classifieds shifting to dynamic pricing

If the categories are going to remain the same I encourage you also add rules about misuse of the categories.

If someone posts a yard sale under 'educational' they should not only have their ad moved to the proper category, but they should be prohibited from posting any more classifieds, at any price, for a period of time.

This isn't a really significant penalty... but kicking people out of areas where they offend is the standard penalty for almost all offenses in SL. Whatever that area is... your land, the forums, a newbie area,... or, I hope, the classifieds... banning is the typical official response to misuse.

It's a penalty to be treated the same as everyone else if you've exerted exponentially more effort. I'm wasting my time, though. I already know your ideal outcome for the successful.

It really has little to do with "working hard".

It's about helping people maybe be working _just as hard_ the opportunity to get some visibility.

If they're working hard, they'll manage their ad budget just fine, you needn't worry.

What if they're working hard but nobody knows it, so nobody buys their stuff?

I don't think you do. My ideal outcome for the successful is that they should get to be successful without making failures out of everyone else. Because failures sit in camp chairs, or quit. And that's bad for everyone, including the successful.

Then they need to work harder than anyone else at marketing themselves. It's how capitalism works.

Not everyone is created equal.

LF

And people don't play virtual worlds to be the same as the real one.

Again I'll highlight the fact that SL != RL. SL doesn't have to be complete and total capitalist wet dream.

There's really nothing wrong with LL doing a little to even the scales a bit.

Indeed. I'm not a frothy-mouthed capitalist running dog in RL; I'm a poor college student with a little too much free time and an endless drive to create stuff. I'm stuck in SE Michigan until I can finish my degree and move far away from the worst job market in the country.

In SL, I'm a semi-respected virtual architect and forum participant, and extremely active member of the community at large. I donate to charities, help newbies, make people laugh, and generally enjoy myself. And I can fly wherever the hell I want to.

I also soaked up a fair amount of business acumen by being here. It's not my fault I'm a quick learner.

Don't penalize me because some folks aren't as quick on the uptake as others.
LF

Don't penalize others for not having arrived in SL as early as you.

Business acumen isn't supposed to be about thinking that you're going to fail.

I'm a late adopter for most new developments in SL. I'm still animation-override free, for instance, and custom anims came about in 1.3. I only recently joined the classifieds system, several months behind everyone else.

80% of businesses fail within the first five years in RL in the US. I expect the rate is about the same in SL.

And we should try to prevent that being the case. The RL economy wouldn't work if anyone who started a business that failed, and/or couldn't get a job they liked, killed themselves. So in SL, where it does not seem uncommon for people to either leave or become economically inactive after a business fails or when they become frustrated, it won't be a good thing either.

You keep comparing SL to RL!

SL is, for most intents and purposes, a game.

Now, I'm sure you've heard about the issue concerning the retainability of new folks. Why do you think there are so many camping chairs? Because it's so hard to make money here. One cannot expect a newbie to just come in and start making money straight off (and even if they could buy $L, would you honestly spend your RL cash to buy play money in a game you just started and aren't sure if you like yet? Even if it's just like $5?).

Money trees and camping chairs are symptoms of SL's imperfect system, not the cause of it. Fact is, the playing field needs to be leveled, at least a little bit.

IMHO, having worked with RL newspaper class ad groups, this isn't unreasonable at all. I'd go a lot further though and offer better looking ads in addition to just placements for the money.

However, newspapers have a lot more classifications than SL. The goal is to make the class ads attractive to readers so they can find things they want, otherwise they loose their appeal to advertisers. No one will use the class ads if they can't find what they want. The land ads are currently getting to that state.

I'd suggest more classifications, and particularly much better searches so people will be more attracted to using them. To keep it worthwhile paying more, the sections and searches should always sort the ads by payment and you could allow ads to appear in more than one section if they pay for it.

This both encourages people to pay more and still allows small advertisers to get some exposure.

To be fair, people do do that for many games. For WoW you have to spend about $30 to even get started. And at least on SL, if you don't like the game, you can sell your L$ back.

I think it's more profound than that. I don't think it's because they don't know what to expect from SL. I think it's because they do.

Remember, the PTP Teleporter HUD Directory (visual and dynamic directory of locations to PTP Teleport to that you can use today) is only L$30/week to list a location and L$1/unique teleport. Why pay L$250 and much, much more per week to LL and only get a few visitors? With the PTP Teleporter HUD Directory, you only pay when people are PTP Teleported to your location!

Also, the directory cannot be "gamed". Listings are ranked randomly, and listings are visual only with the ability to distribute a notecard, landmark, or to PTP teleport the interested party to your destination.

The PTP Directory works in conunction with the freely-available and free-to-use PTP Teleporter by Hank Ramos. Available at my script shop in Grignano (including PTP Telehubs to get listed in the PTP Directory) or on SLExchange.

Well, some do, but as a Mentor the two questions I am most asked is, "What do I do here?" and "How do I make money?"

Most people come here and just expect to be entertained. Then when they find out that it's really up to them to entertain themselves, they get bored and leave. I don't think most know what to expect, working from the myriad questions I get.

Oh good another misfeature run up the flagpole. We await, will this die the flaming death of the "hover-tip settings in INI files" or live on to be an ever-backpedaling zombie like the "classifieds forum will close" initiative?

Would someone fire BugUpRearAboutClassifieds Linden and hire PermissionsSystem Linden or MakeStuffStopBreaking Linden instead? Thanks.

Exactly. When they don't know, they ask those questions. They leave when they find out the answers.

All of them, huh? Every last one?

(sigh) By "they" I meant the same "they" that Lo Jacobs was referring to when he said, "they get bored and leave". Neither he nor I meant everyone.

Make the display order completely random

Interesting grouping, Moss.

IceDragon's Playpen Island - Traffic: 92556
Luskwood - Traffic: 9833

One of these things is not like the other. Did you miss a digit or something?

1) We wouldn't spend inordinate amounts of money to be on 'the top of the classifieds'. We don't care about ordering, as long as new folks can find our stuff, at all, in the classifieds.

2) Our (Luskwood's) position in the 'popular places' find changes from day to day. Unlike certain places which you mentioned that are "glued to the very top", we often disappear off the listing if 'mature places' are included in the listing -- a checkbox i can guarantee you most people have on.

3) Believe it or not, we don't game dwell. We have no camping chairs, money balls, tringo, casinos, malls, slingo, or anything of the sort. As I said, one day we'll be high on the list when a lot of folks hang out, and one day we won't even be on it. We don't pay much attention to it.

4) My only concern is the pricing and requirement of being in classifieds *at all*. If someone wants to get on the top by being "Aaaron's Aaawsome Aaardvark Aaavatars", let 'em. First means nothing. Someone has to be first in any list, someone has to be in the middle, and someone has to be last. I have enough faith in the work that we put into what we do, and the quality of it, that this won't matter one bit. We've never advertised. We've survived, no, thrived for two years on nothing but word of mouth.

5) If someone wants to spend more than the entry listing to be listed 'before' Luskwood, as I said, *BFD*. But if we aren't in the listing at all, there can be a problem. People looking for -products- go to classifieds. People looking to -socialize- look at popular places. They aren't the same thing. If someone wants to blow L$5000 a week to work their sorting in a list, I say they can go with their bad selves. Believe it or not, we never have, nor do we, nor will we, try to corner the entire anthro avatar market. People like our stuff because they like our stuff, not because we're marketing gurus.

To finalize, I find it rather insulting to be compared to a massive casino with camping chairs and moneyballs. That, and the idea that we 'get enough' advertising insinuates that somehow we either are "getting more than we deserve" - insinuating that we're somehow doing something to game the system or exist in a dishonest manner.

I'm curious to know why you singled us out as undeserving, and coupled us with a completely and utterly disparate location. Have you ever been to Luskwood, or is this just some kind of preconception you've got?

I'm just trying to get a grasp of what you're fully trying to insinuate here, because there are LOTS of places between us and IceDragon's (who admittedly is always, always, at the very top position) in popularity that you could have singled out.

-I'm against ranking by fee paid. I think ranking by date posted, then alpha is appropriate. You want me to spend more, then give me statistics on how many search hits I get and what the total usage of the Classifieds are... just like any advertising medium does.

-I'm all for making the standard fee per week $75 instead of $125 ($250/2).

-If you're going to work on the Classifieds instead of texture loading, lag, bugs, etc.... then FFS give us more catagories and a way to auto-renew our ads. Oh and let us enter our location manually instead of setting it wherever we are standing.