By Prokofy Neva, Virtualator
Honorary Consulate of Titania
DOES PP SAVE YOUR MONEY?
Shorter Prokofy: Yes, because after you sell the Lindens from the $650L stipend, and take advantage of the extra 1024 (there is 2048) in the account that normally would cost you another $7 on the PP, you are paying only 40 cents above the premium, or only $12.39/mo -- and you get free uploads and more groups on top of that, which you need especially for rentals or RP. Pick and older Linden Home outright or play Game of Homes and roll for a better new Linden Home or put all your tier in Mainland, the much better buy in terms of space and prims.
Shorter Prokofy: No, because the cost of living in RL is going up, $249 a year or even $29.99 per month to lay out now is way too high a price (that's a day or more of groceries where I live); if you aren't running a business requiring uploads, extra tier, and deflection of costs like the subscription itself, the extra Lindens and tier aren't really a value. Picking your own Linden home seems great, but you can't pick the newest ones and the best have been taken by the power players. Save your RL dollars, buy instead around 7600-8000L Lindens per month enabling you to dress nicely, go out to the clubs and tip people properly, rent a nice home, and enjoy SL more fully -- or shop the discount sales and save for your RL retirement!
So all the time the Lindens have been speculatively and temptingly talking about Premium Plooos (as some of the non-English speakers called it, because that's the pronunciation of the word in some European and Slavic languages), I figured I would get it for the texture uploads alone, which are 10L a pop and add up quick.
It wasn't clear what the other bouquet of features would be, but that was always mentioned. I think this includes sounds as well, need to find out. But textures alone would be "worth it," right.
Except, I did something you all should do. Take the last month or two of your accounts from the web at MY ACCOUNTS and put them in Excel -- or not, you can still go through them and tag them. I tagged my expenses as follows:
o Rent (these are billboards, stalls, signs at furniture stores, etc. I rent to advertise my rentals) and Classifieds
US $21.20
o Search/Places Ads 130 x 30L
US $14.40
o Texture Uploads - 101 x 10L
US $4.00
o Clothes - 1,267L
US $
o Tips (Musicians, Venues)
US $6.92
o Content
US $184.00
o Art
US $44.00
I wouldn't normally spend $184 on content and this month I've spent like ZERO, but there were three things happening in May: events, where I made things and sold them or gave them away (Silk Road and SLB19), and bought models, and Shop 'n Hop, where many stores had 50% off sales, so it was a chance to stock up on houses and skyboxes and such for my rentals. I also started two new rentals areas and revised several others, so I put the content in those.
TAGGED ACCOUNTS
It's good to look at your accounts regularly, and I wish we had a capacity to tag things somehow but we can't expect LL to make a Microsoft-like spread sheet project when you can export the My Account info into Excel and other apps. To be sure, one you have a huge load of tiny micro-expenses and micro-payments in such a spread sheet, cutting and pasting or tagging them is so much of a chore, I don't want to bother.
One way I make the tracking work better is to put all purchases of land especially abandoned, which is mainly what I buy only one one account, so I can always see what was spent; all purchases of houses tend to be on one account, etc. But that gets to be a nuisance, fetching them and digging in their inventory. Actually, whatever nuisance it is, it is now a necessity as my account won't load anymore. Every time I log on, I have a different number for my inventory. I constantly crash due to this load, and endlessly clear cache. I try to sort it and delete things, but it's 240,000 items. Finding things in it is a crap shoot -- the cursor slides by and won't stop on the search term. So much time goes into inventory sorting that it becomes pointless to run a business.
Ultimately, there is no convenient way to do this so I put it in an Excel or even a Notepad to sort it by categories.
$29.99 PER MONTH OR $249.00 PER YEAR
The estimates people made for that "plusness" were often double, like if premium is $11.99, then Plus is $24. Or even less.
You can read about the terms after they were announced from Inara Pey or go to the official blog.
So in the event, it was $24.99 for the first month if you hurried to get that discount, but then $29.99 after that and $249.00 annualized.
So the 45-day sign-up bonus (and a more than a week has gone by so get cracking!) is $3,000 or US $12.00 which slightly takes the sting out of it, but not by much. You "save" US $17 if you get it now and add the bonus, so it's $232 for the first year.
BTW I use that coefficient of 1000 Linden dollars = US $4.00 because that's the fastest but still optimal cash-out rate -- 241 Lindens per US dollar.
To be sure, to cash out to PayPal, you will pay more fees, and then to bring these spacebux to your RL bank is yet another fee from PayPal which just went up. Someone else may conceive of this only in terms of what the cost is to buy and not sell Lindens if they are consumers, that's understood. I think creators and service providers within the inworld economy like me only can conceive of Linden dollars' sell rate because we are never going to buy Lindens -- what are we, crazy? You would always just wait until you had some sales in world or simply do without (that's my usual stance these days, in austerity mode since a) Gatchas were banned in August 2021, depleting the creator and user secondary sale economy, and after May 2022, when Linden imposed states' sales taxes, if applicable; I'm in New York State, with 0.0875% sales tax.
SO IT'S $32.61 A MONTH INCLUDING SALES TAX IN NYS
If you're in Montana with no sales tax, I'm happy for you, but I don't want to live in Montana (where I have camped many times happily) where I have to drive 100 miles to the store and possibly have to drive to Canada (or...where?) to find specialized doctors -- and face the threat of wildfires. My son lives in Florida and at first I thought that it would be worth changing the accounts to him and have him run at least some collections and tier at least in part even for only 1% less sales tax.
But then the cost for me personally doing that increases in various ways, chiefly because I have to beg and plead each time to get him to do this. He has neither time or inclination for SL (although he was happily on the teen grid years ago and still puts SL creation and commerce in his resume -- he and his pals ran a top-traffic mall and a scavenger game called Sewer Safari and even a trading post for WoW loot conversion into Linden dollars. He still gets jobs with that, imagine.
How're you gonna keep them down on the farm? My hope is that his wife and our niece, when she's of age, may get more interested but -- no. They have their own YouTube cooking shows and Etsy pages and Internet merch sales and all the rest like everybody seems to these days.
SL, which to me seems very compelling, doesn't pull. This is something to contemplate in general as to "why," but not now.
Along with that contemplation about my RL friends and family I will add Raindale's latest notice that they are turning SL into a hobby (a wise decision) and going to RL to make money hopefully in design and content on the web in ways that pay better given the war in Ukraine, which has impacted her far more heavily than us, although believe me, with Russian and Ukrainian friends and family, and my job as a Russian translator mainly for media and non-profits, we have been impacted terribly. Since nothing any of us suffer is remotely like the suffering of all the limbless Ukrainian children with fathers and mothers killed by Russian soldiers, believe me, I don't complain.
I used to think that unless you yourself can make a decent living and have a big, wealthy organization behind you -- a foundation, a rich NGO, rich people in general -- you can't be of much help to people in need. Let me tell you that you can, because anything you have is more than they do, and you can always just send $25 and keep morale up on Facebook or Twitter. That's appreciated, too.
If I can pay a few bills and even do things like send a check to Ukraine now and then, an SL business is all worth it, right? You can't use it to make a living. Still...
CAN WE AFFORD PP WITH RISING COST OF LIVING?
So in this hellscape of high gas prices, high prices of food (why has milk disappeared from our shelves when during the pandemic they complained that NYS had too much milk and companies were going into expensive yogurts due to the surplus -- oh, maybe that's why). Yogurt of the Greek, French, Icelandic etc. is now US $3 or $4 for a tiny cup. Somebody posted a picture of a bin of pink ladies (apples) for US $0.69 a pound the other day and I had to wonder what planet or what state they lived in, because my idea of a sale on E. 14th St. at the Whole Foods is more like $3.69/pound and not for the fancy apples. In fact, I'm taking the spacebux I get issued as a sickie by my insurance plan, to be used only at farmers' markets, to get a bunch of sweet potatoes and apples for the Duration.
Not sure about you, but we living in HUD housing and dodging subway "incidents" and illegal firearms activity and sitting all day at Bellevue with the rest of the Medicaid patients have already started living in the Recession which Elon Musk isn't sure is inevitable -- but then as he only lost -- what was it -- $64 billion? -- he isn't going to be taking in ironing or living off the ramen from Costcos any time soon. OK, people don't take in ironing any more like my grandmother, they...they....sell on Craig's list? Oh, I know, they go on SL so let me get back on focus.
Someone IM'd me in tears that they were on a fixed income and couldn't possibly afford $249 a year -- the thought being that it would be madness to pay the monthly fee of $29.99 (again, that means inworld, you'd have to make either 62,250 Lindens a year on top of your existing regular, which in Mainland rentals, will not exactly be a day at the beach but in theory possible [5178L per month to cover your PP] if it weren't for that sales tax which makes the $29.99 actually US $32.61 now per month for PP.
So for me, that means you need to generate 8153L inworld extra every month to cover it. See how that starts to jump? So where will I get this 8153L per month? Here is where I have to start to talk about the difficulties of the Mainland rentals business, which is my chose profession in SL, and ask whether PP will really help me in this chosen avocation.
THE HARD SCRABBLE OF MAINLAND RENTALS
So let's take a typical Mainland waterfront (and most aren't this) which I'll rent out for say 0.83/prim (but I have them for 0.75/prim in some places). Let's take a 4096 lot with 1406 prims x 0.83 for $1,166 per month, let's say. I offer 10% discount for 4 months advance, and many people do this -- a rough equivalent to annualizing a premium. So I have 4198L revenue from this lot and it's paid on time and in full. The tier to LL costs me US $10.94 per month for just that lot, at the "discount" rate which means the rate when you own more than a sim. (I'm not going to factor in the 10% group bonus rate because that generally has to go to tiering a commons or extra prims in some way). So I've made US $16.92 from this lot, yay! And I've paid out the tier to LL and now I have $5.98 revenue (not profit). Yay! Now why am I complaining, having chiseled more than the tier costs me from hapless customers on Mainland where their view goes south any minute?!
Well, go to Hector Lake and look around and see why. I have to "buy the view" -- like I just did this week with a purchase of $13,000 for that 4096 -- a steal, perhaps, a 3L per meter, but still, a US $54 expense in my little system that bites hard and cannot be made back quickly -- it's not made back by NINE MONTHS of waiting while I use the revenue of $5.98 to cover that outlay of $54 -- then it can start paying for me. And not all the lots are rented. And a lot of my lots in fact make US 0.72 per month -- 72 cents -- and that doesn't cover the tier to LL I pay for them, or I break even. So you're $180L/mo Motel Court Cabin is 72 cents a month. You're on 288 m2 and tier at my level (discounted when over one sim) is 0.00267 per meter. This is the iron-clad law of rentals math. If LL does give discounts to big customers of 100 islands, that ain't me. So I pay 78 cents to Linden for that little spot, and it has a cabin and furniture that draws from the prim supply on that sim, which have to be paid for as well. So it's really more than 78 cents, and I've got 72 cents back and lost 6 cents. You see how this works? You try to balance it all out, some more expensive lots, some cheaper, some furnished, some not, the whole thing combining -- along with content sales and tips -- at least to cover the land preserve as well, and break even or pay a few bills.
It's hard to get this to work any more not only because of the competition from Bellisseria. Not only because people leave SL, they get frustrated or bored. Not only because of COVID, which is still a factor. Some people are doing well now. They have WFH and less expenses of commuting, clothes, and take-out. They have more disposable income for SL, not less, and with WFH, can log on at will. Others refund because your US $5.00 a month rental is low-hanging fruit to cut out -- they lost a job, or the gas prices and food prices cut into their disposable income. I can often tell when COVID forbearance in the tri-state area where I live, from which a certain number of customers come, ends or is changed to a lower amount, because the "dings" of refunds begin to resound.
No, it's not just that summer is slow. I have been through 18 SL seasons, so I know from "slow". It's that the economy is in a crisis now, and this may be inevitable with all virtual worlds, not sure.
VACANCY AND SALES TAX
And here's they other reason why that "largesse" that you seemed to see me harvesting on one sim isn't all that: VACANCY RATES. In Mainland rentals, 80% occupancy might be the norm, and then you are already losing money. The occupancy goes down just that amount, and you are in the red. You have to scamper around with 100 other things -- content sales, tip jars, one-time fees for some service like installing a radio or skybox, customers who pay you on PayPal so you don't have to grind through all the fees at both ends and of course sweat equity -- endless efforts to wait on people to keep them as customers, get new customers with advertising and events, etc. etc. You can make it work, like the Cat in the Hat, but then you drop a plate, you drop a spoon.
When the sales tax came, I had to get rid of about a sim's worth of tier at least, and even then, that didn't cover the $229 or whatever I estimated the whole system with 14 sims would have to pay out in sales tax (one sim you can perceive as "free" of tier as it generates from 10 sims -- except read what I just wrote above about commons, extra prims etc.) That is, my sales tax in my state, as I explained to customers means that I have to pay tier on a new private island to LL -- but without the ability to put rentals on it to pay that amount back. Land should ALWAYS be seen as a sunk cost, the cost of doing business, NEVER an investment in a virtual world (I do hope you understand why) and now I would be tiering another island -- another island I never bought all these years (I only have one, plus one homestead) because I don't want to be in the island business and on the hook for big boats of land with no water access that I can't practically sell pieces of and be free and clear of them 100%.
Far easier to spread my 14 sims across 50-60 sims and sell or abandon any of the pontoons when the Titanic hits the iceberg, and the chambers fill up one by one. Then you stay afloat. So that's why when my neighbour in Hector puts her beautiful waterfront out for sale at $3L/meter -- a price that means I will have possibly GTFO, or some BDSM castle queen, or land barons who buy and chop and put up ugly ads.
YES, WE STILL HAVE AD FARMS!
Saffia, Saffia, Saffia. It's not true we "don't have ad farms any more," as you noted in the meetings with the Lindens. While it's true -- after four long years of struggle -- we got an ad farms policy from Jack Linden, who was a prince (they just don't make Lindens like that any more), the enforcement of it lasted only a few years, then the Lindens faced all these "edge cases" and problems stemming from the fact that some of their biggest land customers who outwardly seemed stable and decent even to many of us, in fact engaged in this scurrilous practice, often out of view and they weren't motivated to stop them.
Whitney Linden never knowingly sells a 16 m2 plot by the roadside to an ad farmer on the Auction or after a request of $1/m abandoned land. That is not how it works at all. What happens is that people request the abandoned land. Some of them are the alts of notorious low-life land barons. Possibly the Lindens can track that but likely they can't. The land barons can flip an auction faster than the blink of an eye and now an end user or a newbie baron has it, and may dump it or put some of it to sale because he is in over his head, all too often.
It's then the bottom-feeders pick it up, and that even includes MarkLand, which really should know better. MarkLand has an open and available list of such plots of 16m or 32m that he sells or rents openly. It's not like he needs an alt in the middle of the night. The Lindens could declare this illegal and close it; they don't. It's worked out to be one per sim...sort of.
Ad farms reduce value of your rentals. It makes people move out and never move in. There are certain properties that just never rent due to ad farms or ugly builds, but I don't dump them because they might be part of a coherent community I have built up over years, with people who have actually lived there for 15 years, imagine! Yes, it's true.
THE ECOLOGY OF BOTTOM-FEEDING LAND DEALERS AND AD FARMS
This is how it works. My long-time neighbour thinks she can get $20/m for her so-so Mainland combination roadside/lakefront property. She can't. She's read somewhere about Blake Sea and waterfront; she keeps it at that price for months, even. It never sells. She puts it to $10/meter. It still doesn't sell. Because land like that, on a sim where one idiot with a 2007 birthdate has a little palace with a spinning tower that looks like a dildo, who logs in once a year, is next door. And a lingerie seller with a store in the sky and 0 traffic and evidently her workshop or home sim with ban lines, is next door to that. You see where I'm going with this. My tenants and I co-exist happily with these blights -- high trees help, de-render, and looking the other way help. But it's not a good buy.
So then tier date is coming. Who wants to pay even just US $54 for that hapless neighbour's 4096 running down from road to lakefront? Nobody. Look at the map. There's lots more for sale out there. So she either sells it for 0.03/m which is all you can hope to sell lakefront for, or abandons it, and it is requested. Somehow
And he accepts rentals from the lowliest of the bottom feeders, like Jolie, who then puts a spinning sign on top of that. It's easy to return -- it encroaches on my lot, and somewhere in about 2006, LL made it possible to return prims that encroached on your lot, to make less work for themselves. It doesn't always work, and PS one thing you can't return is Linden plants/trees, which are a "different animal" in their system. That does need a ticket, and it is not uncommon for it to take 6-9 months to get the return from a no-show neighbour's land.
I return, Jolene, as I call her, comes back, builds some other ugly thing, I return it, sometimes by spotting it first, or a tenant calls me -- or a tenant refunds, and I figure, oops, the spinning monster went up again. One time I came, and Jolene had rooted a billboard on that 16m2 across my parcel where 0 autoreturn had been put on, likely by a tenant for some reason. She then rooted a big billboard on the Linden road shoulder, which she ordinarily wouldn't be able to do. I AR'd her -- and how many others may have done so, or AR'd me thinking it was "my land". Of course that would do no good -- in fact I even AR'd this billboard a few times before I realized, when "highlight transparent" was turned on, that she had rooted this long thin invisi-prim on her tiny rental, across my land, to Linden land. So once again, I return everything, lather, rinse, repeat. Let me look today. Nope, nothing there, but Marky still owns it.
Some time ago, I urged him just to sell it to me for a normal price. "Normal" means $1/prim or possibly $3 but not $10 let alone $100. He refused. I don't pay extortionists. I'm happy to play this game for years and years, and did so already for a parcel at the other end of the sim which had an ugly billboard for years, crippling my rentals, until finally for whatever reason, it changed hands (never abandoned and never sold for a reasonable price) and another ad farmer put up at least a small cube doing...whatever those small scripted cubes do...which at least isn't a nuisance. (Usually what they are doing is scanning land in order to find cheap land to buy, since bots are no longer allowed for land purchase evidently). So right at this minute in time, there is technically only one ad farm on the sim, and no more, and technically the owner of it isn't violating anything, although of course land barons scraping the bottom of the barrel have multiple alts and multiple groups and we can't be sure the Lindens work their way through these subterfuges.
But come to my house, as the kids say, and see WHAT ELSE is going on right next store in the view for 4 sims -- oh that giant GLOWING Sith obelisk that sprouted. As I know from having once contacted the owner and interviewed him for Metaverse Mercury, those people are deadly assholes, destroying view and value all over the grid -- they started by ruining the teen grid ages ago. LL could absolutely care less and they don't fall under the policy. I have testimony from tenants about how they came in, ruined the view with those uglies, forced people to abandon the land, then bought the abandoned land and chopped it up, in collusion with land barons. A friend who bought nice land next to the Siths shrugs -- he just de-renders them. He thinks they aren't in the land devaluation business because he sees them on one or two sims. Land dealers who see them all over know how hard it is to keep trying to sell or rent land to them -- not everyone de-renders; not everyone realizes they have to keep de-rendering when the object in question changes -- which it does. That's why the more sophisticated griefers rez grief prims that each rez with a different number (and UUID in the system), then disappear after awhile...whereupon a new one rezzes, foiling the de-render function. This is who you see win the land game in SL.
Not so, you say? Well, you tell me why kids from the teen grid who are now 30-year-old men (like my son, age 29 who was on the teen grid) STILL need to have Sith Towers for their "raids" or whatever the hell they did. It seems very clear to me that such games don't need to be all over the grid, and now there's another game. What is that other game? This should be researched and pondered. Usually the only game on the Mainland when it isn't about Blake Sea, or Tiny Empires, is bottom-feeding land sales. One clue is the Marky Mark stall right next to this new Sith Obelisk with freebies. Somebody buys land or requests abandoned from Lindens, whom the Lindens regard as "not ad farmers" because they haven't caught them violating their policy regarding more than one ad on a sim, etc. Some of the warring land barons actually spend time in detention when the Lindens DO ban them, but since they all have other alts and groups to spare, the land still keeps flipping. When those "grey-area" land barons then flip to even more scraping-bottom feeders whom the Lindens themselves wouldn't have sold to, they can't do anything. It is a "resident-to-resident" dispute.
THE LINDENS NEED TO MAKE A NETWORKED ROADSIDE BILLBOARD AD SYSTEM
This is why, as much as I dislike state socialism and state capitalism just as much, I advocate the Lindens banning all ad farms of any kind on any sim, roadside or elsewhere, and replace them with a Linden-run networked roadside ad system, a mixture of small and large signs and billboards, tastefully decided, available on demand for pay like Classifieds, G rated.
OR, even better! Let the ad farmers alone, but create this system. Many people will cross over to it. It will drive out all the crappy and sleazy ad farmers setting their land to sale for ridiculous prices and putting up ugly signs. No one will rent from them or buy them, or few will. But by leaving them "legal," the little far with the cats for sale with a little sign at the end of the driveway will not be outlawed.
If the Lindens can spend the ENORMOUS AMOUNTS of staff time they used to spend on the MP chasing gatchas that were not in the correct category (that was insane and stupid and vindictive), time they STILL spend to get rid of adult content not in the correct category etc, then they can edit ads in a billboard system that brings them revenue.
Brent Linden does not have time to read down into the weeds on my blogs and figure out the very deep and vexing problem here, which is why we request this -- along with capacity to buy ads at info hubs AS WE USED TO HAVE IN THE TELEHUB ERA. At this point I despair of this epiphany coming to Bret or even Saffia, and I move on. Other long-time land or rentals companies I have known on the Mainland with decent people and practices have simply gone out of business, or sharply reduced their offerings.
What we don't do -- and what the Lindens would like to drive us to -- is to go to the private islands and rent out offerings there. That's because islands are not only expensive, they are not contiguous. You hit a wall a few inches from the beach, unless, of course you can afford additional void and homestead sims to create a large empire or even a small one like Caledon. No thanks.
WHY MAINLAND REAL ESTATE?!
Let Grandpa put in his teeth, and tell you about the time I came back to SL in September 2004 on this account, having bailed out in May 2004 with Dyerbrook Parvenu when he just couldn't stay logged on. He went to a hockey game -- how interesting! It was laggy, he crashed. He flew around doing different interesting things, trying to build something, trying to make things -- and crashed! Fast forward, and the day I landed happened to be a Town Hall with Philip Linden. The site of the actual meeting with Philip was full, but someone explained I could go to Misty Rhodes place where she had a game or a helping depot or something, with benches to sit on and a radio to listen to Philip. I took about 30 tries trying to sit on the bench, as she explained to me what I need to do. Finally, when I got comfy, I heard Philip say that he was putting a feature in the viewer that made it possible to sell land to other people or rent it and retain ownership. He imagined real estate agents would now appear, and add to the diversity of the economy. He pictured an avatar named "Buzz," who would swoop down in a helicopter at the welcome areas, and pick up newbies and show him his rental lands, and help them get settled.
"I want to be that Buzz," I said to myself.
Did I tell you I now have a working title for my Second Life memoirs, Innkeeping in the Metaverse so eventually you'll hear the rest of that story.
SO...WOULD THE PP STIPEND MAKE IT WORTH IT?
Meanwhile, nearly 18 years later (!), it's different now in lots of ways.
Could I use that stipend? I have the $500 stipend of the grandfathered sort before 2006. It no longer pays for the Premium account. At $650 per week, the PP stipend, it isn't much more -- that's US $10.40 if you cash it out to pay the cost -- and I would.
Most people discuss PP in terms of annualized, as that is the only way to save money on such a bigger cost. But I don't want to spend $249 immediately, because I need it for a dental bill. Or I need it to repair my computer once again. Or save it to get a new computer. Or I need it to pay my electric bill. Yes, we have electric bills like that in the winter and summer here because we have electric heat and AC. It's 87 out right now, I don't use the AC to save money. I need $249 for life and accident insurance this month. Or maybe the Windows license or the AVG -- I pay for these things, I don't rip them because the ripped versions cause problems. And so on. There are a lot of expenses even in a poor life; $249 all at once is hard to justify on some extra tier and my chosen Linden home -- when the uploads aren't turning out to be the draw.
So looking at the $29.99 after this month, it's really $19.39 per month after the stipend is used as a rebate -- I don't need to buy hair. Let's say that I would have had 200 uploads, that's $8, now it's free, so let's say it's really only costing $11.39 now -- although really, that's not quite how to calculate all this -- you'd have to show that you had so many uploads MORE than this cost that it would be worth it.
HOW ABOUT THE TIER?
So now we're very close to justifying it -- and look, we get 2048 tier! The extra tier in the account means nothing to me -- on the current premium account schedule, I could get 2048 extra tier for another $13/mo beyond the $11.99, bringing the amount to...$24.99 per month plus tax. If you are buying the PP account for the tier only, obviously, that makes no sense, as you can just add to your premium account and actually pay less, after the first month. So don't. Except, if I get a 1024 extra than I would the PP, then I need to take the cost of that extra amount -- US $7.00 -- and subtract it from my figure, now $19.39 after I subtract the stipend. So call it now $12.39/month.
It's now only US $0.40 above the cost of a regular premium.
I personally hope this will be used to buy on the Mainland and make it better, and hey, you can donate to my rentals and get $355/wk credit for 512 and $710 for 1024.
I would put the tier to my groups and not get a Linden home -- I have a few I put in the SL Public Land Preserve -- a little goes a long way.
GROUPS
So now we come to groups. Who wouldn't want more groups? 70 isn't enough, but I don't need 70 more, even 30 more would do it. I have to use so many for my own rentals and projects because land groups in particular get laggy after about 400-500 people. So I now have like 15 groups just for Ravenglass and related areas and the Land Preserve. I'm endlessly joining groups to be in merchants' events, or for sales. I put alts on the job, but then I have to log them in to see all that stuff and it's a chore.
If I add more groups, then the temptation will be to add more merchants' groups, let's say for $250/each, in order to "save money" LOL. On their sales, which are constantly happening.
I had a good thing with $12.39 a month, right? But if I join even 4 new groups for $250/each, that's US $4.00 for the first month, I'm now up to $16.00+ To be sure, it's a one-time fee, and I stay in them. And I don't HAVE to join the groups with fees. I can join bunches of new fabulous, witty, interesting groups and go and meet fabulous, witty, interesting people. Or make such myself!
But businesses come and go -- where is the wonderfully stylish Mulloy or Sorgo today? Who are these brand new people who came out of nowhere like Fern or Square? There are groups I don't leave because I remain slavishly loyal to the creators, like Green Fairy, although she hasn't issued anything in ages. I'm glad I waited for E.V.E -- he's back after we feared he died of COVID.
Still, I worry that more groups = more spending temptations. While I will hardly spend $184 each month, I might spend $50 or $100 even, if there are compelling things that I "need" to buy, or "save the view" ventures.
The answer to lack of groups is to have them on an alt, even a non-premium one. Because most groups chatter so much they drive you crazy. You can shut them, but you have to KEEP doing that. I'm likely to put even more groups on other accounts including of my helper who rarely logs in except under duress, and I rarely log that account in, either.
My instinct, even after doing the math in favour of the Linden's new product, and whittling that cost with its "savings" down to $12.39, is that $29.99 every month is more than $13.05 every month and is $32.52. That means the Premium Plus costs me $19.47 every month, and I don't really have that extra sawbuck. The extra stipend, tier, and uploads aren't really going to relieve the pain of another day's grocery money out the door because the inworld benefits to my business are always being whittled away by....
SEARCH/PLACES ADS
If I only have 125, at .30/L per parcel, that's still US $15.00 per month. Add to that classifies and other types of ads I indicated.
LL has given no indication that it will add free search/places ads to their customers in the PP offering. They could take a leaf from my book -- I give my commercial customers free search/places ads as part of their rent. I have the group fees system that a certain small percentage of customers hate and go crazy over but most get it and don't mind that...42 cents per year that enables them to move from rental to rental, and get the early cancellation fee removed -- another part of my offerings.
But boy, I could use relief on that US $15.00 a month, now that I've decided to end group fees after 18 years of their use, and now move to adding $5 and $10 to my rental prices, something that I haven't done ever -- if anything, my rental prices came down over the years as the number of prims per square meter went up from LL. I got rid of land to cover the sales tax, but it's not enough. This rental hike of such a small amount isn't enough either. People will pay $55 instead of $50 for cabins so sure, if I have 100 cabins I now have...US $2.00 per month to cover the sales tax which is both on the premium subscription price AND the tier. You can start to see how this doesn't help -- and see why I'm going down to 75 or less in search -- search works so poorly anyway.
The last thing to do when there are leaks in your boat is to bail water INTO your boat; you bail water OUT. You don't add US $20 in cost to your business each month; you reduce US $20 if you possibly can in various ways.
Or...do you? Spend a month picking out a Linden home that is tolerable; loading up a huge bunch of textures and trying to make up the half finished things that fill my "My Creations" folder; finish my rental signs and portal boards; put 1024 to the group and kill off one of the extra accounts I use to hold groups together. Likely I'm going to do that simply to do what the cool kids do.
In August, more dental bills, then I'll be gone.
