Fall-Out Continues from LL Shopping Sites Grab

 

We won't know for awhile what the ultimate ramifications are of the Lindens' voracious decision to buy out two shopping sites, gutting one and co-opting the other -- but I can already see a few obvious things happening.

Some are big winners, some are big losers. Read the still-free forums (they may not remain free for long) and see that unlike the official web site forums, people are frankly describing not just big *increases* in sales from the change to put the shopping connection on the official Second Life front page, they are describing big *losses*. And of course, there's absolutely no way of knowing without more inside data whether these losses or gains even correlate to the Linden connection. Some people admitted their gains might be due to a rollout of a new product. Others admitted their losses could be  unrelated.

This poll, even on the controlled official site, show most people perceiving the move as definitely bad.

I can only report what I experience in my little businesses:

o my sales on XStreet doubled -- um, they went from 0, to one sale of my Flamingo Court/Motel of Last Resort ashtray for $1

o eyeballs for my experimental paid featured ad on XStreet for the Memory Bazaar Random Compass when from like 2000 to 1000 to 800 in three days -- which is probably more than they get inworld, but I can't tell (classifieds only show you teleportations, or clicks, not views)

o in likely unrelated developments, many more newbies came in to rent the cheap seats --  rentals in the $150-$500 range, often in groups with friends, from places as far-ranging as Peru to Spain to England to Poland to Chicago, IL -- but a few in larger parcels began refunding for the these reasons:

o bought a new homestead sim (1)
o broke up with my boyfriend (2)
o can't stand performance issues in SL, back to RL for me (1)
o moving in with a friend (1)
o moving to a RP sim (1)

The sticker shock over the Homesteads *might* be subsiding -- don't forget where you heard MUCH of the whining and gnashing of teeth about Homesteads -- not the end-user, for whom $75 or $95 or $125 are  not at all a big difference, and represent one less trip to Taco Bells or Starbucks that month, but the bulk buyer, who would be suffering more in aggregate trying to flip the damn things.

Will the statistics from these shopping sites join the rows of figures-lie-and-liars-figure statistics on the Economic Statistics page? I bet not. Proprietary info, you know. But it would be great to know how many shoppers, how many clips, how many buys, etc. And of what. If we lived in a normal country, for example, we would have the kind of reports you see all the time on AP about real life like this: "Starter Home Buys Decline"; "Real Estate Vacancies Growing" or "Recesssion-Proof Fashion Industry" -- only applied to SL.

Now. Why would some people sell more on XStreet and others less?

Apparently there is an entire sordid little world of gaming the entries, people using alts to jack up their ratings, making little friendship circuits of "you rate me, I rate you" -- the way the SL dwell stuff used to be gamed. I had no idea! I've always just kept one account there, and rated people honestly -- but then, I'm not a power player of XStreet, I can tell you, selling my Bold Blue Aluminum table, retailing at only $5, which is noted for its "plasmatic inherence" which "enables the table to *remain where you put it for days on end*, even through Rolling Restarts" and the Folding Step Tier Calculator, my brilliant invention which I got Adam Zaius to script (for pay), and got Desmond Shang to make the object for (for pay and license), and which sells today only about 3 a year lol.

But if you are a serious mega content creator, you will have learned through the hard scrabble of Second Life merchandizing that you need key words, you need the right item at the right time, you need ads, you need all kinds of tricks and gimmicks and pictures and puffery. It's work, like any advertising. You have to constantly re-do it and everyone is breathing on your neck. Inworld, you have the war of the bots. On this website, you have the war for the scarce eyeballed real-estate on the ever-changing front page. It will be fascinating to see how the Lindens start tinkering with this and fronting their favourites, as they always do.

It will even be more fascinating to see how/when the Lindens meld the XSSL stuff into the inworld Search. Of course, the geeky received wisdom so typically articulated by Dusan is that the search sucks inworld, and the XSSL search will be better. But it isn't. It is good when you manually drill down, like on Amazon. It sucks if you  use key words and pull up hundreds of pages of prefabs or dresses.

Gwyn is terribly afraid -- in a kind of faux socialist way -- of the end of malls and stores in SL. Already, I noticed that a cool explorers' belt I wanted that was posted on a blog at World of SL simply didn't exist inworld. I always go inworld from those blogs or XStreet itself -- I like to see the thing I'm buying and see what else they have. So I TP to this girl's store, and her boyfriend's "attic" simply doesn't exist. His product is...nowhere. The guy doesn't even use his picks to show some sort of corner or store of his own. He and his products exist entirely on XStreet, so I was forced to buy by the picture only, and hope it worked out. Fortunately, it did -- any item more than $300 I'd want to see, however.

People will likely go on shopping inworld -- old habits die hard, people like to see stuff, talk to others, and more than anything, they LOVE the feeling of being able to order around sales clerks, something they can't do in real life because it isn't every day that they go and buy ball gowns, diamonds, and big-ass prefabs for expenso rentals. That thrill of ordering around the help is something that Xstreet can't deliver on adequately, and now that they've been Lindenized (TM), they'll likely deliver less. For that, there are those of us in the service sector of SL inworld : )

But...it is quite possible that the activity of this world that people loved more even than sex will be sucked out to the Internet, and be Plurkified even in its social aspects. That's sad. It means the world is flatter than even Thomas Friedman suspected -- it's so flat it's a 2-D web page.

Of course, savvy think-ahead types have already realized that the Lindens now are positioned not only to control content in our world, which was my first thought, but control the flow and accessibility of content to other grids, which was only my 32nd thought, unfortunately, I should have been on the ball.

It's unfortunate that at the moment that the Lindens have every eyeball in the metaverse -- and much of the universe too from the tech press - they have to use such lousy screenshots. I mean, they really are from hunger. Bub, is that still you doing those screens? Can you find some new avatar types? The picture of the girl on the giant pouf getting ready to find skinny jeans, and the huge grill of an automobile that looks like a black moonster -- these don't help sell stuff, they make people pause and think...what is this? Can't we do better? And have more variety? I mean, it's a shopping site with really cool stuff! Why do the colours and props look like our suburban rec room from the 1970s? Can anybody spell "Naugahyde"?

I mean, come on -- quick poll here folks. When was the last time -- real or Second! -- you actually sat on a big pouf thing like that? I mean, if you are under 50 years old, especially...And...raise your hands everybody! -- when was the last time you bought a...car? Or a...turntable (paging the 1970s again!)? in real OR Second! Especially Second! Please. Most of the stuff on there are clothes, prefabs, gadgets, etc. Even with the PG requisite, you can still find something better than a fake turntable with tuners that can't tune anything in SL ROFL.

Alright then. Why will some people win? Because they have stuff the majority wants, at the prices they can pay. Unfortunately for Stroker, as one brave commentator pointed out, his products are too expensive, and don't copy (due to copyright theft concerns) -- and that means they don't serve the masses. The lower-priced item wins simply because it wins, it doesn't care if you are older and better.

I don't think Stroker's decision to release his expensive beds for free now, with only licensing not to recopy, is related to the shopping site buyout -- and yet...it feels as if it might be. One of the reasons merchants were relieved to let LL take over their merchandising is that they are tired of fighting bots or being in a bot arms race. They perceive that they won't have to fight botting and exploitation on Xstreet as they do inworld. Shoppers, too, like the idea of shopping bot-free.

As an experiment, I contacted Nytemyst Grace of the Nyterave products last night. I noticed when making a little Russian coverlet bed that the freebie poseball I had for "sleep" in my inventory could well be a stolen item. I have no idea how I got it. It was in a folder marked something like 100 Freebies that I picked up somewhere to use on my infohubs. So I examined it very closely. It was complicated, because the guy who made the poseball and scripts is no longer in the list, but the animation, which I see now is a separate thing was made by Nyterave. Pulling up her profile, I saw her warning about people selling her poses as freebies and her offer to come to her store to pay her for a legal license to use the product on no-copy in furniture creations. I went to her store -- nothing happening. But I later manually paid her directly, as she came online and told me she was reorganizing her stores. How many people will bother to go through those steps, which in my case involved an hour search, a $1000 expense, in order to sell a $5 product lol? If I'm from Brazil or Poland and don't speak English and I'm hungrier, I will not be going through those steps obviously.

What will the Lindens do about such items on XStreet? Will they AT LONG LAST protect content from theft?

What will connecting XStreet to  your account inworld involve? If before, you could even leave SL completely but just keep the content for sale if you had a magic box inworld, and it would keep selling and you could cash out from the website. If you don't pay your tier bill now, will you be unable to go on selling your content from the web shop?

And here's where I have to try to explain, deep into this blog where many have already stopped reading, why you should have multiple actors in a free economy, and not just one, that it makes it stronger.

Except...I don't know how to do that. Where to start. Because people are so friggin stupid. The comments on this thread let me know that people just aren't taught a thing about free enterprise and economics anymore, and merely read Chomsky and their socialist French textbooks.

One particularly dense poster keeps saying that it doesn't matter to whom you pay the commission, if you still get the sale. Well, but it does. Because if you pay to an independent business, you are strengthening an independent economic actor in a free economy. What if Linden Lab goes down? XStreet, were it not part of LL, like GOM, might survive the crash and encouraging a great plurality of free decisions. It might move to other grids or worlds. Of course, it's not likely LL would go down before XStreet would, but still, it's the plurality of economic actors you want.

Few people seem to be able to look beyond their immediate concern of "streamlining" search and getting their sales to understand the long-term prospects of a monopoly on a sales function performed by a company that has already shown a disasterous record of making sudden, abrupt decisions that drastically alter our world and especially the costs for accessing this world. This isn't just a Yellow Pages function that helps communication for free or for pennies; it is a sales platform like an ebay which increasingly takes a piece of your hide as a tax just to be in business. We already pay for texture uploads, tier, cashout to Paypal, classifieds -- now this!

If you are one of those people not making sales now, who relies more on spontaneous sales from inworld buys, friends shopping, people TPing one another, search/places/traffic etc. you will begin to understand, perhaps, why pluralism and a variety of strong actors in an economy is a good thing.

If you have no vested interest and you don't see the webification of SL shopping affecting your rentals, and you think this sort of power move is merely good for business, you will think the storm has blown over and it's all good.

It hasn't. A powerful gale shook SL and it went overnight from being a place with a plurality of economic actors that could response to genuine market feedback quickly and retain independence for the commercial sector, to being a state consignment store, a Soviet kommissionka, where we take our goods to the state store and accept what we can get from them, minus the state commission. Or we don't sell them.

Quite likely classifieds' costs will go up; botting will increase; forums and events' list spamming will increase. Everyone will be trying to be seen. Content theft will increase, because those without the English language, and those without the ability or desire to upload content to sell with a fee, will be forced to lower their prices and spread around content inworld to complete with the still English-only website Xstreetsl.com

Clearly, sales will be up for awhile due to the novelty. I disagree with Gwyn, or this poster on sluniverse that content sales lag because people "buy all they need". This oldbie living still on their $50 stipend is a total throwback to the past -- as is Gwyn. They aren't in touch with the current, existing customer as I am. People buy, buy, buy. They spend hundreds of RL dollars are rentals and prefabs -- astounding. I don't have a house myself, oddly enough, I sort of move around from public space to public space in the Land Preserve, and I can barely comprehend what goes into some of the parcels I rent out, which are literally covered with hundreds of US dollars of stuff, beyond the twenty or fifty or  hundred US dollars they might pay me for the rental. At the other end of the spectrum -- poor newbies, especially non-English speaking -- there is enormous desire to camp, work, get money to buy, buy, buy. People do not live on their stipends.

The world isn't saturated; it's growing and becoming more diverse -- but that's just why the Linden Borg is grabbing it to shake it for what it is worth.

Comments

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

Anything times zero is zero, so an increase from zero to one isn't a doubling of sales.

[Ann Otoole]

Well Prok... there are multiple levels of "The Game". Most don't even realize they are level twenties in a level 70 world.

[Prokofy Neva]

>Anything times zero is zero, so an increase from zero to one isn't a doubling of sales.

Often my blog contains tripwires that I can reliably count on somebody to trip on and behave exactly as predicted.

[Sioban McMahon]

I think you are right, that the sticker shock of the Homestead sims is subsiding, but it's being replaced by another shock.

Apparently, quite a few people who own sims that went from OS to Homestead in the conversion didn't read the fine print about avatar capacity. Daily now, I'm getting IM's from people who have performance venues or shopping malls on Homesteads who find out about the 20 cap the hard way.

Put a singer on stage, 3-4 staff around, send out notices and all of a sudden, the venue manager gets IM's from people telling him/her they can't get into the sim.

The folks who IM me about the 20 limit ask if our sims are having the same problem (we aren't, we traded in most of our OS for full sims) and they ask about a work around. There is none, except to move to a parcel on a full sim or mainland. Alternatively, they can pay the cost to upgrade to a full sim.

There is other issue, though. In addition to the new avatar capacity limits on the Homesteads, the USE of these sims was laid out clearly by the Lindens. They are supposed to be single residences, public lands, and the like. Not clubs.

I wonder if the Lindens will scan to enforce the new use policy for Homesteads, looking for sims that are hitting that 20 cap regularly. They may, though, allow the 20 cap to drive the clubs/venues out of business. As hard as it is to make money in a music venue in SL, it will be MUCH more difficult if you're attendance is held under 20 avatars.

A whole bunch more venues are going to close.

[Ciaran Laval]

I don't agree that the storm has struck, the storm is still brewing, we're almost in the calm before the storm, the weather man predicted it, people got excited and now that it hasn't struck people are getting a little bit complacent.

I very much believe, short term at least, that the webification will be bad for rentals. A SLX magic box only requires 1 prim.

With the residential market, for me at least, not being what it once was, a crash in the commercial market would be very damaging. Residential wise I'm getting far more interest in 512-1024 parcels than I am in 4096.

However it would be foolhardy in the extreme for Linden Lab to ignore the implications of a move from a tiered land system to a 1 prim only 2D marketplace. They could hit a very sticky wicket here.

[Nytemyst Grace]

Hi-
I would like to add to this post about my poses from Secondlife. My username is Nytemyst Grace. I do NOT add anyone to my group, nor do I take money from anyone for poses which are not for sale anymore. If you paid my anything, more than likely it was returned to you. I do not sit and watch my email from Secondlife, so if I popped online, it was a rare instance, trust me. I have been online 5 times in the last year. Until something is done on LL side about the ripping off of items from the creators, this gal wont be putting anything else out. My husband in RL, Sitting Lightcloud, also is no longer in game due to the BS that went on and continues to do so. Anyway, just stumbled on this article and thought I should clear up a few misconceptions. If I am wrong, about our meeting in SL, please feel free to correct me. Much appreciated. Thanks.

Nytemyst Grace