Options for charging admission

Not sure exactly where to put this so I figure I'll start here.

We all know that DI is going the way of the dinosaur. The merits or lack thereof of that issue is not what this is about. The after-effects IS what this is about.

Every venue owner/club owner/event manger out there right now is probably thinking of ways to continue a revenue stream. Whether you want to make a profit, break even, or just aren't altruistic enough to want to pay 125 bucks to LL every month for the priviledge of providing entertainment and value to this platform, the aforementioned people want, and NEED, to make a buck. Or a Linden.

One of the ways mentioned most often for making a buck is charging admission. Which might work -- I figure it will take about 6-9 months to see that model come to fruition. And its not a bad model, as models go. It emulates real life, where you usually have to pay for entertainment. But how are we going to make this work?

You can charge a membership and put a person on an access list to your land. But that is going to have limited usefulness as you can fly pretty close to the land you don't have access to -- close enough to see it, close enough to pick up a stream. And speaking of streams, we've been in the habit of giving out the stream URLs for our entertainers and DJs so people could use something more reliable than the SL interface (like winamp or music match) to stream the music in. So the URLs are out there and there's no taking that back now. Also managing an ACL (access control list) is pretty labor intensive.

So I'm wondering exactly how people (including LL) are looking and/or thinking about having this work for them or if people are even thinking along these lines.

You don't have to manage anything, the land pass system is automatic, you just need to configure your land parcel with a price and a duration, everything is built-in, no scripting or manual intervention of any kind is required.

3ggz0r111, does the land pass system not charge people on the access list or in the group assigned to the land? If it does, handing back the refunds would become a little tedious. Also, I'm assuming that if the land is deeded to a group, said group recieves the money which means it gets distributed to all the group members. Need to add that to the consistently ignored group revision features. Well I take that back, they did take away the recall vote per Prokofy's request. HEY! Hang on just a cotton-pickin' minute here!

Stay on topic, stay on topic, dwell has prompted us to not charge admissions for two years which is, literally, an eternity in Second Life. Ergo it'll be a very painful transition. The best way Linden Lab can help is to eliminate dwell and force the issue. Event and club managers can blame those awful evil Lindens for having to charge us 10L to access an event. It'll be the biggest boost to the economy we've seen yet.

The other positive result will be that content and events will be truly entertaining rather than the vast collection of replicated garbage we see now. Put that rock down. I'm not talking about YOUR events that you work so hard on blah blah blah.

err... ok oO
*nods, smiles, backs away slowly*

You can also find out this information using netstat when you are listening to the stream.

The problem is

- You can alt-look into a land pass parcel
- You can chat into and out of a land pass parcel
- You can overfly a land pass parcel and hear its streams

Exactly so, thank you Yumi.

Its even more complex than that though.

What if, for instance, you decide to go with a membership model. Membership has its priviledges right? Meaning you don't have pay for each individual event. Or simply to have access to the land. (Would you pay to walk through Apollo? I would). Am I going to have to deed the land to a group just to give membership priviledges?
And then I'd have to manage individual events separately and there's still the problem of how to keep folks from poaching a stream.

Live musicians are expensive. They don't play for free. Good DJs are expensive. They pay good money for their equipment and their stream and they expect something in kind in return. Events like trivia, treasure hunts, and fashion shows take a lot of time to organize and plan. Going to a for-pay model is all very well and fine but how is this to be implemented? I cannot be the only person out there grappling with this issue.

Regardless of how ppl are charged for events I can pretty much guarantee I wont be paying for any virtual entertainment over and above my subscription costs already paid to LL.

so do you go to events now?

Or just do ctrl-shift-4 (i think) while in debug mode and click stop or start on the audio stream control to see the stream's URL. I do it all the time.

Its rare because most "events" are CRAP.

*Stands up and applauds* At last someone has had to guts to say it in public.
I am with you. Pay money for nakie parties and slingo games. Forget it.
Hopefully this will prompt land owners to put more thought in to the events they organize.

Rox

I dont go to events. I find places that have live DJs and play music that I typically enjoy. Then I let conversations with others spark my entertainment and creativity. Im sure there are worthy events on rare occassions, but its not worth searching for.

Most events aren't worth paying for, or at least a lot of them are.

But that's not the question, the question is how would charge if the event is worth it and people are willing to pay?

What would you guys do if you wanted to do a pay-for event at 400m? I'm thinking maybe a security grid and a designated bouncer.

Did you bother to check out Vivianne's events before coming into this thread and insulting her?

The buy pass option needs some work. First of all it is difficult to figure out how to set it up. The option is grayed out by default and you have to check to allow an access list and then set the price and time. It is not clear that when people buy the pass they are added to the access list.

Then, using it is awkward too. If you bump into the bars you get a blue popup that says, "you cant enter, not on access list". It should offer you the option to buy the pass in that popup. It should read, "You cant enter because you are not on the access list, you can buy a pass for L$XX for XXX minutes of access". It is not obvious that you have to click on the green bars to buy the pass. I think many will see they cant enter and just leave and not explore how to buy the pass.

But, It gets more complicated because the access list is limited to 50 people. If 50 people are still on the list with time to spare on their pass, I guess the others get denied entry? This would not be a problem with my attraction because I might get 50 visitors a week, but more popular attractions would fill up pretty quick probably. If someone were to arrive and be denied entry and denied the ability to buy a pass, they may never return.

Getting people to buy a pass is going to be tough, at first. I have an attraction and have been considering charging for it, since I dont work to earn any L$. It is an attraction, not an event. I think passes have further scope beyond just events. I was thinking of charging L$10 for 24 hours access, but I bet even that piddly amount will get snubbed.

That's true. The first time I saw an area like that, I wondered around the nearby stores looking for a pass vendor and left when I couldn't find one.

You're not getting the point... If you make some calculations, plans, I think it will be clear that pay per event isn't a solution.

Let's say you charge L$ 10 per person for your 1 hour event. Since SL can't handle too much avatars, if you have 30-40 ppl, you might be already too lagged for a good experince for ppl. But let's multiply.. 40 x L$ 10 is L$ 400 total.

Wow! Almost a 1 and a half real USD!!! For a person's one (or more) hours of work!
Woot!! You can get that much if you work in McDonalds.

But let's see... let's suppose one can work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, doing events... That's about 168 hours and about 220 USD's, if every event has 40 avatars paying. But more realistically, it'll be about 40 USD. That would easily starve a musician.

So, what is the right price, maybe L$ 50 per entry? That makes for an expected 200 USD a month (or 1000 USD in an impossible good theoretical state).

But as prices go up, let's look at the customer's side. I am a person visiting events, let's say 2 events per day. That costs L$ 50 per event, that's L$ 100 a day. Let's say i only come on weekdays, that's L$ 2200. About 8-10 USD's. Well, still not that much, but I'd start to feel it, for sure. Especially if i'm a basic or 10 usd premium user, not someone with bigger land. And L$ 50 per event is still not enough for hosts.

Probably my calculations are just wild numbers, but I don't think you can do much better

This is not only for scheduled events. I would've gladly paid a small fee to ride the Spook House or Timescoop or to wander through Lauk's Nest or Atlantis. That would've seemed perfectly natural to me. But then I'm one of those fools that buys tickets to more RL things than I can possibly attend just to be supportive of the projects. Jarod tells me that's not an intelligently common thing to do whatever that means.

In spite of my opinion that it would be a good incentive for increasing land ownership , LL provides no extra amount of stipend to larger land owners than it does to a premium account.

I paid $250 per ticket for myself and as a treat for a friend at a live musician event earlier this year. It was a sellout event. I regularly tip at the events I attend in an amount greater than that which you have used for your calculations. I am not alone; refer to khamon's previous post. I guess it depends on whether LL wants to focus on retaining customers who are of a mind to pay for their entertainment if worthwhile, or if it wants to go for the numbers. 100,000 and counting, woot! Or...maybe it can do both.

The avatar capacity for private island sims, of which the Spa is one, was increased to 100 with the 1.7 upgrade. Mainland event givers are at a disadvantage in this regard.

I went to several live music events lately. They had a tip jar for the musician.

Basically I tipped the musicians 500 lindens an hour.

Attendance was at least 30.

So if others tipped at the rate I tipped at that would have been 30 x 500 lindens per hour,

15,000 linden per hour, using the old 4 bucks per thousand linden rule, that is 60 dollars an hour.

This shouldn't be viewed as hourly pay to a worker, of course; the music providers have to provide the instruments, acquire the skill, practice the material, and have the equipment needed to produce a stream that can handle 30 or more listeners at once.

2 bucks an hour for a skilled musician, who greets you by name when you enter the room, and might take a request, is a steal.

Now if we could just abolish the tie between streams and being on a particular parcel of land, and let the stream providers have grid wide stream distribution, and charge fees to listen through the SL client, and throw in some commercials for SL products heard grid wide as an income stream.

Second Life musicians and DJs might be able to earn an tolerable income if the entire grid could access their streams for a fee. Instead of the musician just being able to be heard in one business place, individuals listeners and other business places should be able to access the stream for a fee.

The problem is, let's suppose I'm a noob... I join the "free" account, wander around, I want to check out what SL can give me.

The first thing I see is "music event, pay 3 USD to enter". Then another event for "2 USD". Maybe I'd like to go to more places on my first week, just to check out what the game holds...

But possibly all those dollar signs would just make me think again... like... 'I didn't even do a thing and they're already ready to pull 10-20 USD from me'. 'I don't even know what's a live music event, but it takes 1-2 USD just to see if I like it'.

I think many people still view (and want to view) SL as a nice place after work, where they can build, socialize, chat, dance, etc, without worrying about RL things... Like money. Okay, occasionally maybe buy some L$ to get some fancy clothes, but that's no must, and there's no pressure to 'get your 10 USD ready for today's SL session'.

Maybe SL will become a hybrid in the future, though... With many 'free' events, and some premium, value added events (like live music maybe). But I don't think it could sustain an all-paying calendar. If fact, such a calendar would repel any newcomers.

I've heard about There -- any thing you want to do takes (took) hard USD's. Now, who wants to check out a game where you start by spending a lot recklessly? It was enough to repel me, that's for sure.

Given the current situation with events, I don't think this is much of a concern.

I don't think we're ever in any danger of an all-paying calendar. As has been pointed out elsewhere, for some people running the event is the fun part, and paying the audience to come is almost a logical step if you look at it from the standpoint of "I want an audience and will pay people to get one".

Even without money, people will organize things for fun often enough I don't see "free" events going away. Certainly, I'd think most discussions wouldn't be charge events.