Premiums in negative growth, when is LL going to get the message?

I finally happened to see the economy stats. (Google doc: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxbDc4B2FH96NzYTkCnb-SA&gid=0 )

According to Meta, “Concurrency, usage hours, and total resident-owned land continue to grow at a steady pace, while our count of Premium users dropped slightly again in January as we work on designing a better Premium offering.”

As to the concurrency and usage: duh! Bots! Something LL continues to ignore the impact of.

Resident-owned land = islands. Mainland ownership actually dropped, as makes sense since premiums actually dropped. LDPW is nice but is too small to affect actual mainland.

Here is what I would do to change things around.

1. Make mainland ownership open to anyone willing to pay for the tier.
2. Give premium members a 20% landholding bonus in addition to the free 512.
3. Eliminate the cost of uploading for premium members.
4. Reduce the LindeX transaction fees for premium members. 20 cents per buy transaction, and 2% for sales.

I think this would radically change the way LL does business. They would collect more tier, and it might provoke more premium members to sign up. Content creators who own mainland shops would get a little break and could own bigger parcels and have more prims if they were premium. People who just want to hang out inworld and not create content would get a break on their photo uploads, and could have more prims for their homes. Even those who own islands would want to go premium to get a break on the LindeX transaction fees.

If you are not a premium member, would you go premium if the package was like this?

They got the message long ago. They just don't do anything about it.

Good ideas. You are offering a lot of incentives and I like those ideas. Yes I would be more inclined to go Premium if they made it worth my while like that.*

Long term thinking does not seem to be LL's strong suit.


*I'm already Premium, just putting myself in a newbie's shoes.

Come on Cristalle, as usual your post is full of fail! Mainland ownership increased not fell. Every sim they release sells (and they're not cheap either) every parcel in the auction queue gets bought. How can you possibly claim mainland ownership is falling?

The number of premiums fell yet the amount of land owned increased. This seems odd and needs some explaining. My guess is that mainland rental is exploding in popularity. I know my business has really been taking off lately. Really being premium is barely worth it, and to be honest, who cares. Freeby accounts rent land and the landlord pays LL so everyone is happy. I'd imagine from LL's perspective it's a toss up whether it's worth having 65 people owning 1024s in a sim or one person owning the whole thing. One makes more money but the other is way less hassle and requires less tech support and manpower.

Your ideas are fine, I guess, but why would LL even care if you are premium or not? You're still indrectly throwing money at them if you rent land or need Lindens for anything. That extra USD10 per month is hardly worth the effort of worrying about.

I could get into that kind of package, if I wasn't already an premium.

As an existing premium, I'd give up my stipend for this kind of thing. As a content creator, getting the free uploads would cut down my overhead, and the 20% increase in tier-free? I could contribute more to my group and shop!

Oh, and when are you idiots going to give up this ridiculous notion that every new account is a bot? LL have already said that bots make up an absolutely minuscule percentage of the total population. They probably number in the thousands at best. If you think the extra 2.5 million man hours spent in LL this month over last are somehow related to bots you are totally wrong.

I'll give up the idea when I don't ahve to ban 2-5 crawler-bots a week. And that's jsut on land I can controll.

Anyone who ignores the negative impact of bots is the "idiot", not the ones bringing facts on them to the table.

Even the most scaled down bot uses many times the resources of a normal client. That's networking resources, not that of the client-PC. Yes, some are used wisely and with the concept of the community in mind. Most are used irresponibly with no thought at all in mind.

Sorta like ad-farms.

~Jessy

Interesting ideas, Cristalle, I haven't heard the uploading and transaction fee thoughts before. The 20% land bonus puzzles me ... wouldn't it be hard to find plots in that size? I'm not sure the reshuffling necessary to create them would be worth it. Of course, you could do it by scarfing up a bunch of noncontiguous 16m2 plots in the same sim just for the prims ... but that's a complex shopping experience for a noob.

Another thought: what would it take to *fairly* eliminate the Premium program altogether? Stop accepting new ones, let existing Premiums keep their 512 tier-free for another year beyond the end of the program, give them some other gift as well?

The Lindens are aware that the Premium program does not deliver enough value to residents, and I doubt they're looking to make its administration more complex than it already is.
.

"You idiots"? Seems a bit harsh. Good thing your potential renters don't read the forums...

She means a 20% bonus in tier, like the 10% you get now for group land.

I don't want to turn this stupid thread into some other kind of stupid thread about bots so I won't respond to the inevitable rebuttal but resource wise it would be nigh on impossible for a bot to use as much as the official client. For a start they're not downloading any images, most of them aren't downloading stuff like terrain data, they're generally not flying around causing collisions and they almost never chat or shout or wear prims or transfer assets around all over the place. Your prim hair with 300 heavily tortured toroids is using a thousand times more resources than any bot.

Gee Elan, I got it from their own numbers: Resident owned mainland fell from 185.35 to 182.92. How is that growth? Someone must be abandoning for that number to fall. I asked Meta a month or so ago how mainland shrunk and she said it was the amount of meters owned by residents and that the number would fluctuate. So if it goes down obviously someone abandoned.

Personally, I've never thought going premium was expensive. I don't have a premium account because I don't want to open up a business. I don't want or need to work in SL, I already work in RL. I come here for fun. I don't want to make money here, I just like to spend it (heheh)

It's not so much the incentives that are (or not) offered, or the price that keeps me from a prem acct and buying land, it's more the hassle. Quite honestly, on these forums at least, what you often hear about is griefers, theft, crazy neighbours, etc. Which land to buy? Who do you trust? What's the latest scam? Good Land Barron, or bad?

I just bought my own place in RL and I work in a 'business', so I have to deal with many of these things already. I've gotten calls at home in RL because such and such customer was not happy. I understand that this is called Second Life, but I come hear for some peace and fun - to get away. I DO NOT want to double up my life, I want to add another side to it...

If I went premium (out of guilt because alot of you DO pay every month), that's $L that would go to LL instead of merchants and creators, here.

So I guess my answer Cristalle, is no, I would not. It wouldn't change much for me. I still think your ideas are interesting and might influence others, though.

OK, I have to concede I was wrong there. F- for reading comprehension. But really the only reason mainland ownership has falling is because LL aren't auctioning it fast enough. People are gagging for more mainland as indicated by the (to be sure slowly) rising prices.

Among my neighbouring landowners there are 2 plots where new premium members played about with building or rezzing stuff, then left it and I haven't noticed them about the place for months. Also another piece of neighbouring land was owned for a year by someone who I never, ever saw. Then it reverted to Linden Land, was sold at auction and now seems to belong to someone else who's never online!

SL seems to be full of absentee landowners who joined during last year's LL boom and will drop out of the system as their years' subscription ends.

My incentive for making premium membership more attractive is to arrange for residents who've been premium for a year to only start paying tier on land over 1024 sq m.

No. What they are doing that uses so much is SEARCHING about a 1000 times a second. Each Search queqes the already taxed Asset Server, having to send new information over the network. The downscaling is reducing the visual aspects of teh client (bots don't need to "see" things), but the data-packets sent/recieved are still many many times greater than a human could ever hope to use.

Also, they do fly and collide. A lot. As well as select EVERY SINGLE PRIM in the area if they are search-bots. As selecting a prim calls for a Update query to the system, even this increases network load.

The visual graphics to render multiple polygons for skining over each frame is quite low (even with the 255-prim hair [300 isn't possible]) compared to the network load of searches and updates. The visual is actually more client-side only as your Grapic Preference settings effect that.

And I'm all for free downlaods for Premiums, as well as the 20% land bonus. Not only would that bring in new Premiums, but would retain the current with more vigor.

~Jessy

And Elan, I do not think that every new account is a bot. Whoever said that? But bots partially explain the high concurrency rates, even as the LindeX activity flattens out. The number of active users actually took a downturn between December and January, but has gone up again. I don't think it's all bots, but with the existence of alt farms and camping bots, there is some percentage of bots out there keeping concurrency numbers up. It doesn't take two eyes to see that, and your vitriol is unnecessary.

Eliminating the upload fee is a bad idea. It's there to stop the asset servers being filled indiscriminately. There are, I'm sure, business models that would involve continuously uploading textures to the asset server all the time, which are not viable now because of the upload fee. If you remove it, those business models will work as soon as the cost of premium is less than the cost of the upload fees, and the asset server will get hit in a nasty way.

There's a similar issue with transaction fees. Either LL gets money from you as a premium member, or they get money from you in transaction fees. If they lower transaction fees then it's a simple calculation to figure out which choice for you gives LL less money, so this really wouldn't help LL at all.

Rather than the number of premium accounts, I think a much more interesting statistic for examining the success of SL would be the number of island owners. Well, even there, that doesn't take account of all of the people renting but not owning their own land/island. So really the best statistic is just the total land size. That is the amount of land that someone, somewhere is paying for, mainland or island. And that number is steadily growing.

I must have missed that announcement by LL. It’s not in Meta Lindens stats anyway.
How did they count the bots?

A few months ago, someone (? - I'll have to go back searching) did a good estimate of bot population based on visiting high-traffic and mega-dot sites and sniffing the campers. The estimated numbers were high enough to be remarkable.




The topic of bots came into this thread purely on the basis of their contribution to "concurrency" - or LL's claims to real growth in active residents.
The question of resource usage is a red herring.


We don't actually know what percentage of concurrent users are not bots.
While traffic is still a factor in search ranking, it is a no-brainer to assume that the population of bots is steadily increasing - both for camping-for-cash and for lakes/boxes of zombies controlled/contracted by the parcel owners in question.

Seifert, content creators already get around that by using the beta grid. It makes no difference. Considering that $10/mo is about 2700L, that's 270ish final uploads a month to break even under the current system. I don't know ANYONE that prolific. It's hardly a danger.

As for the LindeX fees - again, you'd need to buy/sell a significant amount of L before it becomes a factor. The selling fee in particular is 3%. How much does a person have to sell for that to not be negligible?

Keep in mind also that these are not unique users - there are people with premium alts to take advantage of the group landowning bonus, which would get a real boost if they got a 20% tier bonus on top of it for being premium.

Note also that this package doesn't include a stipend. Stipends are worthless, IMO. It gets eaten up by advertising, parcel, and employee fees faster than you can blink for the average business. Let LL keep the stipend and give us something of real value over and above what is available to everyone else, and I think you'd see a massive ramp up in the amount of people willing to fork over the cash to be premium.

I must have missed that announcement by LL. It’s not in Meta Lindens stats anyway.
How did they count the bots?

A few months ago, someone (? - I'll have to go back searching) did a good estimate of bot population based on visiting high-traffic and mega-dot sites and sniffing the campers. The estimated numbers were high enough to be remarkable.




The topic of bots came into this thread purely on the basis of their contribution to "concurrency" - or LL's claims to real growth in active residents.
The question of resource usage is a red herring.


We don't actually know what percentage of concurrent users are not bots.
While traffic is still a factor in search ranking, it is a no-brainer to assume that the population of bots is steadily increasing - both for camping-for-cash and for lakes/boxes of zombies controlled/contracted by the parcel owners in question.




[RANT]
FERGAWDSAKES!!!!!!
I've lost count of the number of timeout/can't load page/ try again / Refresh that I've had to go through on this crap web server today. Stelath 503's just like the stealth crashes in SL that have been building up lateley.
It's a simple bog-standard BB on a website.
It's not bleeding edge.
[/RANT]

The main reason i dont jump to premium and decided to rent was simple, the tier/land parcel/premium monthly etc etc etc package is just too dang confusing.

The main website has links ogoing off in all sorts of directions giving advice about teirs and land ownerships and all that, i spent 5 minute looking at it wondering what the heck it all meant and thought "screw it, ill rent instead...."

Heehee, I don't mean to laugh at your misfortune, especially since I've been saying the EXACT same thing in my head... Grrrr Thanx for the rant, I feel (a little) better.

Yeah.. have a working website would boost confidence in LL, that's for sure

Exactly. A lot of people just go, "Meh, whatever, I just want to go play..." Why in the world would they go through all those explanations. Most people have a job, (and kids, responsibilities, etc.). They just aren't willing to give up their time reading through everything.

They need to look at how real companies communicate with customers and potential customers in plain english and try doing that. And then follow up with customer service like you get from a real company intent on staying in business.

Word of mouth is the best advertising. When's the last time you recommended SL to someone or going Premium to someone in SL?