Did you know you can get a valuable free gift with your next contract moble phone… such as Wii, HDTV,top spec Laptops, Playstation, Tom Tom and much more? And its all from a name you can trust… Tesco! YOu’d be nuts to go direct to network with this…

stop playing guessing games with anonymous.

Prok: You dumbass, anybody who was around in the mid-early 90′s knows what I’m talking about. ecommerce sites whose domains were not in their companys print and tv ads did not get traffic, plain and simple. Similarly, if Pontiac and AOL promoted their SL sites URL’s in their print and TV ads (wait, AOL wants you to go to AOL, not SL, unless SL becomes like AOL, then… whatever). Problem is those ‘slurls’ are as long and ungainly as those dumb longass URLs, with the tilde’s and slashes and other crap, of the early web before most people figured out the marketing importance of having your own domain.

SL sims are NOT web destinations because SLURLs are longass, hard to remember unless its a sim name you can just plug into the map, and even then most people are too lazy and want a Landmark anyways. LL needs to pull their heads out about making it easier to get from seeing a print ad domain, like, say, “grid.bntholdings.com” which would send you to the BNT Holdings HQ in SL without a lot of bullshit in between.

Banning casinos? check. (though let’s be honest, they sucked anyway )
Upping land prices? check
Treating paying customers like shit? check
Giving preferential treatment to vigilantes? check.
Not fixing long running problems? check.
Ensuring customer satisfaction? negative
Treating adult, paying customers, like children? Check.

A friend of mine just got the linden experience(TM) with her account, she was trying to recover her password so she could actually become a paying customer, and well, they didnt do shit to help her, I know she could have done better to remember her password, but shit happens.

It’s almost like they DONT want people to play or buy sims.

Also, let’s look at the other issue, the land pricing and availability, I’m seeing more and more mainland for sale at ridiculous prices, but no one is buying it. I sold mine off recently as well as a few friends, I have no interest in buying any land in the near future because getting mainland = asshole neighbors who bitch at you or AR you for things on your own property because their personal belief that anything on your e-lawn should be 5m away from the property line.

Private land = you have to deal with the estate and landowners who are usually assholes who will find any reason to kick you off your land and keep your money, or are anti-social psychotic fuckheads who will ban you and take your land because they’re having a bad day. If you want to buy your own sim, it’s insanely expensive ($4k a year!) plus you have to get LL’s blessing on it, if they dont like you, forget it. If you get said sim, put parts of it up for people to buy. Then you either have to deal with the anti-social fuckwads who come and bitch at you for everything, or no one buys it because you arent giving it out for free.

So the incentive to buy land isnt there, it’s nothing but a pain in the ass.

LL is better off promoting SL as a creative tool and platform for educational use and business collaboration, and nothing more.
The hype has killed them though. They’d have been better off stating that you simply buy credits to buy goods in the world and you can exchange them back into money again instead of calling a virtual currency and pushing virtual millionaires and making it sound like a real functioning economical system, when one was never there to start with.

Also, I need to stop posting when drunk

Meta Linden quotes on her Dec 18 Blog entry that the November Economic stats are out. In that Excel spreadsheet, the land surface area existant is 755 square kilometers island land and 184 square kilometers mainland land. A lot of mainland land is Linden land and not paying tier. 184 is about 1/4 of 755, i.e., a fraction, and less than that given the Linden land functional.

>>
The revenue of LL is likely triple what you indicate.
>>

That would be $80ish million USD per year. The bulk cost for any enterprise nowadays is personnel. There are numerous quotes around that LL employs about 200 people. At an average total compensation for each of about $90,000 (including all vacation, health insurance, and 401K match benefits plus overhead) that translates to $18 million USD in payroll.

This suggests LL is earning (60 million – $15 million (building lease, insurance and utilities)) $50 million dollars per year for the shareholders. This is a profit margin of 62%.

Perhaps folks who envision this level of economic firepower should ask if they can invest.

Yes, the search engine will pick up and list anything that’s for sale on your parcel – which surely, is exactly what most people would want. The fact that you had something accidentally set for sale doesn’t make the new search features ‘Evil’.

Afterall, without the new search, that stuff would still be set for sale and you still wouldn’t know about it. …Or is ignorance bliss?

On another note, I’ve seen you use the word ‘Ballyhooed’ about 12 times in the last week. Is it your new favourite?

Um, unless he’s calling Benjamin Duranske/Benjamin Noble a “crazy cat lady now,” I can’t imagine WTF he means by exacerbated by big mouthed know-nothings on ragsheets. It was Duranske who ranted on about alleged Ponzi schemes and Ginko, and helped to cause the run on the bank.

I’ve barely covered the “financial services” of Second Life, I leave all that to Busybody Fugazi.

Obscure could not be more wrong yammering about “the significant amount of the SL economy offworld”. For one, that sector was a bubble that is bursting fast. For two, where’s the big spend? We saw from Glenn Linden’s figure that these much-ballyhooed metaversal agency drones were earning something like $8000 US a year. There are gadget and dress makers inworld that make double or quadruple that. The millions that some companies have sucked down are not invested in SL in any way in goods or services, so they might as well not exist.

The other silly thing is to say that “mainland is a fraction of the islands”. Look at the map. There is a very brisk business off the mainland auction. I’d like to get a definitive answer from LL on this.

The board member Bill Gurley, as I mention on my blog, has a video clip out from a panel where he talks about $5 million revenue per month. So there’s a lot more mainland auctions — at double and even triple the purchase price of islands — and mainland tier than you are calculating obviously.

The revenue of LL is likely triple what you indicate.

As for Intlibber’s hectoring about putting URLs in ads, my God, what an annoyance. Like…someone can click on a URL in a TV ad lol? Duh. And in SL, we don’t have HTML on a prim. So how can we demand that land point to a domain?! Of course, devices can be put inworld to yank the browser up to another page, but many people find this de-immersive and irritating.

Free homes in other worlds that you can’t decorate with anything but an uploaded texture get really old really fast.

Whatever I have published as been pretty straightforward, explaining how the problem of the “financial sector” of SL is really more about psychology than regulation. It’s about people role-playing business start-ups and venture capitalists who don’t have RL experience in business. SL is good for that. It lets failures in RL or people with no experience in RL start anew. But then the results can’t be that different than real life, when it involves real money.

I don’t see the reduction in spending as stark as others are seeing it, because I think that in addition to the dip around Thanksgiving and the service outages, a) the end to gambling spending is to account for it still (casinos still exist and are still being wound down or closed) and b) the messed-up search is accounting for it. Yet SL has shown a great capacity for righting itself. The Lindens have even stopped this nutty idea of devaluing classifieds by mixing them in with “search all,” meaning people stopped buying them. They sometimes *do* listen to protests.

Pontiac and AOL have pulled out of SL, as have some other corps, primarily because the development companies they hired made the same dumb mistakes that corps did in the early world wide web era of ecommerce: they never put their URLs on their print and tv ads (it would help if LL would let people point domain names at their sims or parcels), plus made some new ones, like treating SL locations like websites, i.e. not posting any live help on location.

SL is a social medium, a corporate site in SL needs a human presence to interact with customers. Those corps that do this (and promote their SLURL in their RL media ads), get it and win. Those that dont, see vacant sims nobody visits.

SL is only going to grow if people get this.