Business survey ideas

You're picking an arbitrary number blaze. This is not your poll.

What is serious money to one may not be to the next and vice versa. If a person makes, say, 25K a year, any amount earned could be considered "serious".

Apparently, you are independently wealthy, and therefore think that 90% of the people who make money in SL should be excluded from the survey.

Naive, naw. Tired of know-it-alls who think they have the answer to every situation? Yes.

Utilize my info? Bwahahaha. First off, if it's anonymous, you can't. Second, I don't know that you have the same skillset as myself and my GF.

Let Walker run his poll.

In YOUR opinion. We all know about opinions.

Yours doesn't matter here. If you want to present yourself as some sort of authority on what is or isn't a "business", make your own survey.

I will point out that any income made form online games is considered *hobby income* by the IRS. Apparently you trump them too.

What Walker should do if he was slightly serious about this would be to interview a random sample of consumers in SL and extrapolate from that.

He's still likely to get false information, but much much less likely than he'd get from the people who really don't want you to know.

Oh, Nolan you astound me with your cleverness.

Right, because you've run several of these surveys in the past.

Being that you actually haven't, I am going to stop discussing this with you now, as you apparently think you are the Nostradamus of SL. Have fun ridiculing and assuming. I'm out.

The feeling is mutual, oh wise sage who has figured out the inner workings of SL in record time.

The fact is, I'm trying to help Walker. The individuals on here who are saying "great idea" or "i'll give you my info" are just leading him down a garden path that goes nowhere.

Yes, blaze's idea of interviewing *consumers* and *shoppers* at malls to see what they *buy* is a good way of reverse-engineering the business information issue.

Kim, I'm glad you made a dime off the $25 L item to pay your phone bill. But take all your objects, items, scripts, and ALL your labour and expenses, whether texture upload or Internet ISP provider or whatever, then see if sales of ALL items and valued labor and materials then still give you a profit. I am not arguing that it won't for a few. A select few. A feted few, usually those who have either been given a leg up by the company in some fashion over the years, or those whose talent and skills just put them in the feted category. People get so angry that I label and identify the feted. But it's the only way to describe what happens in a closed society with a few oligarchs where information, goods, and services do not flow freely because:

--information is jealously guarded, distorted, lied about
--land is hoarded and released on a mysterious time-table by land-gods
--sales of land from the auction are partially publicly available but first-land sales are a partially-hidden statistic
--aggregate economic statistics released by the company about in-world sales don't tell us anything about labour and materials costs or merchandising costs like rent, payment of land, tier, etc.
--through volume, through positioning at scarce telehub land, through spam groups, oligarches can maintain their monopoly.

Walker:



SLH itself is a business of sorts, and its editors are related to businesses, and you are asking people to hand over their private proprietary information to YOU, and you have to be a trusted institution to get them to do that. You will have the goods, even if you don't publish them.

Now, are you a trusted institution? Well, ever since Uri a) published an e-mail sent to him in confindence and therefore burned a source, the first rule of journalism is you don't do that and b) published blatantly false information about me which leads to continued harassment of me by people like Nolan and c) in general leans toward the tabloid I would have to say that SLH, like SL itself, is highly entertaining, highly engrossing, and even my employer now for $1000 per column LOL, but, not a "trusted institution". Sorry, but there it is. I don't plan on giving you MY sales info for example, no matter how "anonymous" you think it will stay. "It's the Internet, stupid."

I think most people view this as a hobby, and put a lot of time and effort into it as a hobby. For some, it's a passion. For a few, it has turned them a profit and they sit and work it 24/7 like a home office business. It's such a mixture of styles and motives that it is hard to call it an economy since so many people are willing to sink loads of money into it and not take much out.

Everybody tells themselves a lot of stories about why they are here. Questioning those stories will get you lynch-mobbed.

I don't take issue with you (see a dictionary for the difference between "harrassment" and "taking issue" because of what SLH may or may not have published. I don't put much stock in SLH (No offense Walker, but when you employ "journalists" like Prokofy the Great here, I haven't much choice). I mean just look at that piece of yellow journalism of yours (the Cristiano interview) that they posted. It wasn't an interview, it was just another avenue for you to spout your off kilter paranoid delusions. One you got paid 1000$ for. Now tell me again who is "feted"?

I take issue with your attempt to paint SL as something it's not. This attempt is being made right here on these forums. I don't need to look any farther, though I will, if I think your past escapades with TSO seem to mirror what you are doing now. Regardless, you have spammed these boards for MONTHS now about this cockamamey BS. When will you give it a rest? You've made your point. Your not going to change anything, other than to give yourself a negative image to a great deal of people, new and old. And you say I obssess.

On the harrassment issue, was it not you who took this in-world last night while I was offline and left me a harrassing IM which ended with you calling me a Fucktard? Hmmm, yes, I think it was. I won't stoop to your level however, no matter how much you goad me.

Word to the wise; if you're going to shit all over SL and a good portion of it's player base, be prepared to answer for it. You may call it harrassment, I call it deconstructing myths.

Now, back to the actual topic at hand.

What info is valuable? Any. I said I would not reveal info at first, until I was informed it could be anonymous.

I think any info about what geographical areas of SL seem to have more sales traffic, what type of items are selling best, what types of margins people are making, etc, is useful.

Just because 90%+ of us make sums that don't fit blaze's definition of a business (if I make even ONE LINDEN it's still a business by the way - I guess blaze sees the corner store as a hobby because Microsoft makes billions...), does not mean that the info from average sellers is not pertinent. Being that they represent the bulk of business in SL, it is, and I look forward to this info. My business partner and I are looking to branch out into other products/services, so this info would be invaluable to us.

"Anyone who is making real money (> 1000 USD / month) . . ."

I paid my phone bill with imaginary money? Shh, don't tell MetroPCS.

I guess some months my RL income is imaginary, too. Maybe that's what I'll tell the IRS instead of paying them.

Dunno what you do for a living, blaze, but I'm a professional freelance writer. I don't agree with your two-tier division of income into real money and chump change. I divide it up into money and money earned from hacking. I like the former better, but I don't sneer much at the latter, because if I can't buy kitty litter the cat will crap on the floor.

Walker, why don't we just *ask* the Lindens for this info. They surely have it. Is there some reason they wouldn't release it?

I'm not actually sure their raw information would be useful, mostly because it would too raw and take about a year to parse, though they might have some aggregate figures that they'd be willing to release, figures that wouldn't compromise anyone's anonymity. Perhaps I'll make an approach at some point.

I agree with this - and know the amount of time I put into both my SL non-profit and profit ventures were huge - and did cost my RL business for a period.

I use to justify my time-investment as being necessary for the start-up business phase. I can relate to the denial aspect that people experience when trying to make money in SL - but maybe they just need to keep better records. The one of the tricks is to track "time-task-result" type variables and be realistic regarding the bottom line - and pay close attention to RL i

Having said that, I also respect people's wishes NOT to share this type of info, and if they wanna play at "business" in SL, that's fine. God knows there are lots of SL "business" people that do things here that would be fatal in RL - but that's the fun of make believe.

"Kim, I'm glad you made a dime off the $25 L item to pay your phone bill. But take all your objects, items, scripts, and ALL your labour and expenses, whether texture upload or Internet ISP provider or whatever, then see if sales of ALL items and valued labor and materials then still give you a profit."

I know the difference between gross and net. Yeah, I made a profit.

"I am not arguing that it won't for a few. A select few. A feted few, usually those who have either been given a leg up by the company in some fashion over the years, or those whose talent and skills just put them in the feted category."

LL has not given me a leg up. Anyone can gain skills through time and effort -- you can go to the Particle Lab and learn the same stuff I did. And if you're going to complain that some people have more talent than others, maybe you should email God to complain that life isn't fair.

It's amazing Kim how many people don't know the difference between gross & net - not to mention net/net.

Seems to me those with the leg-up aren't participating in this thread.

_/_/

Um... some of us just don't care.

Prokofy, sometimes I agree with some of the things you say, but I really think you're off-base on this whole 'feted' thing. There are an awful lot of people having fun in SL who are not delusional about why we are there. We like building, or socializing with our friends, or exploring the things others have built. We pay a modest fee to be able to do these things. If there really is a FIC, it's not harming my SL experience.

My previous RL experience is that in any endeavor involving a large number of people, some people are closer to the centers of power (in this case, the Lindens), than others. The Lindens ARE the center of power because they write the software and own and maintain the servers the rest of us are using, which is a lot better reason to be in power than because one is born into the right family or is especially good at schmoozing the right people, IMHO. As for the 'feted' ones, whoever they are, well, stuff like that happens in any social network. Sometimes for good reasons, e.g. the people the centers of power pay attention to have a lot of experience, common sense and good ideas, or mediocre reasons, e.g. the 'feted' ones are bankrolling a big chunk of the organization, or lousy reasons, e.g. the 'feted' ones are good at chatting up Lindens. I don't know what the case is here, but I don't really care, either. I pay my monthly tier fee, and it seems pretty reasonable to me based on what I know about server maintainance cost. In exchange, I've got a relatively permanant place to build stuff. If I didn't like building, I wouldn't even have to pay the tier fee.

Now, back to the purpose of this thread, before poor Walker pulls out the rest of his hair: Walker, I think you ought to handle this with online anonymous survey tools. I personally like Zoomerang, but I hear Survey Monkey is pretty good, too. I recommend that you design surveys for both consumers and merchants, and make the raw results public after the survey. Your newspaper analysis will be about the results, and is your value-add. Actually using interns to go out and hand-deliver the survey is cute, but unlikely to get the results you need because of the lack of anonymity and transparency. Better to have your interns go out and chat people up about participating in the online survey, which actually has some guarantees of anonymity. Don't forget to ask people in the survey if they actually care if they make a profit in SL, because I think you'll find a lot of people don't. In fact, that result by itself could be one of the most interesting outcomes of your survey.

And when you finally do your analysis, remember that the median is less susceptible to distortion by outliers than the mean, and it would be helpful if you provided more statistics than just central tendency (median, mean, or mode). I'd like to see quartile points, if not actual standard deviations. In other words, if you're not a statistician, get one to look over the data with you before you start writing your conclusions.

Well, that's my advice, anyway, possibly worth what you paid for it. I now return you all to the usual rants.

neko

Neko, it's worth paging through all the usual rants if I can just get one posting like yours, which is truly useful and fantastic. Thank you so much.

Walker, stop whining about your thread being hijacked in other threads LOL.

I told you your idea wouldn't work because people are suspicious and hostile and narrow-minded and hateful. And well, they proved my point as usual LOL.

So you have some good ideas for how to make it really anonymous, or how to work from consumers rather than merchants, and how to follow this story in other ways, given the closed society you are covering. But please, stop ranting against the fact that the society is closed -- we know the reasons for that -- and stop ranting about those who are trying to explain why you are on a fool's errand.

Dude, when were you ever one to deny someone a good rant? I mean, really. I help provide a venue for yours, the least you could do is tolerate mine.

And I stand by all I've ranted, btw.

How does Walker's hand taste Prokofy?

Nolan, stop wearing your forum signature to the parties that I am at! We clash!

Wanna wrestle? No eye gouging, crotch shots, or pulling hair. Oh, and no FIC shots.

I agree - SL is my hobby and finding myself under pressure to actually make a profit would make it my job not my pleasure. I do enjoy being able to pay my tier fees through things that I create and I get a great deal of pleasure knowing that someone likes what I make enough to pay for it.

I don't mind putting a little more effort into the business side of SL but that is as far as it goes.

I still think your idea is a good one Walker and as Nekokami says, if the numbers appear distorted, run them past a statistician.

.

i also quite like this idea.

i would be willing to answer questions. perhaps you could make a webpage with question on it... that way people can submit their info and then they will know it is annonomas (omg cant spell today! lol, or neday for that matter).

gl with it Walker

Thanks, Rose and Alan and everyone else.

As several people pointed out early in this thread, it doesn't look like I'll be able to send newbs out with clipboards and pens, so I probably will set up an anonymous Web-based survey at some point soon. I will, of course, keep everyone posted as to when and where.

In the meantime, if you have any ideas for information you'd find useful, I'd love to hear about it.