LL, you've tried your open registration experiment for three months now. That's plenty of data with which to show statistically significant trend data about the financial impact of open registration. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, MBA, or Wall Street analyst to see at this point that there is a significant market waiting for SL.
There's just one teensy weensy little problem. You do not have the infrastructure to support the rapid expansion in registrations and resident population that you have seen thus far. It is imperative that you put on the brakes and temporarily stop your open registration policy until your infrastructure catches up. Otherwise you're headed for a very bumpy ride.
1. You do not have the necessary support resources. Live calls and emails can go unanswered FOR DAYS. You had to shut down the Land Store and delay island orders up to two weeks recently. Your IT staff must deal with almost daily grid attacks. You cannot answer questions fast enough on your Linden Answers forum (I've seen legitimate questions going for two days before getting an answer, if ever). You cannot even spare the resources to moderate official forums or to ensure that a changeover to a hosted blog site is fully tested beforehand (seen all the hate mail regarding the registration process over at WordPress lately?)
2. You do not have the technical infrastructure in your LSL scripting environment to prevent almost daily, crippling grid attacks that result in not just one or two hours' downtime, but up to 9+ hours of restricted or crippled service in some instances (like Sunday Oct. 9th's latest round of fun and games). It wasn't even two weeks ago that you had another day with no less than four successive grid attacks.
Really, you are being fiscally irresponsible both to your investors and to your resident stakeholders by continuing down this course. I urge you to just STOP the open registration policy for now and focus on getting your infrastructure beefed up to a point where you can handle the strain on the system before resuming your mad dash to "One million registrations".
Yes, for every 100 open registrations, some decent percentage converts to a premium, tier-paying account and injects some money into the system. But could those conversion rates be even higher if these new people were seeing a more stable environment and were not encountering as much predjudice and hate (yes, let's not mince words here) by the established, paying residents? Does it help to convince a new person to convert to being a paying resident when they are banned from plots or entire islands simply because they are an unverified account? Does it help to convince a new person that SL can be a friendly, supportive place when they come to the boards here during a grid attack and see people practically foaming at the mouth, blaming the griefing on unverified accounts?
Does it help to foster a sense of supportive welcoming and willingness to educate newcomers among the established residents when we wonder whether that new person less than 3 days old who just showed up is merely new, confused, and uneducated about general SL ettiquette, or is just a potential griefer whom is better to just ban at the very first sleight?
And what about the various businesses already existant in SL? What is the impact to them of reduced traffic due to almost daily periods of 2 hours' or more downtime, usually during primetime U.S. hours? What is the impact in lost sales due to scripts being shut down and people not being able to log in for HOURS at a time practically every day? What is the impact of newcomers considering renting/buying land only to decide after seeing more grid downtime than uptime during prime time that SL isn't worth "investing" any money into, even for a simple place for their AVs to "live", let alone maybe trying to build content and start up a business?
Finally, it's a legitimate question among the paying residents, many of whom invest a fair amount of money to produce content, to produce entertainment...HOW IS A FREE ACCOUNTHOLDER HELPING ME TO RECOUP OR MITIGATE MY INVESTMENT AND MONTHLY COSTS?
It's been said by others on this forum just today. We were ALWAYS able to "try before we buy" We were ALWAYS allowed to check out SL for FREE for a WEEK before we had to decide whether or not SL was worth ponying-up some money for. Why not go back to that model if it will help to reduce the degree of downtime we're currently experiencing? Again, it doesn't take a genius to observe quite simply that the griefing and grid attacks were NEVER this bad or this frequent before open registration started.
C'mon LL. Admit that this horse got away from you and rein it in now before it's too late and you do irrevocable damage to your reputation and your bottom line and your prospects for future growth. A lot of us are counting on you to make smart business decisions, and not just for financial reasons. SL is prototyping an entirely new realm of possibilities for social interaction and quite literally cultural change. Don't blow your chance to do something truly useful and pioneering for the world simply because you're chasing some arbitrary number. You have enough data to prove your point already. Pull back, re-assess, and invest your time, effort, and money into keeping your current, loyal resident base happy and enthusiatic about SL. Take what you've learned from this mess and shore up the infrastructure to get it right on the next try.