Spica Inventor

Bad P.R. = net revenue loss. Why cant LL figure that out? :matte-motes-sunglasses-1:

The land that sits idle is not cheap. That's largely why it sits idle. It's still the same expensive tier land. When I talk about land, I'm talking about tiny independent sims, not just rentable bits of normal sized sims. More servers would reduce lag, and that would also pay dividends. I know that the official duckspeak sponsored by LL is that the lag is at the users end, but of course that's not true out of necessity and there is always a direct correlation on both sides. It's not like adding lanes to a highway where individual servers become less efficient the more or better you have. Servers are much closer to a zero-sum situation. "Nor can it be guaranteed that a larger user base will arrive just because of cheap land, if that were the case then the other grids would have long since surpassed Second Life but they haven't. All those sims for $40 or less? where's the user base? It didn't happen, thus we can see that cheap land does not equal lots of new users." There is only one reason that keeps the other cheaper grids from not attracting peeps, and that's the reality that SL has a virtual monopoly on the goodies. Merchants can't afford to spend valuable time in multiple grids with different setup and sell areas without a substantial equitable split up of merchandise without some type of probable payoff. Much product is hard to transfer over legally having parts of different creators. The government should step in and do an antitrust. To sum up the real problem with lack of userbase and therefore revenue generation is that SL was set up from the get go to be a playground and fantasy land for silverspoons, and the great majority of plebs where to complete the silverspoons fantasy by participating in it with themselves, mostly just their avatars. In return the plebs could collect the crumbs and scraps that fell from deep pockets table and be happy about it or they could be shown the door. Many took the option of going through the exit door with their marbles. Particularly the ones that where in SL not to create things, but just to play around and enjoy themselves (which where the vast majority of them) otherwise happily opening up their pocketbooks to enhance that experience. And hindsight would be 2006 but definitely not 2009. :smileywink:

"True and one of the issues with all merchandise, items and services, in Second Life is that there is very little quality control. But don't forget the very real associating with time = money." Let me take that one further and say 'userbase = money'. And what increases a userbase? cheaper prices, quality products, quantity of products. All the above working in tandem. "50% is a bit too much but 30%, yes I'm with you that far. But only if they actually provide a service that is worth 30% and what they offer today isn't really worth the five percent even." I would say that having an online marketplace by itself is a great service over having to waste peeps valuable time shopping around in world. Even so, LL would have to tax inworld as well so some degree to make anything over a 10% SLM cut work well. Otherwise the malls will populate all over the SL again and even though LL would like that by generating more inworld income via land over the SLM ratio wise, the vast majority of us would not be pleased to go back to those time wasting days imho. "I'm surprised nobody's mentioned this before but there is a very strong connection between tier and content since tier is just as much about the prim count as it is about land size...." I agree. But I will add that I think currently prim amount is much more important for people than land size. Peeps just want a little place to call home all their own but want to decorate it nicely as well. A personal space to get creative and do whatever. Maybe combine these 'pocket realms' with other pocket realms to create a bigger place to do bigger things in. To increase quality requires increasing the userbase more than anything else as the whole economy is really based on userbase. The viability of relying on peeps with deep pockets as the main revenue stream and economic growth catalyst topped out in 2009.

Now the only problem with LL taking a 50% cut on SLM sales is that merchants might manipulate the price lower at their inworld stores to compensate. If LL could tax inworld sales as well, (which they probably could with a tiny bit of envestment) then that would solve that possible problem.

Inworld shops are probably an ego thing in most cases if the merchant has no SLM presence as well. I noticed some merchants have a minor SLM presence putting up just a small fraction of their products on the SLM when compared to what they have for sale in their inworld store/s. The logic to that would be to use the SLM for advertisement purposes to entice/force searching peeps to go to their inworld store/s where much more of their product is for sale. To increase the traffic in that way is beneficial to sales at the sim where the store is, but not at the expense of loosing the additional sales the SLM would have otherwise supplied if the product was at the SLM as well, because the second best form of advertisement is to inundate the marketplace with your product. (The best form of advertisement is to get your product to the top of search results.) Doing away with the land model is by far the single best way to get peeps to come to SL and stay (and therefore spend their money). Peeps want land to put all their goodies on and they want a place to have unlimited freedom with which to create on and a place to do whatever they want. Doing the catwalk on other peeps sims is all fine and well, but by itself it can hardly be considered a superior form of creative enhancement or peep retention enhancer. Freedom and personal/private space = creativity. Offering public and private sandboxes as an alternative is not a good compromise. "The problem here is that "land" is tied to hardware resource in terms of hosting servers in a very linear model." Yes, another problem with LL thinking is their not understanding the reality that you got to spend money and invest money to make money, and short term thinking alone is never a good way to run a business. Improving server resources would be a good investment for many reasons. "If you follow this model, then there's no limit to people asking for more and more land (physical servers) yet you're expecting revenue to come from the small number of successful merchants giving away 50%? Would never work." Many more small plots of land is all that it would take. Wouldn't even require alot of prims per parcel of land. Revenue increase would come from a much larger user base as a consequence of much cheaper land. That in turn will increase sales volume for merchants to a great degree, netting them more money and not less. Land price reduction could be done gradually over time if economic shocks are a concern. All merchants small to big would benefit.

"The Second Life Marketplace is not suitable for BIG" But how many 'millions' of hours have you wasted trying to sell things in world? In world shops where always much more an ego thing then they where a money maker thing. Bagging rights for those merchants who where well established in world and had been around a long time. Same psychology applied to the high relative price tag thing as well and peeps great reluctance to sell their products at lower prices. The false associating with price = quality idea that was constantly being pushed did considerable damage. L.L. should have been taking 50% profits from MP sales instead of the measly philosophical 5% from the get go, and scrapped the profits from land model reality at least as far back as 2009 when it was clear that peep involvement in the game/platform had peaked far too soon.

Seriously!?!? Is L.L. deliberately trying to further bork the SLM to force peeps to migrate over to Sansar where that marketplace will work much better? Is that the plan? Hmmmmmm!? :robotfrustrated:

Is SL a platform and/or a game? Is RL a platform and/or a game? Is there any REAL difference between the two? :smileywink:

'Flooding the market' is a good thing. You want to flood the market because that means peeps are actually buying your stuff, and when peeps are buying your stuff more, that leads to even more peeps exponentially buying your stuff. The 'price pumping' in SL is what is really causing SL to be much less profitable for all and not the opposite. Especially when it comes to a pixel economy with an unlimited inventory, you want cheap cheap cheap and lots lots lots of peeps to help everyone's economy do better together.

If you are a creater merchant, you will make considerably more money selling your products with copy/mod perms over just transfer perms or transfer/mod perms. Selling your products with both copy/mod and transfer perms is ideal for money making, but if you jack up the relative price of the copy/mod version some customers might get the feeling that you are only interested in squeezing them out of their money and so they might avoid buying anything from you as a negative p.r. responce, therefore making that technique counterproductive money making wise.

I blame the 5 day work week. If peeps had say a 3 day work week, then they would have the time and energy to give many more reviews and hang out alot more on second life for that matter as well. :smileywink:

I'm guessing that the SL Marketplace accounts for about 15% of L.L.s revenue these days. Revenue from land is about 70% of their gross profits it would appear. Revenue from other sources make up the rest. Ideally 'sales tax' would make up a solid 80 or 90% of L.L.'s revenue. Land costs should be about 10% of what they are now. Right now it's a viscous cycle. Folks don't play Second Life because they can't afford land. Won't buy rezable product because can't afford land. Doesn't purchase wearables because won't play Second Life because can't afford land. Won't buy things because land costs eat up all their disposible income. Folks don't play Second Life because they can't afford land. Won't buy rezable product because can't afford land. Doesn't purchase wearables because won't play Second Life because can't afford land. Won't buy things because land costs eat up all their disposible income... The rise of Athenian Democracy.... The fall of the Roman empire....

1 = :matte-motes-evil: 2 = :womanmad: 3 = :matte-motes-sour: 4 = :matte-motes-smitten: 5 = :smileyvery-happy:

"Any review under 4 stars...." That is 1 through 3. ;-) It would seem more like this to me.... 1 = I hate you so much 2 = (crickets) 3 = I couldn't figure out something about the product even though you where verbose about it in the description. Plus it wasn't cheap enough. 4 = Good 5 = Awesome!!! :smileyvery-happy:

I always post a counter comment to any review that lies about my product, and those type of reviews are often times from the Alts. of competing merchants trying to sabotage the product. Those are the types of reviews that can really reduce your sales, so you really got to take care of those. Any review under 4 stars is generally considered a negative review, but some people still don't realize that fact it would appear. Hardly anyone ever does a two star review, and three star reviews are usually accompanied by user error or user ignorance based comments, or other largely goofy comments, so are not much use and have little effect on sales. There is still alot of cheating and virtual cheating going on with the review system. (Many hundreds of reviews for some products giving them a much higher review to sell ratio when compared to their competition)? Please! hehe It's possible that more expensive products draw a higher review to sell ratio naturally as peeps get more emotional about an item the more expensive it gets, and consequently are more inclined to spend their valuable time reviewing what they purchase. L.L. only knows the details and are probably not willing to fork over that information. ;-)

The Thought Police are always bad, evil, wrong, horrible, terrorists, unless they agree with you of course. In which case they become honorable, saintly, good, righteous, patriotic etc. ;-) “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” Orwell 1984 :matte-motes-wink:

L.L. thinks 'exclusivity' is more profitable. But as per usual the opposite is the case to their thinking in reality. Price pumping, exclusivity, transfer only merchandising, and other similar philosophically based promotions from L.L. are all negative for the profit margin in reality. :matte-motes-crying:

L.L. doesn't realize that it would be much more profitable (for everyone) if they allowed volume over price. It would be a safe and painless switch if that type of change was done gradually over time. The land revenue model was a poor one right from the start and has caused years of increased damage to profitability. Revenue based on merchandise sales has already proven in other (games) to greatly maximize popularity and profits along with it and there is no good reason the second life platform would stand out as different in that regard. But L.L. is way over controlled and influenced by those with deep pockets who desire to and enjoy a concrete sense of maximum exclusivity in SL. So we get profit damaging things such as price pumping and the promotion of transfer only items and limited quantities merchandising. I pray that Second Life 2 doesn't repeat the same errors, but ingrained and long established 'philosophies' and those in control who promote the same are always hard to overcome without the ship sinking more abruptly or completely.

It seems to me, being closer to the top pages of 'relevance' search results, is much more beneficial for getting more sales, (due to strong natural herd mentalities of the vast majority of Humans), than whatever reviews an item gets and their effect on reducing or increasing sales (which probably isn't much in any case in reality). But yes, the practice of relisting to remove poor reviews, and then have your friends and alts buy up a bunch of the product to place it back up on the relevance search result page is no doubt easy to get away with if you only sold like a few dozen of the thing to begin with. Any really hot selling item that sells one per day or more or so on average will hang around the top of relevance search results anyway even if in the relisting you lose hundreds or thousands of sales history search result boost. Iv'e noticed that L.L. is giving greater relevance search result weight to products selling more per week than total history of sales these days which is a good thing imho. Still I find the current review system to be very informative and useful in its present unperfected form. It is much better than nothing imao.

'Price pumping' in general is the single biggest reason why overall profitability is as low as it is in S.L. The income from pixel land model emphasis is at the very heart of the problem.

Free advertisement from Google image searches. I wonder how much effect that is having on the bottom line? I suspect quite a lot. :smileyvery-happy:

Merchant greed. A promoted culture of exclusivity in S.L. Overcharging on products. They all tend to correlate with each other.

Let me see if I can get into L.L.s head again. And thank you Elicio for making such awesome rezzable inworld fantasy stuff that has profitted LL greatly over the years. :-DD -The great majority of things selling on the SLM are wearables for modern human women avatars, so they market what peeps seem to be mostly interested in. I think the thought is that if LL marketed variety, even based on distribution of sales even for a moment, it would take away from overall profitability because focus must 'always' be on the bread and butter. Always. Plus, the marketing department in LL is probably populated with mostly women who have an interest only in modern day fashion things, influencing things greatly toward that direction. -The only thing that seems to be growing in SL is sexually oriented stuff, so that is becoming a greater and greater emphasis in LLs marketing. -LL knows that the vast majority of peeps can't afford in world rezzables because land affordability is out of their reach, so therefore the focus is on Avatar wearables which peeps can afford, as LL is loath to bring land prices down even for long term profitability. So as for most 'problems' in SL, marketing focus is also tied to the high cost of pixel land in SL. as well as a general disregard for what the SL community (and the could have been SL community) wants.

"Remember that blog post about LL saying that their database servers have serious issues?" Yes agent Yatsenko there are a few names for it. Downsizing, being cheap, short sightedness, investment adverse.... So what are we up to now? 10 sims to an old server? Good thing all the lag is caused at our end.:matte-motes-evil:

"These days, for better or worse, most sales for most people are on the Marketplace. There are exceptions of course but The Lab has wanted this (more money for them) and it has come to pass." Nonsense. 'The Lab' has never liked the existence of Xstreet or their SLM, and in reality blame them on their losses of revenue. The 'problems' with the SLM, with all the annoying unfixed inefficiencies, are considered damage control and by design to keep inworld shopping as maximally promoted as possible. :matte-motes-wink: