How to help newbies financially?

Not neccessarily having a Shop Manager and Shop Assistants that contribute to the bottom line sales are far more valuable than mere traffic units......as a non business owner you wouldn't understand that concept would you!

The best idea for LL's involvement was suggested at the top of page #2 - give everyone a stipend.

I understand extremely well the value of providing service.
I would hope that businesses would continue to employ service people even if there were no benefit to Search ranking in doing so.

But that's just injecting cash into the economy.
The benefit of camping - which is to be replaced by whatever - is said to be the recirculation of cash.

Unless that special stipend is sourced from residents - for instance, those who were providing camping - then LL are printing money to keep the L$ circulating.
I understand that this is not a good long-term plan for an economy.

Then you need to come up with ideas that don't involve LL. Anything that involves them is pie in the sky thinking.

Phil ...i tried sending you a message, but this message system is borked for me on both Firefox and IE.

I have sent you in-world IM. My promo sample was delivered to 385 people yesterday....day 1! I can upload the listing into Excel containing all the names....and match against future sales. That will tell me how valuable the system is. I sneaked a notecard into the Promo sample which has info on all my other companies....so they might benefit too.

Cheers, Rene. I'd be very interested to know what you find.

Oh Good Grief!

I'm talking from a business standpoint, giving an example of a "promotion"..... not from a "Holier Than Thou gambling is the work of the devil" standpoint.

And I'm talking about people on a TOUR.

I should have known better than to use that as an example. What was I thinking!

More on perfecting a TOUR.....repeat slowly now.....T-O-U-R

I was looking at a lucky item board. It's like a camping chair on an ad board - there are 6 items/gifts featured....when your letter comes up you click on the board to receive the item.

Do a Landmark Board for a Tour. The person chooses which place they want to visit - they click on that window....they get a LM to TP to that place....they click something the minute they TP in....and they are given 2L for spending 5 minutes - 5L for spending 10 minutes. Another LM board is staring them in the face, to proceed to next stop.

A board could have 12 places on it - that are categorized per board. You could have a room with 6 boards in it. Call it the Newbie Welcome Center or something. Have some other gadgets there for them to fool around with and some good resources for them.

If you're feeling particularly "Saintly"....put it on a parcel that is not checked for traffic search....just make sure you give them reason to walk around your venue.

Adopt a Newcomer Program.

A group that promotes matching a business owner with a Newcomer. Business Owners read through the Newcomers' Profiles, and select someone that they want to adopt. They hand them a packet of resources that was pre-packaged by the business owners in the group.

You give them 100L or 200L without conditions. You give them an easy job in your store/venue. You check in with them once a day to see how they are doing....see if they have any questions.

There are Newcomer Get-Togethers several times a week. A Venue could host those, in order to get some promotion out of it. The participating business owners in the group would be allowed to send out offers to group once a week.

In exchange....you pick their brain for weeks on end as to what they are doing in SL....how are they spending their money....what cool places did they find.....what services do they need......etc.

The 32,000 region figure likely includes beta test regions, teen grid and whatever else that may not be included in the numbers you cite. They may have had region shrinkage due to the open spaces pricing fiasco... who knows.

"Minting to prop it up" deflates the value of the L$, it does not strengthen it. And, so what if they don't have a CFO. Better an empty chair while they recruit a replacement than rushing to put the wrong person in it. Finding a replacement for Zee can't be a trivial thing. Maturing companies often go through executive team changes as the wild "start-up"ers move on and are replaced by the next generation of corporate culture.



I'm glad we have so many altruistic big businesses, banks, and yourself, looking out for the little guys and little businesses with your overflowing generosity! Keep that karma engine primed!



But we're solely reliant on L$ buyers anyway.
Can you pay your land use fees with L$?
Will LL re-imburse you for your L$?
Of course not.
How does anyone in SL run a successful business without being entirely dependent upon people buying L$ on the exchanges? (or paying in US$ direct). Without L$ buyers, we're all just payin to play a game.

Yes, yes, I know you're looking at where your L$ come FROM, but L$ don't gain value just because they took the scenic route back to you after the last time you sold them off. Do they?

And, of course, PIOF only means that there's an audit trail back to some identity associated with payment. In 5 years, that number could be 40,000,000. Can you say how many of them are still around and actively buying L$ from knowing how many have ever used payment info, not really.



Perhaps, but consider, say, Hawaii. Big tourist economy there, people come, spend money, get a tan and return to their normal lives. Consider for a moment what would happen if they doubled their retention rate... or tripled it.

Now consider what would happen to grid performance if, thanks to LL's effective help, resident retention tripled over the next 6 months. I doubt we'd see the revenue stream triple with that much lag, eh? =)

Wait.. were you talking about their retention rates for CFO's?
--
Wasn't I supposed to be sleeping now? hmm. oops.

It sounds like this thread is drifting toward a networked version of freebie-dumping as promotion. Maybe that can work for some stores, although I still think a newbie given the choice of the finest of freebies or L$1 will pick the L$1 every single time. So... put it like this: anything that doesn't pay out L$s is not addressing that opportunity. And that opportunity won't go unaddressed for long, with or without camping or traffic cones.

For anybody still following the "camping replacement" side of the thread: The most frustrating part of this, for me, is that it really is too big and complex to host it in-world only, especially with script memory limits coming soon. And that means that it can never be strictly no-commission because some poor bastard would have to pay the hosting fees--and if it works as well as I think it could, those fees could be substantial.

The other big technical challenge remains detection of bots and other L$-sucking multiple alts. (This is one advantage of a freebie-promo approach: nobody particularly wants an alt or bot to collect extra copies of freebies.) I have some ideas about how to make it relatively difficult for bots, but nothing is completely safe from scamming when there are free L$s to be had.

(By the way, on the gambling tangent: Any reward scheme like this might have an interesting variant with probabilistic payoff. Partial Reinforcement Extinction Effect FTW, etc.)

You're kind of overlooking the obvious.

Pay people to report each other as likely 'bot' or 'not bot'.

Sure it'll get gamed to hell... but can you imagine someone AFK for 30 minutes returning to find they got no L$ because everyone else thought they were a bot?

Folks get into that survivor reality tv stuff (can't abide it myself, but whatever).

Turn camping centers into little mini-competitions...

"Sorry Charlie.. you were VOTED OFF THE CAMPING ISLAND. Try again later."

I think we were discussing serious and effective Non-Camping options, such as the LM Tour.

I'm not. I'm still keen on a cone-like system - just not the current cone system.

I don't think anyone was thinking of a commission-free system. Commission is wholly justified, but I think that 33% is much too big. I don't pay anything for hosting (the hosting is in the family). It mght be interesting to try it out for free in the early days when it's smallish, to see how it goes. If it grows to be too large, arrangements can be made.

Elanthius is the man to know the answers to that. I asked a few questions earlier but he probably didn't see them.

If you're interested in giving it a go, and need some hosting for nothing, let me know, Qie.

That lost me

You're not up on what we are discussing here.

Lost me, too....can you please explain?

I think I've understood this bit now. It's all to do with the probability of the avatar being in a particular location when the payment is due - rather like particles

This is why I had suggested LL as the host.
The immediate response (probably valid) was "LL Involved? FAIL! They don't do stuff."

Why on earth should the get involved?
Only if it affected their bottom line.

Let's say they were asleep at the wheel while camping became a monster - but a monster that became an essential part of the economy.

The problem is that large-scale camping is killing any chance of traffic being a meaningful indicator of parcel worth. They want to use a measure of worth in search. They begin to slowly clamp down on manipulation of traffic and of search. They say that the will watch the economic indicators for early signs of a negative effect.

They are perhaps hoping that as camping shrinks, and if the cash was actually a key enabler for the economy, then some other source of income will arise. Y'know - something like magic self-replicating L$ faries.

They must have a fair idea of the amount of money involved.
What if they did a search on transactions database for people making more than x small payments per hour on a continuous basis in the same location? That would be the profile of a significant camping operation. It might match Zyngo - although the flow pattern would beas regular as would be camping. Anything else?
They are already profiling transactions looking for risk and gambling.

They probably have a good handle on the spread of the money between the major operators and the larger number of small-timers.
Perhaps they have decided on an approach of squeezing the biggest operators and gradually working down, hoping that enough L$ continues to flow from smaller operations that they ignore and/or that other schemes something like the Cones arise.

What happens if they end up in a situation where a restriction of the cash is believed to be having a significant negative effect on the economy, but a level of camping remains that is significant enough to have a noticeable effect on traffic rankings?
Perhaps they are looking for a level of cash flow at which they can say that the number of simultaneous campers allowed is a function of parcel size. Then they find that they would need to allow "too many".

They are stuck. They either revert to allowing camping at significant levels or they have to find an alternative way of keeping the economy greased. In that situation, they might be open to development.

By my gambling reference I only meant something very simple: if the cone tour is addictive now (and it is), it could be even more addictive if the payout were only occasional, and larger, sort of like a scratch-ticket win. Coneheads would have to believe payout was coming and that they weren't getting cheated by the places they went to without "hitting" the payout (and gamblers are a superstitious lot!) so turning the tour into a gambling game wouldn't be without a downside.

Still... it might appeal to a different sort of clientele... possibly one of interest to merchants.

(Oh, and for the "Partial Reinforcement" reference--and the behavioral underpinnings of all gambling--search http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement for "PREE".)

Or perhaps something like a random bonus payment. Nobody will know where it will occur, but everyone will know that it won't occur at place x every time. It could be a significant amount from a free money person's point of view, but not be paid very often.

Or have a bonus payment on completing a tour of nn places.

Or allow each place to set the amount for itself, with a minimum of 2L, so that the user doesn't know how much s/he'll get at each place (unless it's a repeat place), except that it won't be less than 2L. That would add a bit of spice too.

There are all sorts of ways to spice it up a bit and make a bit more interesting.

I'm going to spice it up at my place....and make it a bit tempting to stay and skip the rest of the tour.

I do like the idea of a random bonus pay off going out.

ok....I've got three cones in place....sending contributions....sending traffic to cone headquarters....doing extensive market research....blatant product promotion....my alt is the Conehead Poster Child....(unless you want to battle for that position).....

......and no customer service yet.

Jopsy - they can control money supply....minting or taking it out of circulation, works both ways....but they can sure manipulate it. You think its a coincidence the Exchange has hardly moved in ages......i have been selling at 260 or 259 L for god knows how long now.

CFO...well its been about a month or more since Zee left (or booted), with the job market what it is now ....they should have an abundance of Resumes. LL is not that big a company.....it's hardly "blue chip",. I would consider it a medium size company both in staff numbers and Turnover.

I pay all my SIM tiers with Lindens generated from sales....i have never had to use my own funds since 2007, which were mainly used for SIM purchases...and even then it was only partial payments.

The main bulk of Linden buyers are those that need to pay their monthly tiers or rents and don't have businesses...or SIM owners that are non-commerical and who bear the Tier costs. 80-90% of LL's income comes from SIM tiers and Mainland plot tiers.

The latest stat shows 400k PIOF or PIU, nothing to do with historical uses that left or deleted accounts or whatever.....these are open accounts......sure some might be dormant in terms of usage and activity, but they're are still open.

To be honest its no point me carrying on point by point...sorry but you seem to be a bit .....erm clueless in terms of knowing how an economy works RL or SL..no offence.....but you're talking in riddles.

I will only agree on one point as i had been thinking about this....had the retention rate been much larger, i doubt that SL could scale to it....so maybe there is a reason why LL doesn't actively market this platform. Maybe they don't want crazy growth that they can't accomodate.