Are freebies hurting SL content creators?

Due to it being mention in a few threads, I felt this may be a good time to bring this issue to the forums to get sussed out.

There are so many freebies on the market now of varying levels of quality that a person can join SL and have a extremely rich experience without ever paying a dime and living off freebies.

Are freebies hurting content makers? Without so many freebies, would more people feel it necessary to invest some real life cash into SL to have a better experience or would they just leave because real life cash is a requirement.

I cannot say that my business is hurt by freebies yet...But that could just be a matter of time.

Do you feel your sales are impacted by freebies and dollarbies? Have your sales been completely decimated by freebies in the past? Or, are freebies not a problem in your particular business?

i don't know why all these big stores think giving away freebies helps their sales. there are more freebie hounds than return visitors. those are ALL lost sales, imo.

As they are generally done, I think no, freebies don't have much negative impact on content creators.

Take rezzing systems, for example. There's a really good free one readily available in the Scripting library - Builder's Buddy. Decent feature set, updated fairly frequently, and open source code. Yet that doesn't stop paid-for products like Rez-Foo from attracting business and making decent sales. As a Builder, I used Builder's Buddy a lot when I was getting started, and I still use it for some projects. But I also paid for a current copy of Rez-foo, and use that for other projects. Because the higher-priced item offers better features, and fits certain situations better. The maker has differentiated their product from the free one by adding innovations and improvements to their own product.

With rare exteptions, a free items is usually unsupported by its maker, and is often "last year's innovations" - stuff the maker does far better in their current product line. It's much like going to the "Factory Outlet Mall" and getting discontinued or slightly flawed merchandise from big name brands at a steep discount. You get what you pay for. If you want the best quality, and good customer support, you pay for it. You rarely get the best quality items or any customer support with a freebie.

Freebies are great for newcomers. They let them see just what sort of things are possible in SL, without spending a lot of money. And in some cases a freebie can even be great advertising for a merchant. For example, a dress maker who puts several of "last year's dresses" in a freebie box may well get paying customers in return, as the newbies and bargain hunters try on the old stuff, and start to think they would like more of that maker's best stuff.

Where freebies can hurt competition is when some big merchant tries to "stink out" the competition by *flooding* a market with free or insanely cheap goods. Like when a big meat packing plant muscles in and offers meat in a town at a fraction of actual cost, taking a loss because they know that people will buy from them instead of from the local butcher, leaving the small merchant with inventory literally rotting on the shelf. Once the little guys have been driven out, the big guy sets normal prices, and owns the market.

It's hard though to "stink out" a competitor in SL. There are too many innovative people, and there's no cost for inventory or raw materials. No one person has a solid monopoly on anything in SL (though there are certainly a few that own a huge market share). A certain well-known Resident tried that a while back with really cheap furniture. the attempt backfired, and you don't see that Resident's furniture anywhere now, while the other furniture merchants are doing fine.

How do you feel the OpenCollar system will have an effect on the BDSM collar market?

I spend alot of lindens in sl... but I love freebies too... Sometimes when shopping if I like the freebie I will go back and check out everything the designer is offering and usually buy something... so in my opinion I dont think freebies hurt sl....

Consumerism is the lion's share of "the market."

The obvious answer, is the question you did not ask: Freebies are good for the largest overall market segment, and bad for content creators.

Well, complex issue, my results may not be the same for others since I am a niche market creator. Let me take on the first point. Of the free accounts I know that use freebies, I would say they would go if there were no freebies. The current 'price point' as it were for online MMO's (bear with me, WE know SL isn't a MMO, but this is what new players see it as) is $15/month. Now try to own land, outfit a character, so some shopping and you QUICKLY go over $15 a month....meaning you either have to be a merchant, spend RL cash or take one of the many mindnumblingly boring SecondJob activities to generate the cash. Freebies balance this out for them. No freebies, SL == moneysink and we lose a lot of them.

So far my business has not been hurt either. But then 90+% of my items are sub 500. The folks I have seen getting screwed over by freebies have been the big-ticket folks. Someone that seriously thinks their virtual ship/car/script/widget is worth over 5K $L. What happens here is someone with building or programming skill thinks that merchant believes his prims are made of gold, then makes a copy that is often as good as the original, and releases it full perm. The high end market seems to take more of this than the lower end....why sink hours into building and scripting something you can buy for $500 or less? Save that for the overpriced stuff, least that is the mentality I have seen.

My sales have mostly been affected by the following. A) Competitors that make knockoffs and price it lower. B) LL constantly dicking with search criteria last year (one week I am page 1 in search, next page 10, next page 2, with same keywords and smilar traffic) C) Search Keyword Loading (like the dark furturistic 'City' RP sim with EVERY keyword known to man in their listing, most of which they do not offer). Freebies are really not on my radar.

I'd like to point out that yes they do and yes they do and they affected me directly are close enough to be the same whenit comes down to it.

Freebies have gotten beyond the absurd- the quality even isnt important and don't get me started on the mind numbing idiocy of hunts-

Generally when I find really good freebies, I'll go back to that store and spend money on their products.

I do not think I have a single freebie in my inventory unless it was passed out via the Forum Cartel Group.

I guess there are two types of freebie builders. The first type don't necessarily have a business model or an expectation of making Lindens. The second put them out as marketing.

The first:

They might want to contribute to SL "society", or they might just want to build something and see joy in others using it. Or show off. Or whatever. These are the people who are in SL to enjoy SL, help it grow, and just generally be good citizens. I find it difficult to fault them, myself.

The second:

The others do it to raise awareness of their store. Search basically sucks, buying ads sucks, everything about getting your message out sucks in SL. IMHO, of course. If a freebie or a hunt exposes your store to a 1000 people who otherwise wouldn't have found you, and only 1% of those buy something, you've come out ahead.

But yes, I do think freebies can hurt some business owners due to lost sales. But more because either a) they don't do freebies and are missing the marketing boat, or b) someone else markets better than them and gets their potential sales.

I'm not saying that markets can't be killed by freebies (collars?), but that too is part of SL. The overhead costs in SL are a fraction of RL, despite the high cost of land. One can treat SL as entertainment expenses and go hog wild killing markets. But I would argue that those markets were precarious to begin with, and instead of complaining about it, those affected should be happy it lasted as long as it did.

Well, so far it hasn't caused me to change my "brand loyalty". So far I haven't seen any reason to give that particular product line any consideration. My Pets and I are happy with the brands we use now.

My Pets use one of two types of collars, both popular commercial models. One is my preference, the other we have found somewhat better at dealing with furries who are shorter or taller than Human norms (the animation positions can be adjusted for the individual collar wearer, so a short avatar, when kneeling, isn't planted in the ground, and a tall one isn't hovering in the air.)

Take a look at cuffs. LockGuard cuffs are available for free. But people buy lots of paid-for ones with more features.

OpenCollar may gain a certain share of the market, but I don't think it will push all the competition out. Not if the competition does their own job and continues to add innovations and improvements to their product.

There have been free collar and leash sysetms for as long as I have been in SL, and that's several years. OpenCollar simply appears to have raised the bar for what is available for free. But as I said, I haven't prsonally even seen any reason to have any of my Pets evaluate one for their use.

(Also, I am hardly a typical customer for such products, since I only rarely engage my Pets in such play, and am not using such items all that frequently. And as a builder and scripter myself, if I want a free set of collars or cuffs, I'm just as likely to make my own.)

I look for quality, and loonyness in a product. When I find that I take it, be it freebie, or pay item. When I find a creator that consistently makes items I like, I will tend to buy their products even when it might not meet the loony factor, just to make sure I keep them in SL.

I spend on average 10kL a week, some weeks more, some less, all depends on how well Teleport is working. I have seen many a 'freebie' item that is a direct knock off of something I have seen or purchased before, but when you look at the true close up detail, it sucks. Then again, I have seen pay items that the detail sucks, and the knock off freebie shows much more care and work.

Price isn't an issue, quality is.

and loonyness.

and Chocolate.... if the item comes with chocolate, I buy it, period!

I do both. I have alts that are almost outfitted completely with freebies, dollarbies or lucky chair stuff, and it is part of the fun to make them look like these are anything but freebie outfits. I take a certain pride in getting compliments often about the outfits, too.

But with my main, I pamper her and spend a lot of Lindens on stuff, and darn, it shows. I think the people that get as hooked by SL as I was, the ones that will be here in two years from now... these will spend money, no matter how many freebies are around.

1 user agreed.

The thing that hurts is pricing themselves out of business, not the freebies

I talked with someone offering a set of click scripts for 1000l for each attachment (breasts, ears, feet, hands, etc) complaining about not selling them to anyone. I had to break it to them bluntly: others offers them for less, and those can be customized where his could not. So he was competing with a product that offered more for less.

That is the key, you have to offer more than the freebie and competition. Much like I do when I do work for folks now and then. I charge variable fees, but I also support it and will customize it.. sometimes for a fee later down the road depending on what they want or need.

It's like the car manufacturers, they compete to offer more than the others. And they sell cars that way, even when KIA offers their two cars for the price of one... at less than the average car on say a ford or chevy car lot.

I would have to say they are not ALL lost sales. There are so many clothing creators out there now, that freebies/cheapies is exactly how I decide who is getting my money.

Anyone that knows me well, knows that I absolutely love the freebies and run all around the grid grabbing some of them up - though granted I am not quite as obsessed about that as I used to be. But, even with all the freebies that I nab, I still spend thousands of L$ every month.

Granted that many of the newer folks might just live off of freebies, but I would still think that some are like me and use them to gauge quality and such.

Freebies raise awareness. They're advertizing. It's probably not an ideal way of advertizing, but if you're a new store owner then it's the only way of making people aware of your stuff. They see the free stuff inworld and look at the creator's profile for links.

Perhaps one day XStreet will become more popular and freebies will no longer be necessary.

This I definitely agree with. I think that the ones that hang around will ultimately spend money, regardless of how many freebies are out there.

I believe freebies has some impact on sales and economy. So once a person has become established then they stop hunting for freebies and start spending money on things that are new.

On the otherhand, I think it's idiotic to offer them for free.

Freebies (I try to call them gifts now, because the word 'freebie' sort of cheapens them) have impacted my business positively. I use gifts primarily to market my product. First and foremost, I want to get people into my store, to look around and maybe shop, and to remember the name of my product. I want them to see what I make, my style so to speak. If they like it, they will come back. I want them to then see the quality of my work, and hopefully appreciate it.

On the day I post my new releases and freebies, my shop is rarely empty all day long. Yes, a lot of people tp in, grab the freebie and go. But quite a few of them stay and shop.

I'm not so sure about that, but I don't think it has much to do with the fact OpenCollar is *free*, per se, as it does with the fact that it's *open*--and therefore can be made to interact with anything.

It took a long time, but eventually some of the scripted attachment sellers understood that integration and interoperability would become make-or-break, but their response was much too little, much too late, with extra, closed-source integration scripts that require "developer partnerships" to use. That left the door wide open for the obvious open-source replacement. (It's not just collars and cuffs, either.)

Perhaps they supposed that familiarity and brand loyalty would carry them through, but the market is a fickle mistress when account turnover is this high.

So in the case of OpenCollar, no, it's not freebies that are hurting SL content creators; they really couldn't have made themselves more vulnerable if they'd tried.

Freebies are made by content creators too!

I agree that freebies must affect the sales of priced goods. I make stuff for sale but I also give away some of my creations as freebies. I imagine that's the same for a lot of other stuffmakers. I shop for freebies too, although I'm not averse to spending a few L$ to from time to time.

I have said on here before that for many SL residents, it seems, 0L$ is a bargain but 1L$ is a rip-off.

They do not hurt if it is based on me. The first freebies handed to me got me hooked on playing dress up with my avatar and I have gone hog wild ever since. I quickly put my credit card on file. I do not spend any less even though freebies have grown. Freebies are great, but as far as finding that exact perfect thing the moment I want it. I will shop.

I also look to for objects to dress up my land now too. The only thing that might slow down some of my shopping is creating more. I am never going to be able to create by myself the variety I can get though. So, I doubt I will ever stop shopping.

Agree with the above!

My businesses have not been hurt due to the flood of "freebies" AS YET! However, i'm not silly enough to ignore that there is a real possibility that might all change sooner rather than later.

Over time, I have spoken to many other creators in various different markets and most say their sale levels are down (or well down) from 2008 or 2007 or prior. Of course this is not solely down to freebies...as more content creators enter the market relative to growth in login rates (consumers) the slice of the pie will shrivel....but high quality freebies don't help any!

It will be interesting to have this same Poll, this time next year....my feelings are that the picture will become more clear cut.