By: Ilya Vedrashko It looks like a fairly heated and a long overdue discussion on virtual world marketing is unfolding across SL-related blogs, so here’s a a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post with more links. (Brace for more SL news…

I don’t really see any Lindens or former Lindens or Lindesidents in ESC, MOU, RRR, or AW. But, would I be told? No lol.

And one thing you have to bear in mind: For all we know, half the people IN Millions of Us, Electric Sheep, and others of the developer companies, are actually Lindens in disguise.

As we know, LL now allows their employees to also run profitable personal businesses on the side, on secret alts, in the very world they also rule.

coco

And yes, sure, LL steers to those they like best and are comfortable with like ESC, Aimee Weber, and MOU, there’s clear evidence of that. They blatantly mention only these few each time there is media coverage and they steer every chance they get in a media inquiry. And they and those who benefit from this steerage are beligerently defensive of this practice because they believe their work and their performance demonstrably outshines others.

But it doesn’t, always, and there is no reason why a tiny cadre of studios should grab the lion’s share of contracts, do them badly, and sour big companies and the media in general on the metaverse just because they were greedy for quick hits.

The Developers’ Directory is somewhat of a fiction, put out there under pressure of people like Cocoanut Koala who urged the Lindens to create a more transparent system for bidding. In theory, anyone with the chops can register and get on this directory here:
http://secondlife.com/developers/registration.php

Many more should. I know some very good people nervously waited way to long to get included in this directory after applying, and didn’t dare publicize the fact of their long and nervous wait for fear of alienating either the Lindens or the big guns on the list or for fearing to be sour grapes.

The process should be way more registrational and far less discretionary than it is. People should even be able to simply have a template and *buy* the space for an ad in a yellow pages sort of directory if they wish without having to be vetted and filtered by Lindens. This is how an open market and open society works — which they keep resisting. So don’t depend on them to provide it — like any unaccountable government in power without elections or a free media, they do what they want and help their friends, not you.

Our expectations for them to be open and transparent and accountable come from a set of expectations appropriate to governments or entities like RL businesses or non-profits or universities. Yet there’s always a hardcore vocal cadre of both Linden lifers and beta-tester fanboyz to tell us that these expectations are all wet; that it’s just a very special and precocious software company with its uber-talented and kewl designers’ studios and we should shut up, because we have no lives and are just jealous gits.

I obviously reject that characterization of the process, because I don’t think RL works this way even with very specialized high-end design studios that still advertise openly. And I think if they are still touting a “world” product as a distinct from a “business platform” product they need to do the minimum to make it a world, which means being just and accountable.

Still, there has to be made a kind of freelancers.org or Craig’s list of SL that does an end-run around Linden and FIC filtering, and that awaits the entrepreneur who understands both the public interest value and the profit-making potential for such a gigs type of site.

And people who want to reach companies with the news of their experience and skills have to paper them with resumes in the old-fashioned way, I suppose and try to show up and get noticed as they would in RL.

We’ll probably be waiting in vain for the Lindens ever to get off their well-worn rolladex cards.

I found it interesting that these same people who wouldn’t give you their gross annual income in Second Life as miniature content providers getting micropayments were so open with Business Week about their RL money from outworld contracts.

Only the Lindens know the truth about inworld revenues given their voluminous server statistics, and they aren’t talking.

The companies are paying way too much at the moment because they made the idiotic move of going to the Lindens first to get help, and the Linden’s steared them into an artificially small pool of vetted developers. On the one hand that makes sense, because it avoids disasters and crappy builds, but on the other hand, it relies on the absolutely false assumption that Linden Lab knows what is going on inside their game.

Outside investors need to understand that Linden Lab has only the faintest sense of what is happening inside their world, and that was true back when there were only 100K subscribers. It has also been true for every MMORPG that has ever existed. These places are different. The social aspects aren’t controlled or understood by the platform owners. Going to them first is not the way into this wild and crazy new world.

That’s not the point, however. It’s about the disparity of two different economies where the gulf is widening between those working inworld for Lindens and those working outworld for dollars. The figure of $10,000 or even a million means the pricing of work to outworlders that is often done inworld by those at the next tier at a fraction of the price. For example, an indigenous builder doing a routine job of terraforming and building out an island might charge $500 or $1000 US in Lindens; but these companies charge and get many times that amount, in part because outworld companies haven’t figured out the differential yet.

Perhaps metaversal consultants could be charging the same on a RL marketing project, but RL costs aren’t involved in SL — that’s the whole point. There’s nothing like the comparable cost of office rent or printing. Buying ad space? But these marketers *aren’t* buying ad space, mainstream media is covering them for free.

What is the marketing budget of SL? It’s primarily labour. And I suspect if we peered at a lot of these budgets we’d find some pretty low wages for some of the lesser-known slave builders on the projects.

Let anyone make as much as they can get away with from this “business platform” — this story merely illustrates why the Lindens can suddenly charge as much as they do for private islands now — because of the vast sums changing hands.