Sales Effected Since Age Verify Announcement?

Hello,

I don't usually post to the forums as I have lived life pretty happily in SL for about a year now without much reason to complain.

Except ever since the day they announced this age verification system my sales have fallen nearly $800 / month. That being what I was avg. for last few months and now I am breaking even. Nothing has changed in my advertising strategies or store layout. Only new thing was that announcement. I was curious to know if many other SL business owners are experiencing the same problems?

It's my take on the issue that the Europeans just arnt investing as much into SL since the announcement came out. My evening sales (ie USA customers) has really been the meat and potatos of my income since that time. Before it was the opposite. Also, my sales have been in the lower catagories (ie 69 - 299 L$) with almost none in the higher catagories ie (800+ L$).

Let me know your experience!

P.S. Not looking for comments on my past success just on current market environment.

My sales are way down also - Im not sure its the Age verify thing though.

Basically they dropped off when the changes were made to the defualt search settings, and I never completely recovered after that

My sales are a little over half of what they averaged per month for about a year.

Im sure theres lot of reasons for this - But quite a few people have noticed a drop in sales.

I expect when Age verification hits Ill get another drop, Less signuups, people leaving PLUS who needs a shape when they cant show it off.

The reduction in SL sex activities might cut down the average playing time too .. which might hurt a lot of people's sales.

Voice might help my sales some - If a lot of gender pretenders decide they need a male avatar/account. , Or it may hurt them - If gender pretenders decide not even to bother with Second Life.

This is distressing. I don't have a business that relies on item-purchases for income, but I have noticed that, since about February, even before the appearance of the third Mainland, there seems to be a real stagnation in the rate of land resales in the private estates. On the one hand, one can discuss prices of land as a probable contributor to that slowdown. And certainly, supply far outweighs demand now, with the new continent exploding. But I am concerned that your anecdotes, if they match a larger pattern, point to a second edge to the sword...

If there is actually less spending in retail, this points to number of actual RL account owners relative to number of avatar-based businesses, essentially, the economy is saturated with store owners selling to store owners, who only have store owners to sell to in turn. I see a world where the most active buyers and merchants, all owning more multiple accounts, still have a finite amount of cash to spend...total dollars spent and total number of avatar accounts, to this point, has been masking the fact that although there are more active accounts, there are actually not a corresponding abundance of subscribers to support the expanding marketplace...I am positive I read some stats in SL Herald sometime back, presented by she-who-shall-remain-nameless (but numbers are numbers)....showing that the number of premium accounts may even be in decline, even as the rolls continue to explode???

All consequences, I believe, of an artificial economy where the floating currency value is not permitted to regulate the rate of currency production in any relevant fashion (if I understand the economic analyses I've seen herein the forums as well as in secondary sources).

They are rising, but at a Progressively Slower rate compared to population increase.

So the PROPORTION of Premium Account holders is declining quite a bit.

The absolute number has gone up.


It might be that is true for a lot of economic things - not keeping pace with growth - thus the newer competion is killing our sales due to a proportunately lower spending by residents.

Even though the absolute dollars spent might have gone up.

Sorry, you were responding while I as editing...even though the quote you extracted doesnt exist exactly in my post now, I think my ideas as they came through are still the same, and that your response is still valid.

Ok while I was away the thought stuck me that in RL economies there are usually recession after times of rapid growth. Is it possible that we are seeing an onset of a SL depression? Recession boosted by overwhelming lack of user confidence in the system equals less spending, less investment and businesses crashing. Seems to make pretty clear sense to me, wish I could get more market stats.

Ive noticed in the skins market on classifieds a crazy boost in advertising L$ spent. The first page of results were about 100k on top 5 with rest being 5k -> 30k. Now its like 200k on top with most of the rest 20 - 40k. Which either means the market is doing really good or the other businesses are trying to increase their advertising in an effort to make up their losses in collective sales. In other words sort of a bubble effect. My guess is as the identity verification system goes into place the bubble will pop and you will just see a massive exodus of business accounts in SL. So the question is if this is true how does one ride that out? And is it worth it? Let me know what you think.

This is interesting...

Whether or not I buy into the institution, two important vehicles by which the US Federal Reserve Bank compensates for/regulates rate of recession are: 1)regulation of currency availability, and 2)adjustments to the prime-lending-rate.

Because, as yet, the currency production rate is based more on chaos-theory than any sound economics, and because there is no established debit economy, doesn't this leave the economy relatively powerless to "self-adjust"?

It could just be summer coming.
More sun = less people staying inside for less hours.

And with this observation, we have the basis for some tech-society grad student's doctoral dissertation...the only thing better than Second Life is the quality of the people you run into here!

Possibly - But -

last summer I didnt see this same sales slump though

I didnt have a slump at all.

I made the comment in jest, but, you know, Linden Lab and RW have introduced a huge number of new variables to the mix since last year. I think the true impact of the hype-PR, the SL land rush before the holidays, the changing profile of the average SL-er, and the in-place and impending TOS and identity policy changes all is yet to be realized.

This calls immediately for a much deeper meta-analysis of both social and economic factors than I believe Linden Lab understands, or is prepared to pay for.... without wanting to be the voice of impending doom, if they don't begin to look at SL as a functional organic world (okay, pixel-organic), as well as being a grid-maintenance challenge, worldly-mechanisms are likely to take SL as a functional entity into the depths, even while the performance of the grid hardware and software continue to approach optimal.

My sales are down as well, it looks like the people saying "I won't put any more money in this game" (I've seen several comments like this in the forums) aren't kidding.

It's a good thing SL is just a hobby for me, not a livelyhood.

my sales went way down when SL decided to remove casino listings and a few weeks later SLX removed casino items. It really bothers me that they'd do something like that and not come up with any alternatives. And now they still aren't trying to produce an alternative.

Sooo... Linden, here is your solution. I know you have a few data centres spread throughout the US and so I suggest that you rent(or buy) some data servers and host them here in Canada. Then those that wish to list casino's can do so freely on the sims run with data centres here (in canada) since here we don't have ridiculous laws that restrict online casino's so much.

All good possibilities and also, there may be more competition now because some of the new people have stopped buying so much and are setting up businesses of their own.

Well, first, as a tiny business owner - my sales have gone down in the last month - and I have been running exactly the same classifieds at the same prices since I started selling things.

Second, I have stopped spending any money at all on SL due to the pending "age" verification plan. I was spending an average of $100 a month, sometimes up to $500. Overall I've spent more than $3000 in SL on land and items.

I sold all my land but one piece and all my transferable inventory at a loss to prepare to leave the game. Others may be doing this as well just to get ready to get out of the game entirely - which may in some way contribute to a drop in the economy as more land and items enter the market at cheaper rates.

I had at least 10 businesses I was spending Lindens at regularly every month. I've shopped at dozens more. All of those business have now lost me as a customer.

After reading these posts I'm picking up on a few things:

Business owners are experiencing a loss in sales
This could be due to multiple factors which effect in game spending patterns
One factor (id verify) is causing people to leave the economy all together


For my own sake I guess what has me the most depressed about this is that as the content creators in SL (ie. for most part business owners) we have little to say in the community. I don't remembering having an option to vote on the id verify yet they say they are setting it up do to requests. Who's requests? And why are their's considered more valid than our own?

Second has to do with the way the age verify system has been introduced. If they gave a clear picture for how it was going to be implemented from the first place we wouldn't be seeing this drop in sales or at least so dramatic. I still don't know if my skins and shapes store will be considered adult or just mature. There is no information coming from LL as residents are just uninstalling and moving on in frustration.

I enjoy making content and so long as I'm breaking even I'm having fun. But to lose $800 / month in hard earned sales is a pretty noticable thing in the real world come time to pay the bills. So needless to say I feel pretty screwed over by LL. The market has never been so aggressive and damaging to my business as the platform it runs on.

I've been running at a turnover of at least $L1000 a week for my sex toy store, for the last few weeks.

Last week my turnover was about $400 - so way down on my normal sales.

I'm not sure if this is to do with the age verification debate or just co-incidence.

I hope things pick up again - or maybe its time to just shut up shop.


Allex ...

Sales cycles fluctuate with the season. People's interests change. Oldbies leave, newbies join but don't know where to find you. Increased competition pushes your product to the fringe. SL outages. SL policy changes.

All of this can affect your sales.

My sales have been about the same, though traffic has been down a little on my land. The drop that some people are experiencing might be related to any number of things, as mentioned above.

It could possibly have something to do with what you sell, in the current crackdown climate. My store is very PG-rated, so the age verification announcement wouldn't affect most of the people who shop for my stuff.

I'm not a shop owner, but I am an occasional shopper.

The only thing I've been buying of late is a few clothing items at shops I might not be able to go to when the identity verification goes into effect. Since I may well be restricted in where I can shop, I figure I'll do a little shopping now.

But all in all, I'm not willing to invest much money into SL until I see how this will affect me. Since I refuse to submit to this virtual tattooing (which is how I see identity verification), I know there is every good chance that I will be leaving SL in future, or at the least, just meeting up with friends there occasionally. So any investment is no longer worth it.

Sorry shop owners, but LL's decisions have affected my shopping habits. And I'm just one person.

Rather oddly - my sales have picked up again this week. I'm not sure if the previous week was a case of post-ageVerify depression - or just a co-incidence.

The one thing I have definately on hold at the moment is any plans to buy land. It would be useful to get a parcel of land on a nice class5 sim for a store - but I'm inclined to see how the age verification works in practice before parting with any cash.

In particular I wonder how well flagging a parcel of land as adult will go down with the neigbors - unless other people around me do the same thing. I might get the: "what the hell's that adult store doing in our nice neighborhood" response if I stand out too much. I was originally thinking of having a shop in the sky - but flagging the land as adult will still show at ground level, even if I just have a nice garden at ground level.

Maybe things will settle down again soon ...

Allex