How to help newbies financially?

It's in another thread - burried now, but it was about a week ago. You'd probably find it quite interesting.

Okies, then back to helping newbies financially.

The premise is that camping income is going to shrink - although not disappear, and that newbies/impecunious need some other way of being fed with L$ so that they can spend it in the economy.

The Cones system looked interesting, but would need a beefy back end before it could support the level of activity that would replace current levels of income from camping farms.

If one global system can't do it, then perhaps a number of independent systems of the same or different processes could.

A big issue is that the money has to be sourced from people who want some specific service in return for their money.



So how to help newbies financially?

Absolutely - there is no reason at all why one system should, or even could, handle all that's required - and I'm thinking of what's required by places (fresh visitors much of the time).

I don't see that as an issue at all. Camping for the traffic numbers required a return for the money. Cones-type system places don't require a service but they do require a return - eyes on stuff.

Don't forget that camping isn't banned. If people want to give other people free money, without anything in return, camping is still good for it. The camp parcels mustn't be set to show in search, that's all.

Although, why people want to camp these days is beyond me. I had my eyes opened tonight at 2 places. Camping was paying 1L/30 minutes AND you had to have one of the places in your picks and the other required group membership. Even if they go to bed and leave their avs camping, it's just not worth it. 16L eight hours later? For goodness sakes!

How do you ensure that return? How do you oblige people to look?
Apart from the chain of locations, how is the cone-type system any different from any roaming camping system?
You've got their avatar trapped for 11 minutes. That certainly clocks up 11 traffic points. That's certainly how camping operators will see it.

On that basis, people should be able to set up any of the existing camping systems that allow people to roam in the vicinity. Offer 11 minute sessions. Call it a traffic system and not a camping system. Say that the people are meant to be looking at the store.




The logic then will be that a cone-type system will be ok as long as your parcel is not set to show in search.


Alternatively, have certified cone systems that generate a summary of the 11-minute sessions per parcel in a day. That gets sent to LL, who deduct the appropriate number of traffic points from the traffic recorded by the normal system.



It remains to be seen how many places will continue to offer camping or cone-type on that basis.

I'm all for the mandatory stay....if I'm paying....otherwise, what is the point?
Are you talking about being able to have an "opt out" feature on the LM's given? The actual choice of location not being mandatory?



I tried to explain this using a classified ad example. The classified ad does not necessarily bring a buyer....it brings a visitor. I paid for that visitor. I want them to stay as long as possible. Same thing. Just a guaranteed 11 minutes out of the cone system.



I still look at it as a Tour....not camping.

Let's say you're in RL...and a group of venue owners hired a bus driver to drive a load of people around to their venues for a Tour. All the venue owners pay the bus driver their fair share. Plus...the bus driver is to give each tour participant 20 bucks to spend.....from the money they contributed.

The bus driver arrives at the first location...ushers them out the door of the bus to mill around the venue. He was instructed by the venue owners to leave them on the grounds for 30 minutes....anything less would not be of benefit. If he ushered them out of the door of the bus...let them mill around for 2 minutes, then told them to get back on the bus....the venue owners will fire him.

The Cone and the 11 minutes are simply our bus driver....simply our control system. We're paying...we want control from that payment.....and it is not unreasonable to expect that.

I used to go on bus trips to casinos. The casino hires the bus driver to take the people directly to that casino. You are given about 20 bucks credit to spend the minute you walk in. You got a free bus ride to another state....you got 20 bucks to spend....you usually got a free lunch at the buffet.....you are hostage for the day, until he loads you back up at 5pm. The expectations are clear and they are not unreasonable. Win/Win both sides. (if you leave out the part about dropping $200 at the craps table)

The Camping thing would be similar to a RL store owner hiring people to mill about in the store and pretend to be shoppers...they leave their cars in the parking lot....the parking lot appears full. A bit of deception going on there.

I look at Camping and Touring as two different things.

Sling - I just read back over your initial suggestion again....very first post.

It is very similar to what the Tour is doing....except that The Tour offers a value to the store/venue owner for donating the money.

That is Fair. Do you disagree?

You know... I've always suspected that LL was happy to abolish gambling because it absolutely HAMMERED on their transaction tracking systems.

Now... there's probably nothing in SL that generates the sheer quantity of payment events like camping does... After all, they need to keep records of every single one of those millions upon millions of transactions for how long? And they're still sniffing after possible gambling. All those camping transactions can't make that easy. They may have arbitrarily decided "This is a problem for us and it must be addressed!" ("Too many notes!"

Just a thought.


[/b]

Sorry to jump on the "derailing" side-thread... but these points rang false enough with me and I wanted to speak up.

First, the idea of "fewer businesses = less revenue" seems flawed. It's volume, not quantity of businesses that matter. Land is what matters, commerce is a distant secondary. There's 32,000 regions in SL said Jack a few months ago. Land drives this world, business is a distant second, and I find it extremely unlikely that our population of casual shoppers could be paying for anything more than a slight fraction of all these regions.

So anyway, as far as "Taking profit out of SL"...

There are only two things that take money out of circulation:

1) LINDEN PAYMENTS TO LL, for snapshots/classifieds/listings/uploads... and we know this is not a trival sum of L$.

2) PLAYERS THAT STOP SPENDING THE L$ THEY HAVE. (usually because they've stopped logging in, and we know we have high turn-over. Knowing that most of these L$ will likely never ever go back into circulation, LL can safely mint matching funds and sell them on the Lindex, and I'm confident they do.)

It is quite reasonable to conclude that the more widely circulated L$ are, the more likely they will go down either of these drains. As a result, LL ends up selling those "lost" L$ on the Lindex.

Keep in mind that when LL sells their own L$ on the Lindex, they are in DIRECT COMPETITION with SL merchants for the limited US$ that consumers are bringing to Lindex. What an amazing business model... they profit off the successful SL businesses... AND compete with them directly. Devious and brilliant.

LL controls both taps and drains on our economy... So saying that some businesses "take profits out of the game" does not make sense to me, it is a closed system. If anyone is taking profits out of the game, it's LL when they flood the Lindex with their L$. But anyway, that's just semantic bickering.

With all the above in mind... the *ONLY* significant value to camping that I see is that it might encourages some fraction of newbies to become consumers and buy L$ from the Lindex.. . And as Zaphode pointed out (I think)... the desire to own land and organizations like NCI probably have a higher success rate than that.

Anyway... sorry for the long and likely incoherent ranting... too much coffee made me chatty.

IM me in-world and i'll give you the info and link.....it has everything you ask for, you even get a stats page to see who received the sample item as downloadable CSV file from the website...and can compare against your own transaction records...plus it randomly features your businesses on given days on the website. The user gets to select his own Tour by genre....and this has a section that covers Homes & Furniture. The system kicked off on 9th May...as of today it has 2836 subscribers and 148 Creators....it's already jumped up by 150 new subscribers since yesterday.


.....i would never disclose it into this Forum so the likes of Sling can dissect it and knit-pick it to death....we'll be here another 15 pages or so. She is not a business owner, I object that she should dictate the way we conduct our business? Does she pay our Tiers?

That's brilliant!
Hire a bunch of cheap shills to make it look like the casino is busy.
Take the money back off them. Take even more money off them. The poor wretches are gutted. They hate the place, but they can't leave.
Casinos don't do win/win.



People milling around the store pretending to be shoppers is the same sort of deception.

That may be how you and camping operators see it, but I'm not interested in how anyone sees. The only thing I'm interested in is getting eyeballs on my stuff, which, if I use it, would be the only reason for it. If I want some extra traffic points, I can just add a couple more bots to the castle. I've intended adding a "damsel in distress", a "castle ghost", and a prisoner chained to a wall, for a long time. They would generate *far* more traffic points that the cone system ever would. But I've come to a stop with the castle - lost a bit of interest for the moment.

No. The cone-type system will be ok regardless of any land settings, as far as I'm concerned. I'm satisfied with the nature of what I'd use it for, which isn't traffic points, and other people can call it what they want - I'm just not interested.

There's no point in tossing it back and forth. It can be used purely for traffic points, purely for eyes on stuff, and shades in between. What's to discuss?

We're probably discussing different things now. I'm not discussing the original topic of the thread - ways of giving money to newbies. That discussion petered out a long time ago. Since then, it's been about getting visitors with real eyes into places, with a view to some of them becoming customers at some stage and, at the same time, giving people a little money. That's the only thing I'm discussing here.

Rene. Can you PM the URL it to me please?

A proposition of L$2 for 11 minutes spent on the parcel - when looked at solely as a deal between two parties to the exclusion of all other considerations - is fair.

It is as fair as your example above of a RL supermarket paying people to leave their cards in the parking lot. You describe that 'fair' deal as "A bit of deception.

The moment you look outside the fair deal between the two parties, you see the 'unfair' for third parties.




I would not accept a proposition that a form of Tour without a mandatory stay does not offer value to the place donating the money.

1. At worst, it's like a magic Classified that is guaranteed to bring visitors. These visitors are not guaranteed to be shoppers, no more than the Cone can guarantee shoppers. The Classified does offer a greater possibility of a sale - but it's way more expensive and it does not guarantee visits. Swings and roundabouts.

2. At best it delivers 22 minutes of somebody's presence for the price of 11 minutes. This can arise if the previous place was awful.

If you post it in another thread that is not trying to focus on the issues of feeding L$ to newbies/poor I'd have no issues with it as long as it doesn't game traffic by *forcing* people to remain on a parcel.

Firstly about the regions thing, its been shrinking since Oct 2008, here is the latest info from 24th May 09.

The Main grid showed a small net increase of 56 regions this week .Total number of Main Grid regions is now 26784 ( 21367 private estates & 5417 Linden owned)

So 5 or 6 k smaller than your figure or (20%)

As regarding your Blog reply...yeah so you finally figured out how LL control the Lindex exchange and why the rates have been so stable!!! Minting Lindens to prop it up when required. Which still has nothing to do (or very little) in developing business plans and pricing models! As of now, LL doesn't even have a CFO.!!

Campers don't really contribute to the growth of the economy, what they do is move millions of linden dollars around the economy....which actually could end up benefiting the smaller shops that cannot afford camping. (real Av's). So Megastore X pays 100000 L a month to its campers of which the majority of that money is spent in other stores or shop rentals or cheap land rentals.
I spent 27k a month on a total of 3 camping spots....1 each for 3 different businesses. I sure as hell never benefitted from being high in "Place Search"...I stated on the blog, that my best placed shop was 280th last week! To me that 27k was the a cost of doing business...a hidden tax for want of a better expression. Hardly any of that 27k per month was ever spent in my shops (too specific)....i would say 99.99% of my money went elsewhere.......but by the same token i know a good percentage of my sales were generated from NPIOF folk who most likely earnt camping money elswhere. It's swings and roundabouts......but it keeps the money supply fluid. This is basic Economics 101 really.

Why are Banks lowering interest rates and providing cheaper "Money"? They want folk borrowing money again and buying/spending..it kick starts the whole economy...keeps moving, so Shops can make sales and keeps them business...so Property sales can start moving again..etc etc

If the money supply became stagnant, you're solely rely on players buying Lindens on the Lindex or 3rd party sites.....last i looked less than 10% of the entire userbase were PIU or PIOF (about 400,000)

The only way campers can contribute to the growth of the money supply is when they flip over from being a NPIOF and become a PIU and start buying from the Lindex....i have no doubts that's a small percentage. LL needs to improve their retention rates....we can only build places of interests and desirable products etc....but at the end of the day LL has to help too.

There are various reasons to "force people to remain on a parcel" other than inflating traffic numbers. We've been discussing one reason for a long time in this thread. Another reason is staff. If you don't stay to do the job in the place, you don't get paid. Imo, it's better to look at what things *are* than to look at what they could be, or at what they are not.

I think I've been careful to highlight that the premise for giving L$ to newbies isn't based on any facts that I've seen.
We have a few people posting that they depend on camping for tier, etc. We have some camping operators telling us how valuable camping is to the economy and/or how essential it is for their business. We have camping system operators whipping up a storm.
We don't know any numbers. No metrics.



When I joined SL, I didn't need to spend any money.
I used what was in the library. I went exploring. I built in sandboxes.

I wanted some land of my own, and when I eventually got my First Land, I used a credit card.
I didn't *need* land. I wanted it.
Why should I have expected that others would pay for it?


I don't know if newbies/poor *have* to be fed L$ in order to keep the economy afloat.
*If* they do, then in an environment where camping cash will shrink because of anti-gaming policy, I'm kicking around alternative ways of feeding them L$.

ZOMG Phil!

You're trying to hijack a thread focussed on giving L$ to newbies into a thread focussed on benefit to yourself??

Dear oh dear!

I'm not going to post the "system" anywhere on these Forums. Who appointed you as the Traffic Inspector to object or accept any given system for Shop owners?

How about:

1. Merchants contribute arbitrary amounts of cash to a common pool.
2. Once a week or month, there is a random-ish allocation out of the pool over all people selling things.
3. Anyone who receives money gives away a matching value of product/services to NPIOF avatars.




What percentage of the entire userbase are alts of PIUs and PIOFs?
What percenatge of *the active* usebase are alts of PIUs and PIOFs?

The retention rate for new users is said to be about 5% ??
That's a massive skewing of the 'entire userbase' into NPIOF.

I dunno that one can mandate charity. Seems a contradiction in terms.

Unless LL wants to give a small startup to new residents like $10L, even. But I dont think other residents should 'have to' give other people money. That's virtual socialism.

People can, maybe should, do pay it forward types of things though. Also newbies can get so many good things free now. Not only the things at freebie malls either.

I just donated a few things to the Forum Cartel freebie shelf myself. Thanks for that chance it inspired me to make something to try to help people with. There are 2 styles of dressing rooms and a fenced in 10 by 10 yard. The dressing rooms are 4 or 5 prim each I think and the yard is 2 prim.

it doesn't matter if that 400000 is 5%, 10% or 90% of the Userbase.....it's still only 400k that could possibly buy Lindens from the Lindex!
You could possiblly add another X thousand that buy from 3rd party sites that are NPIOF in-world.

It's not about charity....its how any given Economy works.
Charity is providing freebie content. Camping, modelling, greeter, hosts, shop manager, shop assistants....all provide a servcie of sorts...but of course in a lots of cases the reward was traffic units to the owner!

What happens when people tighten up on their spending, can't borrow "Cheap Money" anymore......ah that would be some of the aspects of what has happened in the "real world" economy then.!! i.e Sales down --> companies going bankrupt--->job losses---> lost homes etc etc

It's really very simple --->/327/f4/322387/17.html#post2446821

The thread evolved into discussing something that's beneficial to places (not just to me), as was mentioned earlier when I offered to start a new thread because of the change of focus.

The owner wanted the traffic units .... in order to game search.


How about:
1. Parcels donate L$ to a pool.
2. That pool is doled out in small amounts at intervals to logged in NPIOFs who don't look like bots to the LL servers and who are not AFK at the time.
3. In Search, there's a new tab. This ranks Places by amount donated to the pool in the most recent 24-hour (or other) period.

Add:
2.5. When the avatar gets a micropayment, they get a LM (sourced from the pool of doners weighted by donated amount). If they TP to the place, they get a bonus L$1 from the pool.
Or. They get a L£1 payment initially, and a larger bonus if they TP.

As long something requires LL's involvement, it isn't going to happen. All the ideas under the sun can be suggested, but it isn't going to happen no matter how good they are. It would be better to come up with ideas that don't involve LL.