How To Kill Your Own Business In 10 Easy Steps

Written By Linden Labs..available At Amazon Books Now

i can tell u 101 way !

Is this just a whine, or do you have some facts you can share to back it up?

Because if you're calling "running a casino" a business, you should actually be calling it crime, as unregulated gambling (which all SL gambling is) is a federal crime in the US.

Broccoli

Ibtl!

Kill their own business?

Would that be the business that last year at this time had less than 1 million avatars, and now has almost 9 million? That has 30% more "active residents" now than they did 6 months ago?

Would that be the business that last year was unprofitable, and now makes a profit?

Would that be the business that collects rent today on many multiples of the area it collected on a year ago?

Correct me if I am wrong but 30% of 1 mil is 300k. So only .3% of those 9mil AVs are active. That doesn't sound good.

Total Residents: 8,912,391
Logged In Last 60 Days: 1,639,432

Math is right. Logic is wrong.

Forget total population. The numbers are inflated. Alts, griefers, one-timers, etc. Everyone knows that. Nuff said.

Total number onlin (today) = @40,000 on average.

A year ago that number was @3,000.

% increase = 1300%.

I'd say that sounds good for buisness. Class dismissed.

~Jessy

But how many businesses would stay open if only .3% of their customers were replete?

If that's enough to make it profitable, then it's enough.

Word.

Is it Friday already?

Mari

I have one main character and four alts, you don't seriously expect me to log them all on at the same time, do you?

It would be near impossible with all the features they have added recently.

I'll be buying a new computer in about 6 months which might make it possible, but still why would i log on all five at the same time?

Sometimes I wonder: do some people log in to the forums on Friday with an alt just to give us material to get started??

Inquiring minds want to know.


In before the lock.

I love Fridays... about the only day I post!

This post wasn't poorly written enough however.

Sometime within the last year we broke a major milestone by having over 5000 people
on the grid at one time. At the time that was a pretty huge deal. And like today
the grid would act up when there were "so many" people on at the same time. I remember
going and finding other things to do when there were 'that many people' on at the same time.

I also remember wondering back then if I could ever see everything there is to see in SL.
I am amazed at how much it has grown in such a short period of time. I am also amazed
at how many people can be on at the same time now and still be able to get some things done.
Not because the technology isnt there for it, but just because of what I was used to back then.

With the scope of this platform and the growth they are experiencing there will always be
problems and or challenges as it is a product of technology it will forever be changing and
being improved.
But even in the short period of time that I have been here ( a bit over a year) LL has
added a number of pretty slick improvements that have made life and business much easier.

Sure everyone hears about the huge obvious changes that take place and various choices
are clearly questionable.

But for the most part I still find the overall experience very intriguing and challenging.
And my mind boggles when I think of what SL can become with the continuing implementation of current and future technologies.

I look on the bright side.

Your numbers are wrong.

Peak concurrency for August 17th 2006 was approximately 9,300. Recent peak concurrencies have been hovering in the 42,000 range. That's a 450% increase. Not 1300% as you've stated (without proof). This is consistent with the estimated number of unique daily logins which has gone from roughly 35,000 last August to 137,500 this August (~400% increase).

In that time, the number of registered accounts has risen from ~520,000 to almost 9,000,000 (1700% increase). So, although the number of accounts sounds like SL is on the path of runaway growth, in fact the *true* numbers don't agree with that assessment.

400 ish % is still pretty good for a year.

The number that interests me though is the "LindenX activity in the last 24 hours. " which is a pretty good meassure of how much actual USD is involved in the economy.

Which seems (just by observation) to not have changed nearly as much.

Math is actually wrong, but it's not your fault - the stats given were weird. Chex said 30% more active users than 6 months ago and 8 million more users (1mil+8mil for 9 total) over the last year.

You have different time frames and different variables, active users versus total users. If you want to compare the growth in active users to the growth on total users, then you need the same time frame - i.e. total users 6 months ago/total active 6 months ago and total now/total active now. The compare the percentages to see whether the growth in active users tracks the growth in total users. Then you need someone WAY smarter than me to analyze what that actually means.

The bottom line that I see is twofold. If you accept Chex Losangeles' numbers as fact, then you have a company that went from turning a loss to turning a profit, and saw a 30% growth in income producing business in the last 6 months. That's pretty danged good, but it's not a tatistically significant time period, so it's not a good indicator of long term growth.

Anyway, I'm pretty slow, so I could be wrong. Apply the numbers however makes the best sense.

Im trying to figure what the 10 steps out of LL's "plan to kill its own biz" would be.

I mean if you buy thats what they are doing (not saying I do)

- these are the steps I get:

1. Drop Credit Card Verification, allowing open registration.

2. Remove advertizing on Age-Play

3. Remove advertizing on Gambling

4. Institute Turn in your neighbor Anti Broadly-Offensive policy.

5. Ban Age-Play

6. Ban Gambling

7. Add Voice Chat

9. Add Identity and Age verification, with associated Content controls.

10. Merge Teen Grid and Adult Grid.

400% in a year is indeed decent growth. However, my point is that SL isn't changing the world, and in fact isn't anywhere close to WoW in size or influence. It just seems that way because people are so close (readbsessive) about it.

You cited the flat "US$ Spent" number. With the growing number of users, what that means is that people are spending less per person on average. As we all know, people tend to spend the most in their first month or so as they outfit their avatar, buy furnishings for a rental plot, etc. After the initial spree, though, spending tends to taper off to close to zero for most users. That means in order for content creators to maintain profitability, SL needs to continue to attract new users to inject fresh US$ into the economy. Once that declines, I predict more than a few creators starting to sell off their land etc., as keeping a SL business open becomes a losing proposition.

1. Whenever someone IMs you about your product, act annoyed like they are wasting your time.

2. List that your product is MOD/COPY, but make sure it's neither of the two.

3. When someone asks for a notecard, tell them to "Sod Off!" --this goes for LM too.

4. Purposefully play IM-tag with them...when they IM you back...quickly log off. Then, jump on five minutes later, IM them, and repeat step one.

5. Hire a foreigner to do your customer relations--if the customer is from the same country as the relations worker, quickly transfer the call to a different foreign rep.

6. Place scripts in your objects that are complete hogwash, and do nothing but cause grid-wide issues.

7. Never show up to work.

8. Spend all of your time trying to 'game the system' rather than creating a unique, quality product.

9. Use Centaur as your companies main logo font.

10. Use a name like: GAP CLOTHING for your clothing store, when you are in fact, NOT GAP.
______________________________________________________________

Those are my top ten ways to kill your business.

Total names, total active... it's the total amount paid that counts, not how many that pay.

I doubt they have an 80/20 ratio. Probably more like 5% of the people give LL 95% of their revenue.

Does that sound good? Or sound bad? All depends on whether 100% of LL's revenue is "enough" or not. Who can say?

Sure there's a lot of turn over and one-time visiters in SecondLife. This is a weird wonky world, and definitely not everyone's cup of tea, for whatever reasons.

Can you imagine how tragic this world would be if they had 50% visitor retention instead of ~3% ? One could hope that those with a knack for SL stick are more likely to stick around than those that would merely grief or create lag without bringing money or talent in with them.

Drowning in residents and money sure could kill!

LL may make silly decisions from our perspective but we're on the outside looking in. The fact remains they keep getting more people signing up and staying (even though those numbers could be handled better) and they keep opening new offices in different parts of the country.

By the looks of it "killing" means "doing things we don't like" in this thread so I guess that's true if you look at it that way. But considering you're all still here and more people keep signing up and staying I think they're doing alright.

Stupid question: in an other thread, you mentioned that you make "Nikon" cameras??