Robin Linden try's to salvage M Lindens HUGE mistake

Most of you will be aware of the Blog interview with M Linden the other day in which he made the mistake of saying that Premium membership was not importent to LL .... bad move M !


http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/11/mark-kingdon-on.html



Anyways Robin has dived in to save the day with a post on the blog .

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/11/mark-kingdon-on.html#comment-137749768


Bad M-an & Robin ...

Have I missed something? To own a sim - be it private or mainland - you have to be a premium member - or so it says on the website. No premium membership - no land ownership? All you can do is buy land from someone else and lets face it, that is a complete farce as they always maintain total control of the land of they are the tier payer.

Put me right if I am wrong please!

Yes, it was a good save until i read:



Concurrency rates are a lie.

12,000+ bots and the number is going up every week.

All you need is Payment info on file to pay the tier Spacexcape not to be premium thats only if you want to own mainland.

You don't have to be Premium to purchase a private island sim direct from Linden Lab, or by transfer from another Player. Premium membership is only required to buy Mainland sims and parcels.

Well it is true that the context of M's statement was in the overall context of month over month metrics. In that specific context that measurement may not appear to be a major factor overall albeit a direct reflection of potential interest in mainland ownership. I suspect there are a lot of premium accounts that never bothered to find a cheap 512 to grab and hold with no tier.

But it was a poor choice of words easily spun in negative directions.

On the other hand if Linden Lab plans to drop premium subscriptions as a requirement for owning mainland and obtaining technical support as well as dropping the requirement of owning a full sim to buy an open space sim then things might get some traction. Not to mention getting rid of an annoying metric. But then they would have to eliminate the no tier first 512 which would further anger a lot of people.

The "M Message" today will be interesting.

You need to essentially put premium memberships into perspective - of a $72 USD annual fee paid to Linden Labs to become a premier member, you receive over $55 USD of that annual fee back in Lindens through the weekly stipend (assuming $300L/wk).

That essentially means the revenue from Premium members is on the order of $15 pp/year which isn't exactly chump change but considering the cost of infrastructure and bandwidth required to support Second Life in general, especially considering the majority of residents are not premium subscribers, it becomes easy to see that as part of the overall budget, premium members are not where the company's profits are going to be generated from.

It is unfortunate but M should have expanded out on that comment more rather than leaving it off where he did because I don't think he necessarily meant to imply that Premium Members themselves were irrelevant - only that they don't generate a profit margin off premium memberships. It ALL goes back to supporting the premium member and their community usage.

It doesn't cost LL anything to give out the stipend. They get the whole premium fee. Lindens$ have no material cost, very minimal handling costs and LL does not buy back the L$ for real money.

You don't honestly believe that LL is BUYING linden from the people of SL do you?

That Stipid ...while you may be able to sell it for 55 bucks if you save every penny for a year... Its NOT LL giving you the 55 bucks its another player and LL makes 3.5 % of the real money from the sale.

LL automaticly generates the fictitious funds called "lindens" from thin air, they do not have a central bank that that money is based on and the only money syncs in place are advertisments and some lesser land auctions.

Why do you think you can't pay your mainland land fees with linden or your island land fees with linden.. because LL does not buy or sell its own currency.

Stipends generate L$ to circulate in the world, lessening the demand for people to buy them directly (at full price) from Supply Linden. So it *does* affect LL's direct income. Whether it's a one-to-one relationship is highly questionable, and arguably the influx of stipends stimulates the overall economy, including the Lindex transactions which LL takes a cut from.
So the true value is likely somewhere in between "it costs LL nothing to generate L$" and "LL is giving you almost all your money back". The exact balance between those two would probably be very, very hard to assess.
I suspect that the stipends create a feeling of "expendable budget", and thus has a very big impact in stimulating the inworld market, but the question is how much the inworld market means compared to full island fees, and to the perceived "alive-ness" of SL as a platform.

actually it costs them nothing.. want to see watch this.



L$ Sources and Sinks
2008 October
Description_____________Sinks (L$)___Sources (L$)
Classified Charges_____33,873,444__________0
Group Creation Fees____2,321,600__________0
Land________________17,496,631__________0
Supply Linden Sales___________0 __________0
Parcel Directory Fees __6,470,790___________0
Referral Bonus_______________0____2,131,000
Stipends____________________0__118,769,100
Upload Charges______32,279,150___________0
Other______________95,245,994___12,206,145
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
TOTAL_____________187,687,609__133,106,245

Total lindens paid to LL 187,687,609
Total linden paid out from LL 133,106,245

as you see they take in more linden then they pay out. and LL is not the ones selling linden in the exchange.. its residents.

Uhm, yes, exactly. Because residents *have* L$ to sell. That was pretty much my point.
It doesn't *cost* them anything to give away L$, but it diminishes another potential source of income.

Her response seems fine to me. She says he was talking about the cost of a premium subscription, not about tier, and it's pretty well known that a premium account is close to free, when you count the stipend. You can get all rabid over M's comment about "subscriptions are immaterial in our overall business" but when taken in context, he's absolutely right and it's in no way an insult to anybody.

/me doesn't go anywhere near the concurrancy subject because we have nearly zero unbiased data on that.