Premium Account Improvement Thread

But it wouldn't act as a gateway drug for land barons, which is where LL really benefits from you having it.

Estate land outnumbers mainland four to one at least.

You still need a gateway drug to get people owning land, buying islands, whatever. You have to get people into the whole "owning land" schtick in the first place, and the easiest way to own land is to own a chunk of mainland. Then people want more, they want privacy, they buy an island. I've seen it happen over and over again, with dozens of people, some of whom now rent land on their islands and are "land baronets" in their own right.

If LL really wants to encourage land ownership in SL, they ought to let premiums own homesteads without owning a full island. That would make the whole process work so much more smoothly.

Renting on an estate doesn't do it, there's no equity, you know it's temporary.

That would seriously damage estate rentals, LL will go down that route at their peril. It wouldn't surprise me if they do go down that route, but it will hurt.

At half a sim price for a quarter-sim worth of prims, it wouldn't hurt as much... especially with the people doing the renting grandfathered in at the old rate. And if they're making a profit at that price, they win either way.

The point I was getting at is that premium accounts get you started down that route. I know guys who got totally addicted, multiple sims, private estates, serious land jones, starting with that deceptive little First Land.

My way out of this for LL is to charge people who just want a homestead USD$125 but offer estate owners a homestead at USD$95, so estate owners can still resell cheaper and it rewards them for owning an island but residents can own them too.




Sure, it happened to me but to make premiums more attractive I think they should offer something appealing to those who don't want to own land too, so you have more than one type of premium memberhship, the land owner package and the non land owner package and you make it easy to switch between the two.

This isn't about creating two classes of estate owners, this is about lowering the barrier to becoming a profitable (for Linden Labs) estate owner. Right now going from Premium to Estate Owner is a $300 jump. More people would do it if it only cost $125.

Don't worry about the existing estate owners. They already have ALL the grandfathered homesteads. And some of the premiums who buy homesteads will grow to larger estates, without challenging the existing estate owners or taking away from their rent.

Why would they want to? What's the benefit to Linden Labs for creating a premium account that's not a gateway drug.

Because the SUBSCRIPTIONS - the US$72/year they charge - is nothing. It wasn't an insult to all premium members, it was just a simple fact.

Tier is a different story. Unlikely you will hear LL dissing tier.

I can see a problem with this concept, also. Say I'm a train enthusiast, and I have found five different wonderful train-related places in-world belonging to five different people. Perhaps one sells some great ridable train engines and train cars. Second place is a great train museum. Third one is just a fabulous place to ride trains. Fourth one, has some fabulous certified legal train artwork for sale in SL. Fifth one, maybe has textures to customize the trains you bought at location one.

Every last one of these picks entries is a valid place that deserves to have their search ranking improved by being in my picks, but under the system you suggested there only the first one would actually matter. I can see limiting it to the first location out of five entries that all point to stores owned by the same person or group, but if all possible "train" hits are truly unique, all five should be counted for their search rankings by virtue of being in my picks.

I actually think it is you who has the quote out of context. M said it during the openspace discussions, as a refusal that the dropping number of premium subscriptions was a problem for the overall health of the platform, not about whether they made money on the subscription fee.
It had many people puzzled, since premium subscription is the entry ticket to the valuable tier payment. (Somewhat ironic, by the way, that you have to pay to be allowed to pay).

I didn't say it was an insult. But it is "just a simple fact" that M does not think the number of premium subscriptions is important.
The only logical explanation I can see is that LL is happy to have a few land barons hold the vast majority of land. Other premium subscriptions are, well, immaterial, and as such not something worth encouraging and using resources on.

So any improvements to premiums would be to enhance their function as "gateway drug" as Argent puts it, and I would think that even that isn't terribly important, since that probably isn't how the next Anshe is drawn into the land market.

For one thing, don't need as much customer support, that way. (Estate governance.) People are always the most expensive thing.

Premium accounts are the gateway drug of SL... It's the Crack - cheap, but it puts down roots in you.

LLs should hire a few of the guys who keep getting busted for 'possession with intent to sell' down in the Tenderloin (LL is in San Francisco right?)...
- Those guys may not have good 'security' but they understand the market model:

1. Give your customer a free sample (LL has this part down).
2. Give them a gateway drug.
3. Keep them hooked on ever and ever more expensive 'better drugs.'

If you try to go from 1 to 3 without 2, you fail...
- The other dealers get your market share, or your customer gets over the addiction too soon...

Estate fees -do- need to go back down just a tad.

If estate owners have to hit 75% full capacity (as stated in some other thread somewhere by an estate owner) to break even... that's too hard to do, and it means that fewer estate holders will stay in business.

Mainland premium accounts also need 1024 land and/or double prims...
- For the same reasons as above. LL needs more people holding land and putting content on that land with more use of a wide range of the sims and not as much clustering so that people interact more, can shop more, and have to see more other content in between shopping...

- and you can replace shopping in that with anything else that results in economic activity inside of SL.

If premiums have a little more prims and a little more base land, they'll build more.

Once they are building more, they will be more inclined to keep building more, and step into higher tiers. But there is a hump, and LL's needs to make getting over the initial hump easier.