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Porky Gorky

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Posts posted by Porky Gorky

  1.  


    Zanara Zenovka wrote:

    Picks were useful to see which merchants had to resort to ludicrous gaming to promote their products, and were therefore best avoided.
    :)

     

    Maybe for you on a personal level that was the best use of picks.

    For allot of other people though, picks were used to dominate and dictate search rankings to great effect. Picks were one of the more easily gamed search factors and with a large L$ investment it was very easy to secure the number 1 rank on lots of keywords in a very short amount of time. 

    I know, because I did it. 

    The downside was it drove away a few potential customers (like yourself) who were apposed to paying for picks.

    The upside was it bought in thousands of other visitors who didn't care less about search gaming and went on to purchase products.

    So yeah, I say bring back picks. We cannot rely on Linden Labs to produce a set of relevant search results. We have to rely on ourselves to game search in order to get our businesses to show up in relevant  search results (at least within the first 5 pages) and picks offered an easily understandable way to do that.

     

  2. These are good questions Greek and allot of us have been asking them for a long time now, ever since M Linden, Joe Linden and Jack Linden steered the company down this path of self destruction.  My guess is no, LL will not be making a conscientious effort to help drive up sales and help shop keepers in world. To be honest I don't think I want their help. Every time LL makes an "improvement"  things just seem to get worse. 

    There seems to be a severe lack of coordination when it comes to improving the platform mainly caused by the flawed Tao management style. Teams go on developing their projects (like inworld search) with little accountability for their faliures, constantly diminishing the usefulness of the technology in the process. Same with V2 and also with the marketplace to a lesser extent. In my opinion LL has lost focus of the core issues that exist in SL today and they have lost touch with the core needs of the user-base, either that or they don't care anymore. Rodvik has been in SL for 3 months and made zero impact, if anything the situation for merchants has deteriorated further in that time especially with all the privacy issues that have come to light recently. We are facing even harder times ahead I fear.

     

     

  3. I only sell 1 adult item on the MP out of about 1200 'G' rated products across multiple accounts. Sales in the last 7 days have been down about 50% on SLM and about 25% inworld compared to the last 4 weeks.

    Judging by other merchants comments in this thread, it's clear that the latest change to the Marketplace cannot be solely to blame for this recent decline in sales.

  4. Without effective reporting associated with listing enhancements then this feature is still in beta IMO. If they have doubled the price then exactly what improvements have they made to justify this increase?

    Care to comment Brooke Linden?

  5.  


    Phil Deakins wrote:

    As time goes by, the marketplace is becoming the normal place to shop for SL goods and inworld stores are becoming the abnormal way. It's LL's doing, and it's intentional. So I think it's a bit rich, to say the least, that a Linden suggests discussiing
    "Inworld Marketing and Advertising Best Practises"
    when they are doing their utmost to undermine all of it.


     

    I agree Phil, and it makes me wonder exactly what sort of Muppets are running this show? Driving sales to SLM results in less traffic in-world which results in less requirement for commercially used land which results in less tier in LL's pocket.

    So the question is, does the increased commission from SLM sales offset the loss in tier from in-world merchants? If it doesn't then someone (else) needs to get fired.

  6.  


    Robert Galland

    Yes I agree. LL efforts to drive the sale of 3D content from a 3D world onto a 2D website does seem to be succeeding. Who'd have thunk it?

    What's worse, the tactic they have used to achieve this is to seemingly de-value all the search systems in world. This is forcing people to down-tier or give up in world stores entirely. Are LL really sacrificing all this tier just so they can take a 5% commision on more items on SLM? I think we have arrived at this point purely by accident mainly through the poor deveopment of GSA 6 and V2

    Re. freebies, I think L$10 is a low enough cut off point. Sure you are still going to have allot of low level products priced at L$11 but I think the volume of overall freebie style products would be greatly reduced from the main marketplace. I think it would be worth LL running some experiments on this.

    You are right, they were proposing to charge a listing fee on freebies. I found this on Daniel Voyager's blog just to remind is all of what was planned. I think we will see some of these listing fees introduced sometime down the road.

    http://tinyurl.com/6kae6n5

    Date 20th Nov 2009:

    We will enact the following new controls for the Xstreet SL Marketplace within 90 days, with at least two weeks’ notice, in order to improve the shopping experience:

    Monthly Listing Fee for Freebies of L$99:

    • Listings for free items will now be treated as a marketing/promotional tool and thus will have a price.
    • L$99 is the price of our least expensive listing enhancement and so we will start there.
    • Depending upon desire for this marketing opportunity and perceived value given such demand, we will adjust the price as necessary to maximize this value and keep the freebie listings from becoming bloated again.
    • Expected Delivery: 30 – 60 days

    Minimum Commission of L$3 on all items priced L$1 or greater:

    • We will enact a minimum commission of L$3 on all sales of non-freebie listings.
    • Since Freebie listings are now considered marketing and are charged as such, they will not incur this fee.
    • A L$3 commission will raise the commission on all listings under L$50.  This was a range suggested by residents, but it turns out that this is the price range where there is a very high transaction volume and low commission income which combine to cover the costs of those transactions.
    • We may adjust this minimum commission as we see its effects on the marketplace.  L$3 does not cover the full cost of a transaction, but the goal here is first to manage freebie growth first.
    • Expected Delivery: 30 – 60 days

    Monthly Listing Fee of L$10 for all items L$1 or greater:

    • All non-freebie listings will now be charged L$10 per month to remain listed in the Xstreet SL Marketplace
    • Currently, less than 20% of Xstreet SL listings make at least one sale per month.  This displays just how much clutter of unsold items exists on Xstreet SL.
    • Doing this will provide an incentive for merchants to remove listings which are not selling, while keeping this fee low enough to have a minimal effect on listings which are selling and are desired by shoppers.
    • By reducing the overall number of listings on Xstreet SL, the shopping experience will drastically improve which will please our shoppers and be a boon to the business of all of our merchants.
    • Expected Delivery: 60 – 90 days

    Separate freebies into their own category:

    • There is already a freebie section on Xstreet SL.  This section will become the place to browse for new freebies.
    • We will remove free listings from the browsable categories and keyword search results on Xstreet SL.
    • Expected Delivery: 60 – 90 day
  7.  


    Pamela Galli wrote:

    I think you can still pay for Picks if you want, but since they don't count for search, there is no point.

    I don't see any way for LL to monitor this system's use. The only way I see to neutralize it is for everyone to use it, so everyone has a billion stars and cancels one another out. 

    When people started paying for picks I was sick of watching my search rank get relegated on a daily basis, everyone above me in search was paying for picks. In the end I gave up and started paying for picks myself. I could comfortably out-pay the people above me in the rankings and very quickly rose to the top of search again. If LL refuse to police gaming then in my opinion I was left with no other option than to beat the gamers at their own game(ing). I was pleased when picks were removed as a search factor as it rendered paying for picks pointless.

    The same applies with paying for ratings. I have already started tracking and AR'ing those people paying for ratings and will continue to do so. I'll give it a few weeks to see if LL takes action and if they don't then they leave me no other recourse than to start gaming ratings myself.

    I am happy to play by the rules when the rules are enforced. I am also willing to fight dirty in order to compete and overshadow the gamers. If LL do not take action against those people I have AR'ed then I see no other choice but to out-game them again. LL's history of inaction against  gamers leaves us with 2 options. Either lower ourselves to the gamers level to restore an even playing field or to take the moral high ground and reject all forms of gaming to our own determinant. I've spent years living on the moral high ground in SL. It's not an advantageous place to be. It's allot less profitable and there is a distinct smell of crap in the air.

  8.  


    Tara Chester wrote:

    Sort freebies and cheaper items at the end of "relevance" and "best selling" search results. ty

     

    I don't think freebies and anything under L$10 should even be on the marketplace. If LL insist on leaving them there then they should be treated completely separately from all other items and not be listed in standard search results. Given them their own category and search field. Keep them separate.

     

  9.  


    Argus Collingwood wrote:

    BTW.. what does AIS stand for? Asset Inventory Server?

    According to Sea Linden at the last office hour, AIS stands for Agent Inventory Service

    I remember reading Toy's guess in the transcript which was AIS = Anti Implementable System.

    That cracked me up.

  10.  


    Persephone Emerald wrote:

    Porky Gorky said:

    "Remove peoples ability to vote and they will make their views known in more extreme ways."

     

    - I can see it now. In-world rallies with residents burning Lindens in effigy & reporters filming it all for the 6 o'clock news.

     

    LOL well I guess that is never beyond the realm of possibility. 

    I was eluding more to people spamming with allot of duplicate JIRA's, derailing user groups/office hours to express their opinions on JIRA's or just allot more moaning and bitching on the forums and blog comments about issues they are passionate about.

    I guess we will see for ourselves soon enough as the removal of JIRA voting is going to happen.

     

     

  11. The only time I ever notice listing enhancements is when I am scrolling through hundreds of them trying to spot my own. When I go on SLM to shop I am oblivious to them. I think nearly 20 years of being online has trained my brain to auto filter all advertising out.

  12. It's funny that the spammer is ranked as "honored". Another fine example of how pointless rankings are. Just a useless automated system without any human intervention. 

    I bet he/she had a good chuckle to themselves when they received a message from Lexie Linden telling them 

    "As the result of your contributions to the community, you have earned a new rank."

  13. Totally agree with you Med. What would be helpful is if the moderators could inform us of why threads are deleted. At least then we could avoid making the same "mistakes" or at the very least try and make sense of their moderation. At the moment it is all guesswork. 

  14.  


    Medhue Simoni wrote:

    Well, I just noticed that my Woohoo! thread was removed from the Roundtable. Did we/I do something wrong? Is the merchant roundtable just for business talk? I thought it was a playful thread. None of it was derogatory. I'm still scratching my head.:smileysurprised:

    I was a bit critical of LL and the new rankings in that thread,  and we were posting vid files that weren't really relevant , and Suella went on one of her cheese related tangents :smileyhappy:. I can see why they deleted it based on the recent level of moderation.

     

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