No Q4 Pricing Changes Planned

yes ..... but if i look at costs in relation

this is for me ..... yours may differ

ISP = £10pcm 16mb bandwidth, unlimited downloads
Domain Name (SLUK.Info) = £4.99pa
Hosting = Depends on service anything upto £50pcm

Thats a BIG difference, allthough i want to know what the maintenance charge is for as backups dont really come into it with the assett server.

Linden Lab have an excellent idea with SL, just needs to be managed a little better than is currently.

I never said LL wants to be an ISP . But the statement that since the internet is free for all, SL must be free for all is not based on reality. The majority of people pay their ISP (or whatever entity) for their internet access, it's not free.

The web isn't a free-to-all either, there's no shortage of pay-for-access sites. Even if the content is available for free, someone is providing the funds for it. In LL's case the people who provide the majority of the funds (land owners) are balking at the possibility of paying more just so everyone else gets free access.

If LL can make the current system work without taxing anyone further then all the better, but if the current system leads to perpetually increasing tier every year to fund the free accounts then they should be willing to revise their open door policy to cut down on costs, starting with the unverifieds who are past their due date where they'd turn into contributing residents and upward until they reach an equilibrium again. I honestly don't see why paying for access to SL is such a big deal to people.

But paying for Hosting would be like owning land.

It doesn't cost you anything to browse the internet of OTHER people's websites once your connected.

The problem you get is -

If the 2D web is still mostly free, but the 3D web costs money - It will slow the growth of the 3D web.

Additionally is SL wants to be the 3D web and its costs money and their competitor(s) want to be the 3D web and doesn't cost money .. SL wont become the 3D web.

I think them wanting to be the 3D web is a pipe dream. But they (and others) dont.

I do not have a solution to share, just want to share this:

When islands jumped from 195 to 295, players thought SL was going down the tubes, however because it was a class 5 server, it was understood why the prices would be rising and the old islands are tiered at 195.

I think those (class 4) 195 islands should remain as that, as well as all class 4 mainland servers. Once you start to charge the same for a different performance sim, you will likely get the equivalent of class 4 players subsidizing the other players for less performance.

As an owner of several mainland sims, this makes me uneasy. By SL even confirming they are not raising prices through the end of the year is a bit disconcerting. Its telling they are planning pricing changes in some way.

Perhaps they will lessen the impact of the new tier pricing by having some way that the FREE accounts must pay. If not, there will most certainly be a backlash that may put a nail in the coffin.

That's another problem with LL's current pricing though: it doesn't follow the web model at all, low traffic places subsidize the high traffic one (when it comes to paying for the resources used by visiting avies).

If I wanted to host a site that includes a blog (best web analogy I can think of for having land with a house for you and friends) I'd pay a few dollars every month.

If I suddenly become Miss Popularity and the site starts attracting large amounts of visitors my hosting bill will equally skyrocket.

I do think LL wants to go into the history books as being the company that standarized virtual worlds, but I just don't see that so I just dismiss that viewpoint personally. SL is at best a social site, with room for personal expression. There's no way to really offer information (notecards are clumsy at best), and where it is planned (HTML-on-a-prim) it just uses web technology so you might as well stick to using your normal browser for that.

Even free Second Life Accounts have to pay their internet provider to acces the internet.


I do not think that anything LL charges trickles back down to the land owners (that dies out in 2006 with the end of traffic payments).If everyone had to pay a dollar to turn on Second Life just to look around - I think all of us landowners would see a major decline in business and income. I have one fee-to-enter parcel, many do. It is the same as pay-for-access websites.

I would not want to turn on my internet to look up the time a movie started and be charged for it. In your SL - NBC holds a promotional event and must issue some sort of rebate to every guest because there will be a charge just for attending that is out of NBC's power. In my SL - people come to my venue because its free and social. The reatilers pay to be around the traffic.

Right now SL's prices are extremeply high for what we get (not the ideal of what we would like to get). These prices have to come down for SL to compete with any new 3D web service provider.

But if you become popular on the real web you can charge more for advertizing - that hasnt translated over yet.

I think its more what LL wants SL to be that motivates their pricing decisions. Rather than what SL is.

I think that if they had been content with being a virtual world and social site - the open registration 6/06/06 never would have happened, and prices would have adjusted so they stayed small but profitable. I think the idea of them moving to an all premium model ended with the open registration decision.

Which was kind of my point .

Purely fictional numbers:
Hosting cost/sim: $100/sim average at 10k sims = 1 million
Grid operating cost /avie: $2/avie average with 250k active residents = 0.5 million

Either every avie pays that $2/month and it would cost $100/month per sim, or every avie gets free access and a sim costs $150/month.

That's what I meant with landowners footing the bill. The more active residents there are the more landowners will have to pay to even things out if you insist on a free model.

(Don't focus on the actual numbers though, like I said, not based in reality in any way, just an illustration of what I meant )
Which works because having that service increases ticket sales, or is necessary to just remain competetive (assuming you're talking about a movie theather). You never get access to any content you actually want for free though, it merely facillates your eventual purchase.

My L$2 on how to make it more appealing to go premium:

1) don't take away anything that people have now. It will alienate and upset too many people to go limiting what they can do or access, after giving it away for free for so long.

2) Look through the feature requests or the jira or whatever and start adding some features people really want, but restricted to premium accounts only. Make a big PR hoopla about listening to the 'community' and adding those things that have had the most votes / been around the longest. Here are a few I would like to see, in no particular order:
* Ability to make a local backup of inventory
* Expanded group memberships, to 50 or 100 even
* Greater flexibility with the appearance sliders ( eg. avatars from 6 inches tall up to 20 feet tall)

I'm sure there are technical challenges for each of these things but if they really wanted to overcome them, they could. And then they could go back to the 'community' and say hey, you asked for these things, if you really want them, put your money where your mouth is and go premium.

-Atashi

I like the idea of a free trial, then a required subscription to continue. This model is in line with the high initial turnover for new registrations...a lot try it for a short time, don't like it, and leave.

However, it doesn't address the problem of griefers being able to get in for free. To address this aspect, the idea of limited grid access is appealing. Keep trial members on a limited portion of the grid. Let vendors rent space there to sell to them. Let them rent land there, and get a taste of building.

If that is to work, it will have to be much more extensive than "Move City", the build on Orientation Island. It will have to offer significant variety...a true taste of SLife.

I think that all permanent residents should be charged some sort of fee, at least for their primary account. True, SL is not your ISP. But neither is it "just another website." In return for the 3D world and all its capabilities, paying a subscription fee makes sense to me. And somebody has to pay for the infrastructure. Putting more of LL's income into subscription fees spreads the cost of SL across a broader base, instead of placing it almost entirely on landholders.

Making a popular site...any site...subscription does cut way down on the griefing population. I've seen it happen repeatedly. The downside of course is that you also eliminate a lot of non-griefing customers who aren't willing to pay the subscription fee. Your user base does decline...but the quality of the user experience goes way up. Some sort of free limited trial would help overcome the customers' reluctance to open their wallets, I think.

I also want to see more cross compatibility with the outside Internet. Allow upload/download of all standard filetypes, especially commonly used formats like PDF. Integrate the ability to IM or Chat with people out-world into the viewer. Maybe integrate email into the interface as well, though I'm not sure that's necessary.

The idea of tying stipend to land has merit. After all, the more land you own, the more prims you have, and the greater your need to fill up that space with Stuff. Stipend helps pay for the Stuff you can't create yourself.

And that's my two pies' worth.

I love your ideas, especially backup of inventory for Premium members. I could see limiting free accounts to 10K items or maybe even 5K in inventory. I like the expanded group idea too!

The trial /subscription idea as Lindal describes it would also weed out the short-stay visitors from the population numbers if population was to be counted as subscribers only.
And I like Atashi's ideas on the expanded group numbers and inventory backup. Also because it would be a nice one in terms of responding to long-standing requests in the Jira.

Yup, brainstorming can be fun

One suggestion I had in a thread a while back was a combination with one of Argent Stonecutters ideas:

New users would get to try SL for free, this would either involve them being only able to access one of the welcome/orientation simulators, or being able to access the whole grid with limited options (cannot run scripts, or no scripts with 'harmful' functions such as push and rez object).

To become a 'full' basic member the user has to 'verify', they can do this by either:
- Paying a USD $10 set-up fee (possibly with a low recurring yearly fee).
- Receiving verification from a premium member.

Verification from premium members is something that premiums have to offer out, and they can verify a limited number of accounts each. This means that a premium can either:
- Verify any alts they create, making them free extra accounts
- Verify friends who they know can't pay the charge due to credit-card issues

This is a much more interesting system, as it means that NEW (not existing) basic accounts would _have_ to pay money again unless a premium member is willing to 'verify' them (which makes them accountable for the basic's actions).

To make this reliable however, additional methods of paid verification would be required to make the payments, for people who are not able to use a credit/debit card.

It in theory significantly reduces the ability to grief, and would raise the cost of bot-use

IMHO, I think a lot of the problems could be solved by clearing out asset servers from accounts that have been inactive for X amount of time.

Think of the space that could be cleared (and eventually speed up times for a lot of us), if all those idiots who created 53295739 boxes then left the game were actually wiped from the face of SL.

If you were always basic, non-verified, if you haven't logged in, in 6 months, adieu. You can never get anything back ever.

If you were basic, but verified, 9 months.

If you at some point went premium for any length of time, you have 1 year.

Almost all games (especially free ones) have some sort of definitive time frame you must log in before all your stuff is gone. LL doesn't do this. Or at least, said they didn't 8 months ago. AFAIK, unless you specifically cancel your account, any av anyone created since inception is still on the grid for access. 3+ years is a long time to hold an empty, non active account.

Then you take the premium account holders, use up that free space by switching them over to less bogged asset servers, so that their items load up more quickly. Put their sims on class 5 first. Then trickle down to size of land holdings in sims to move to class 5.

At least, this way, their service they are paying for, for others will speed up some and be a little less frustrating than those who are basic and own nothing .

You're hired. Brilliant (and necessary) idea.

If one subtracts the cost of the stipends and the cost of the 'free' 512s of tier from the subscriptions, are Premium subscriptions worth anything to SL?
Surely the exalted status of "Premium" is simply an artificial and accidental outcome of the decision to increase signups via free subscriptions.

Are Premium accounts an anachronism?
What do they actually contribute to SL?
Not that this is *not* a question on what individual Premiums currently do or can do. The fact that only Premiums can currently buy mainland is irrelevant to this.
What is the *nett* benefit to SL of having Premium accounts now?

If there is a demand for certain types of services from SL, why not allow individual accounts choose which pay-for services they want to subscribe to?
- levels of inventory?
- levels of support?
- levels of concurrent prim attachments?


What is the benefit of the 'status' to Premium residents? (Omit the stipend, the 'free' tier and the 'privilege' of being able to pay tier direct to LL instead of to another resident).
Is it only snob value?

Landowners have the option of excluding NPIOF. Maybe some or many do.
Do many/any landowners exclude non-Premiums?

good ideas yes. If you can talk the Providers into finally butchering the sacred cow of total subscribers, we can all have steak dinners.

Me three on Seola´s suggestions....... could that be a vegetarian steak please?

Premiums bring in at least US$530k every month just for being premium, which is more than LL would get if they sold their stipends through Supply Linden.

In-world there are a variety of places that rely in some way on members donating their 512m² "free" tier, so that's a benefit as well I guess.

Premiums just fall into the "Payment Info Used" category, you can't distinguish a verified basic (who paid for something at some point) from a premium.

The contribution on LL's side is a guaranteed payment for that month. They can count on that.

On our side, depending on how you look at it - my "free" 512 is perfect for my little shop and I have no need for others. So instead of renting from a baron (while it's cheaper, I have less freedoms), LL actually makes more off my being premium than renting from someone who is maxed in tier.

My math could be groggy today, so bear with me.

X resident pays the max tier of 305USD (after account). The land size is 65,536. Separating that land into the 128 parcels of 512. That only works out for LL to be around $2.39 per 512. For me alone, they get $9.95. (Of course, this is variable to grandfathers, stipends, etc.) But there again, if I rented, I don't get near as much freedom or the higher chance of losing all my money if my landlord folds or dries up, whatever the case. So it's a win-win for both LL and me strictly speaking in economics. My personal choice is the freedoms, so that's why I pay more. In fact, depending on where you rent from it can be more than 10 bucks a month in L payments. As a personal theory, I think premium's with a minute amount of land, or none at all are their bread and butter. I've never had to contact LL about anything to do with my land because it's so small and I'm not the sim owner, so they don't use as much tech on those with no land or very little.

Pattied tofu for you it is then!

They could actually change the semantics and not have to change that number. Instead of total subs, they could change the wording to something like "accounts created" with no other wording.

This wouldn't be a total lie as at some point they were "created", would keep PR up, wouldn't constitute false advertising, they still get the fluff and we get the benefits.

But, that $530k is paying for 512m of tier for each Premium.
What number are you left with if you subtract the 'value' of that tier from the $530?

Not necessarily. That would be to assume all premium's only have just 512, nothing more, nothing less. I expect that a very small minority of premiums have EXACTLY 512. Some have none at all, but a far greater proportion of premiums have 1024's on up to several sims.

ETA: And if my math above is correct, LL would make far more if everyone DID have exactly 512 anyways.