third of employees and forgetting this forward momentum idea, fades away in the distance leaving us technically CEO-less for a bit until Rod appears (who I happen to like as a pick as well). Fearless founder then goes back to work on this concept of the Love Machine to what I believe is now called Coffee & Power ... a cafe in San Francisco where people who work on software projects bring their own laptops and work there or remotely on software that he basically reaps the lions share of the sales on. Or so it would appear. At one point and probably to this day LL works on Love Machine mechanics (ex partner/founder Corey says Love Machine was his brain child though) where employees can "pay" other employees "love" based on peer evaluation. The beauty of this little venture (Coffee & Power) is that people get to pick micro-jobs, if you earn enough trust you kinda-sorta get a budget that you can hire others to do jobs that relate to the product(s) that need developing. In the real world, when you dictate how, when and where people work, they're no longer independent contractors, they're employees and must be treated as such, paid as such, etc. Not so here! Because other people are doing the "hiring" on micro-jobs, no one is an employee, everyone is an independent contractor. Life is good. Factor in some fake currency (because things like pay and escrow are alien concepts) and you've got yourself a way around a bunch of those icky things a normal business has to deal with, which also equate to much less overhead and much more profit. And people who do the work make much less than say a 40 hour week. Or perhaps some make much more. Most likely the majority make much less. Kind of like SL. Not to say this is in any way illegal, people get their W-9s and technically all would seem above-board. In a time when we need jobs and companies that provide jobs though, well. You can also be peer eval'ed right out of a job. All the job security of a one night stand. In one interview he says this is good for some projects but not for something like SL. This fast and loose approach doesn't work for serious software projects. In a later interview he says he's going to incorporate more of this into SL, because well ... it's good. Or maybe because you don't have to pay people quite so much or classify them as employees. Or something. Could go on an on an on, it gets good enough that you just can't make this stuff up. Although it is the biggest reason that I don't place the blame on the employees or the CEO, all employees need is proper structure and guidance. Not ways to figure out how to get everyone else to do all the work, provide all the content and create an environment where those who do the most get rewarded the least. A lemonade stand approach would bring in more users and create better software. Or create shopping cart software that worked, because you have people that answer to managers that aren't buddies on the same team. Thankfully we've got a new board member who also gets this virtual world game/stuff, check out http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/10/will-wright-joins-the-board-of-linden-lab.html Please, Will ... vote no to bone-headed-ness, and yes to traditional corporate know-how. And stop your CEO's from pet projects ... it only sidetracks them and gets them fired. And remember, creating opportunities for the most amount of people gets the most amount of users. You want success stories, it's what got SL on the map in the first place, the lure to make a buck. Your merchants are the key to your future, not your creativity space, as awesome as that is. Done now I think, whew.

Meanwhile, the ones that need firing can't be fired. As in, take the crowdsourcing ideology from SL, start a company that develops software in a way that said person admits is not good for enterprise level stuff, also includes fake currency, and a few months later then turns around and says they may implement these methods into SL in an even greater way. Or sitting on the board of a "free" software entity but yet the companies invested in hold oodles of patents, all in the name of freedom. Being a tad sarcastic, business is business, but therein lies the root of the problem with mutant crowdsourcing dreams and the problem with veering away from business methods that have proven to serve well for over a hundred years. Welcome to the 99%, micro-payments, fake currency, no benefits, no recourse and a jobless future. Now that I've got that out of my system, back to your regularly scheduled topic.

There is "that", heheh. What constitutes "reasonable". Many aspects of various open source licenses have not been thoroughly tested in a courtroom, as yet either. Here's a can-of-worms type of question ... If all distribution and licensing requirements are indeed met on both ends, and the distribution/duplication fee is actually reasonable, is it legal for SL to charge a 5% commission on top of that? Probably safer to go with a Creative Commons license, which does specifiy sales and intent a bit more, but isn't quite the right tool for the job either, being better suited to Media than code. Safest of all (not legal advice) is probably to word an agreement as simply and clearly as humanly possible, and to keep it short. At least you could probably fall back on intent to some extent, rather than get shot in the foot with legalese on a more sophisticated agreement, at least for SL stuff.

Most open source licensing is horribly mangled in SL. Depending on the license (which mostly covers the way the product is distributed, not used), it may not be right for the original author to distrubute under those terms either. Meaning that it's possible that if the original copyright holder wants the product to be distributed under "different" terms than the GNU license, they need to dual license it. The GNU license in question is probably stating that "this is the way you, and anyone else who uses it, must distribute it". The GNU license doesn't include whether someone sells it or not. It's generally fine to sell a GNU licensed product, the license doesn't specifiy whether it's sold, only that it's distributed under certain conditions. (There are exceptions) As long as the seller is distributing the product under those conditions, then they're probably allowed to sell it. For instance, it must contain the original license, included materials may have to also be under the same license, and there must exist pointers to where the original code is archived so that anyone can obtain it "freely". Technically, they may have to provide that link in the Marketplace ad itself. But again, most likely the original author isn't quite using the license properly either. That's why it's best to have legal advice in these matters. It would almost be safer to come up with your own agreement in some cases than to rely on GNU and open source licensing, but again, a lawyer is the only sure bet.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Ceera Murakami wrote: [..] They show a chart that indicates there were between 5,000 and 10,000 more "Daily Completed Registrations" after May 1, 2011. [..] One thought did cross my mind about all these new user signups ... maybe they're bot-signups used by the Spammer(s) that are constantly harassing the forums? Just thinkin' out loud ... That could very well be too. The CEO did express some distaste and a desire to do something about griefers. Tip for a certain programmer that may have time on their hands related to something I said about the new users that sign up showing in the right margin. As far as I know, new users are automatically signed up for the forums. An enterprising programmer that knows how to screen scrape might be able to verify if that adds up to 10k+ per day signups, if that's the case, or find an approximation of that total. Could be wrong about the auto signup though. Edited to Add: Samplings, not continuous, lest you be DOS'ing.

Didn't quote because it's awkward for me snipping out separate parts with this quote tool. Will absolutely explore blogging and such more, starting to get the point that it's vital, I think. Love the doggie treats idea, agree that was absolutely brilliant, heheh. How many people have pets in SL, right? Also going off on a tangent, but it's great stuff about the RL to SL bits here. LL is so busy with this weird kama sutra love machine thing, freeform management bunch of west coast yahoos coming up with whacky ideas about what a virtual world is and so wrapped up in everything but writing good software that works that they can't see the "real" business picture. Agree that RL sales potentially outweigh sales in SL, but there lies the rub. The whole concept of "second" life rather than an extension of RL is the wrong direction as far as business goes. Amazing how $75M profit can numb a companies vision. Or founders and a board that have this hippie open source mentality or are more interested in micropayments and playing games with fake currency and skirting RL liabilities. The potential alone to expand to both a virtual "and" RL marketplace is amazing. They don't get it though, if we're selling RL goods as well they're not getting a piece? Or that people in SL wouldn't buy RL goods. Or that people wouldn't make use of a marketplace where selling RL/virtual goods would bring in a massive amount of users who'd at least give it a shot along with eBay and Amazon. Here's a for instance: I've done my time in import/export/manufacturing. One way to get something manufactured is to send a CAD or 3D file off to China, approve the prototype and you're in business with a new line of products. So now we've got mesh/3D with something resembling an industry standard (again a whacky implementation and convoluted set of "costs", but so be it). The hook to bring in the world of import/export/manufacturing would be that you can see the product in 3D, meet with clients in a virtual factory, handle the process, save some money and time in prototyping, get your logistics ducks in a row. sell your existing products and off you go. The future of Alibaba in the making (a large marketplace of import/export which was acquired by Yahoo!). The eBay of the future from retail on up. Best they've done on that front is that SL is good for corporate meetings. Saves travel expenses. Here's a cookie for that one. Their idea of merging RL though is getting us to upload pictures of our RL selves that preferably match our avatar pics, or linking our Facebook accounts. How innovative is "that"? Of course none of this would work with SL as-is, any more than an enterprise version of SL worked, it'd have to be less of a toy and more business oriented (and tools, tools, tools that'd need to work.) And that without the games with funny money and RL currency in play. Piece of cake, PayPal for instance now supports micropayments. And without being overly impressed with themselves on pricing. None of this would hurt the virtual merchant one bit, in fact, it'd increase revenue for those selling virtual goods. Might even be more job opportunities for people creating virtual goods that get designs bought by companies producing them as real life goods. They can have that one for free, although if you put this current management and board behind it they'd probably botch it horribly. Plenty more ideas and opportunity where that came from. Keep ignoring and underestimating merchants though with a wide array of RL experience, doing a bang up job of it so far. Those business people you were talking to that were interested in SL? They'd be here in a heartbeat under the right conditions.

All of the links I've had are gone. I believe the raw feed is still available in more limited form, someone had posted a link a few weeks ago, but I don't see references to that in the wiki any longer either. On the plus side, it looks like some USD amounts are there that may not have been before, too lazy to look up prior quarterly reports at the moment, and it's good to see Marketplace gross. On the minus side, there are some residual factors that appear to explain some of the numbers. One is that Marketplace growth of course is going to grow for a couple years after LL acquired it. A monkey could make sales increase for a year or more after it became an LL property. People are slow to adapt, so for the Marketplace revenue to grow is a slow process for quite a long time. Especially when you factor in an increasingly difficult in-world sales environment due to search, old ideas such as malls growing stale, etc. This is still an ongoing element. Another residual effect is that new users don't appear to be new users for the simple reason as above with the Marketplace ... users will continue to create alts to make use of the new names. It'll be a continual process for 2 years for people to snatch up those single names since we moved from first name/last name. I know I've created a handful and we're going to create 2 more for business alts in a week or two. This would explain much of the user growth, the fact that these alts are holding more money in small amounts, increased spending as they outfit themselves with at least the basic non-noob gear and the fact that these alts aren't logged into very often, so I have to wonder how many of these new users are actually alts making use of new names, quite a few I'd imagine. This would explain some of the economic participants increase in the report. Premium accounts increasing may be good, or it may again be attributed to fresh alts taking advantage of a good deal. How it's determined that a unique user is actually new and unique is a mystery. Comments are not turned on for that blog post which may or may not be an indicator of "something". I like to judge whether we're seeing a rash of new users organically, and the forums are one of those indicators. If these new users are in fact a new generation of web-based, short attention span users that don't log in much, there would still be the usual rash of new faces and a surge in noob questions on the forums, which doesn't appear to be more than usual, and much less than other times we've seen an uptick in new faces. The same names in all the forums, although the new forum signups are there everyday which you can see in the right margin where you see logged in users here. Can't think of a more useless stat though than user transactions, every time an afilliate vendor pays out, every time an alt transfers L$ to an alt, etc. If LL even bothers using this for anything, they should stop wasting their time. Of course that's pure speculation, but there it is.

Mickey Vandeverre wrote: oh, and in reverse....have met some people on twitter who sell real life product quite well - variety of things, mostly in home design or art or interior design services and they are fascinated by the creativity that comes from SL and by the marketplace too - all those different products offered. I would imagine that if you had never set foot into a virtual world, browsing through the marketplace to see each niche that someone carved (some quite interesting!) would be intriguing to say the least. A good while back, I had several come inworld to talk about it, and showed them the store....and they really wanted to get involved. But some issues came up that did not present well in public, and I can't exactly smooth those over right now and encourage someone to give it a shot. Which is a huge bummer. That's why I get a little anxious about this tool functioning thing. Waiting. I'm woefully weak on blogging, Twitter and have slacked on social networking such as Facebook and LinkedIn, although we manage Facebook and LinkedIn and paid Google advertising for the day jobs. Might look you up on Twitter for some tips for that and blogging sometime if you don't mind a brain-picking session. Interestingly, a few years back I'd still been selling some woodworked products (lets just say fantasy garden products), as woodworking had been a hobby-turned-business. I still maintain that a couple products that really took off that would do very well by upselling the RL version of the SL product ... meaning to create in SL the products I was producing in RL. They were inexpensive enough to pull that off. But of course, there's the whole privacy and identity thing, and the way it tends to go, I wouldn't risk marring my RL business ventures with some person in SL that decided it'd be fun to trash my RL business. Had hoped to see a lot of that when I first came to SL ... the merging of RL and SL goods, but that hasn't happened in any big way that I know of. In fact, I don't know of an instance of that now here in SL. I think the inhibitor is for the same reasons of privacy, but you would think any hand-made products would be a perfect fit for virtual/RL crossovers. Ah well. But that would fit in with your advice about mitigating risk.

Some elements of sarcasm there sure, but to be blunt, I got the same vibe about the semantics bit that you were trying to force your side as the only right way to handle business. Also got the vibe that your points were challenge-and-response, down to a contest of who makes more money and who's right or wrong. I'm not the best person in the world to play judge, I've had my moments of both sarcasm and brute forcing an opinion too, as you know. Helped myself get over that a bit with my signature, it's a constant reminder that no matter what I say, unless I back it up with fact, that it's just my opinion. Point taken, that no one is perfect, but you're kind of doing it again by singling out the person rather than the content of the opinion. For instance, is one accounting principle as good as another? Does it matter in the end if one person uses one method of business over another? I think that if we were to meet in RL and have a business conversation that none of us would come across as combatant and obnoxious, but you do come across as if you're trying to pick a fight and force people to choose sides, at least to me. And that's ok, for people who aren't thin-skinned, a good debate and some verbal sparring can be healthy, but maybe not ok for a public forum if that's all it's about in every conversation. I actually liked the direction that the conversation was going aside from the tone, I could talk business and theory all day, talking shop does it for me, Poor Mickey here can't keep a thread on topic to save her life thanks to our antics, though. For what it's worth, wouldn't be the same forums without your input, but you don't need to hold a blow torch to someones feet to have a conversation.

Been stewing on this today and had a related conversation with someone today also. Didn't want to appear to be a Mickey groupie (although you're certainly worthy of err ... grouping?), but you know I'm a sucker for a business chat and coffee. This is priceless advice, especially when I hear that people are sometimes instantly and dramatically affected by search and such. Not an anti-SL statement, but putting food on the table (and life in general) should always come first. To that end and back to your topic, I think you're touching on something that might be useful, and that is reusable skills and content. SL is an absolutely awesome business testing ground, and a great place to try out concepts. Perhaps a wise move would be to think about honing skills that translate well to other income. We've got graphics work, which are skills that can be used elsewhere as well as a great place to learn programming for the technically inclined, marketing skills that all merchants tend to learn, branding, etc. The other point is reusable content which can include graphics, but is particularly suited to mesh and 3D. 3D skills and even the content itself is usable for generic sales (turbosquid and friends), game and film content, etc. Local advertising and television is another place to possibly explore for these. Music and DJ skills may also translate to other vehicles. Thanks to your post, I'm kind of brainstorming ways to (with the least amount of work, effort and content) find those things which can be used in the most amount of areas, in and out of SL. As much as I love SL, when it comes to financial security, I have to say that it's best to spread the investment over a wide array of venues, in order to weather the storms of SL change. Thanks for getting those juices flowing, hopes that a merchant forum can one day scratch that business itch more than providing a place to poo where we eat. Yes, Dart said poo.

Not enough to know that a corporation that can buy SL many times over typically operates on a gross profit margin of 10% or so. Couldn't resist, sorry. Also, that the only real place anyone can dictate whether your business should run on profit, is when you have a corporation that doesn't show profit for a number of years that must lose its corporate standing and must be bumped down to personal income or hobby. Or that profit margin is a floating number, which is but a piece of the puzzle. Agree with you here that gross profit outweighs margin. The higher the volume the more wiggle room to trim the fat and play with the margins. Or lay off say a third of employees and still keep on ticking merrily away. There's more safety in that sense in volume than margin. Or lower margins, but higher investments as assets that increase the base worth of a company as opposed to a company with great margin but no assets (who's going to get a loan more quickly here?). Or entrepreneurs that quit their more lucrative day jobs for "feel good" businesses, with low profit margins, high risk, long hours. Businesses are organic beasts. Buy my book!

Oh, didn't know that total, amazing. Glad to see some of the other stats go, like user to user transactions because they weren't indicators of anything but churn. Would love to see real stats, giving dollar amounts. I think it was Chelsea that said something about having to get financials in L$ and how awkward that actually is. I don't begrudge LL a penny of revenue, but as an adult, I would love to see a breakdown of revenue in USD by LL rather than all this fictional stuff. I think it would make for smarter "partners". If it's revenue, call it revenue, don't call it a sink, call it a fee. Just stop handing me this sci-fi novel with financials and give me the bottom lines in real terms. Wouldn't care a bit if they were to disclose that SLM is more profitable than in-world stores, and I think Merchants could work with that more effectively, if they understood the how and the why of it.

Or unless the company that does the actual transactions is a separate company/entity, which I've heard before. Not disagreeing with you that it's not a plain old sink, but to me at least it's pretty unlikely, given that that sinks in an economy you control aren't really needed anyway when you're making profit on both ends of the sale already. That's a pretty thin reasoning, the whole concept of sinks. Also, it wasn't needed before as a sink before XStreet was acquired. Granted, these are things that LL doesn't disclose, and the economy is a throwback from way back, while in hindsight, fixed rates would work much easier against the US dollar than an economy that adds complexity on top of the dollar. Besides, the whole purpose of a sink, in either case, is that you get less money for your money.

Yes, true. Giving you a hypothetical. You buy L$. LL makes money. You sell L$, LL makes commission. You sell a product on SLM, LL makes 5% in L$. LL cashes out 5% of all SLM sales. LL prints more to fill the void in the sink. In the above scenario, would you rather get tier from small plots of in-world stores or 5% of all SLM sales, "if" you were to cash out that 5% as a company? Remember, as a company, I would get to waive the fees/commission there as well. Pink used to justify that 5% and potential listing fees as a way for SLM to support itself. Didn't get the vibe that SLM pays for itself with a sink. What I'm saying is that it's more likely direct income, not a cause and effect of a fake economy.

Right, L$ are sold for real money. Perhaps the purpose of this particular sink is to cash out even more of that money that was purchased. In that sense, if those sink L$ are cashed out, it's sort of double dipping, eh? What Supply Linden does or doesn't do is irrelevent, without some comprehensive accounting of how LL itself uses L$. Sell it, cash out the sinks, print more in the name of economy. Sounds like another conspiracy theory doesn't it?

So you don't think LL is capable of cashing out their own currency? A sink in a manufactured psuedo economy where you make all the rules of said economy. Do the math, tier on mostly small to mid sized parcels of land tier, vs. 5% on a million products. Then you'll understand why they seem to be shooting themselves in the foot with marketplace vs in-world sales and how they're really not shooting their feet at all.

Ciaran Laval wrote: nikita Jefferson wrote: I could go into a lot on this subject, but for LL MP is purely a money maker, they tax every sale which they cannot do inworld. Yes LL has every right to make money,it is all their servers, but in the process in world shopping has dropped drastically. It doesn't quite work the way you seem to think it does, Linden Lab cannot bank that "tax", they can bank tier payments from inworld stores. The commission fees are a means to an end, but it's an indirect route of income for LL, not a direct one and it's difficult to quantify how much money it generates. No? Think again. L$ is as good as cash even to LL. Residents aren't the only ones that can use it as real money. Otherwise there wouldn't be a 5% commission, after all what does LL need with fake currency? A sink? Really? It's outside of labor laws, workmans comp and all the icky stuff that the rest of the world has to abide by. There were rumors a ways back that some Lindens were paid in L$, although there was no clear proof of that. It also prohibits us from having any sort of consumer protection, and legitimate recourse, refunds and what have you. This is something that needs stronger legislation all around.

Alternate ways to get the commerce teams attention: Send flowers. Bribe them with L$. Revolt on the forums. Send them one default cube per minute, filling their email inbox. Show up at the SLM User Group. Send a container load of micro brew with a combination lock, the combination to be given out upon a solution to your problem. Seduce them. Start a conspiracy theory. Drive to San Francisco and hunger strike in front of LL headquarters, wearing an IMVU t-shirt. Blow up the Love Machine. Get everyone in SL to wear a t-shirt that says "Ex Commerce Team Employee".

Catwise Yoshikawa wrote: Yes, I have slow deliveries the whole week. And guess would still be like this until LL do somenthign with it. Can't wait forever for DD, so if they don't have it ready, they should fix actual system. Oddly, this doesn't seem to be an option, fixing the current system on the Magic Box end. If I had to guess I would say that the purchase of SLX didn't include more than rights to use the code, which would explain a complete re-write, and no upgrades to the Magic Boxes, or enhancements to their communication. It could be that parts of the old SLX code weren't able to be purchased for one reason or another. No evidence for that whatsoever, but doubtful the current boxes are going to see any work at all no matter how long DD takes.

To the OP I would say that I agree with you in spirit, but that the culprit is misplaced. It's not the freebies and low cost items, it's that no measures are being taken to cater to a group of professionals on that level. SL is what it is, so you can't exclude free and low cost without drastic changes and a different type of SL. My take is that programmers, graphic artists, 3D people and those who do achieve a professional level of sales should be worth their time. We're lacking all of the things that keep us from being professionals, such as consumer protection, better IP tools, certain restrictions (and benefits) available to higher end merchants, solid advertising vehicles that work, consumer data, tracking and reporting, afilliate sales, being able to sell products on external websites, strong sign up perks with merchant goods, gifting L$, etc. If LL learns how to turn virtual goods professional, and yet retain the level of free they have today, you won't have to worry about things like freebies. It's a long road from here to there, though.

So a general prediction of nothing specific resulting in nothing specific, go figure. A town I lived in when I was younger had a historical cannon in a green. One day all that was left was a hole where the cannon was. Conjecture and conspiracy theories about who could have done such a thing, was it a school war, an election thing, etc. Turned out all they did was dug a hole "next" to the cannon and bured the cannon with dirt from the hole, so the cannon was there all along. Like proper conspiracy types, they had the good graces to be embarassed but still missed the point that in the land of the obvious, the conpiracy has no market value.

The creator, or holder of the rights, can make different arrangements with different people if they wish, unless they intentionally limit themselves by making an exclusive deal with someone. Maybe contact them if you haven't and ask why they made that deal with others and if they have a separate price and terms for full perm resale available. It's not unheard of to sell a product for a lesser price with lesser rights, and a product with greater rights for a higher price. Edited: hadn't seen Chelsea's post before responding, must type faster.