COPY PERMS - Bad for Business, Bad for the economy

INSIDER INFO - Things THEY won't tell you - if you want to make money in SL :

1. For clothes and avatar accessories :
Copy / no Trans is best for selling and business.

2. For land based products - houses, furniture, plants etc :
No Copy / Transfer is best for selling and a healthy business



Don't be bullied by land owners and the uninformed who perpetuate the MYTH that you have to sell with copy perms because SL is wonky and unreliable. NOT TRUE

THEY only want Copy Perms because they intend to commercialise your products and make money off your hard work

If you sell land based products with Copy Perms you will just get ripped off by land owners who will buy your product once and then commercialise it and add value to their land products, selling YOUR product over and over again with their land and you won't get a cent more.

You will make LOADS more money selling NO COPY / Trans if you make and sell a land based product.

But beginner merchants and some who foolishly believe that Copy Perms are best always shoot themselves in the foot, usually because some uninformed person encourages them to sell with Copy Perms.

You will just LOSE LOADS OF MONEY selling with copy perms and you will shorten and destroy the SHELF LIFE of your products and business.

If you want to make a successful LONG TERM business and make money in SL don't sell land based products with Copy Perms. You will just get ripped off and others will make money from your hard work

Consequently COPY PERMS are bad for the economy simply because LESS SALES ARE MADE. Less sales = bad for the economy .

Depends if you're willing to just give up the large landowner market.

It is absolutely true that land-based products sold copy-perm are of very much greater value--and should be priced accordingly if you want to sell into that market. If a business is small or its products not that appealing to larger landowners anyway, then it may not be worth the trouble of offering the much pricier copy-perm option.

But if one wants to appeal to that market, there really is no choice.

Nobody selling no-copy plants, for example, is going to successfully compete with a copy/mod offering from one of the big players, at a *much* higher price point; not for the large landowner market.

Part of the reason for that goes way beyond the piddling price of a few hundred plants. It's the enormous impracticality of managing land that contains no-copy *anything*. A large landowner has better things to do with their time than wading through their Lost & Found hunting for no-copy plants they returned to themselves when clearing a property, so unless they're priced so low as to be disposable, they're completely worthless.

Consider making your prices re the above : two options, one copy, one no copy.
Large landowners are not the evil do'ers you make them out to be, sorry !!!
If I want something to go in ALL my rental homes, I want copiable..and I'l pay MORE for that facility, its up to YOU as the creator to price accordingly.

PLUS

Imagine the benfit of 100's of homes with YOUR creations in them. items that I have paid a premium for to be copiable...potential free advertising , a lot of my residents ask where I get things from and want landmarks...

Every time you say "less (item)s" god kills a domo-kun. The word is "fewer".

(cue dictionary flames telling me that "less is acceptable". It might be acceptable, but it makes my frontal lobes itch something fierce)

It sound like Ralph has had a bad experience with selling copy items. I've always sold my furniture no-copy. In fact, there is only person who has a copyable piece and that's because it's a friend.

I've found that you don't have to sell copy items (at higher prices, of course) to sell into the rental market. I've sold to many such business at quantity discounts, but never copy items.

/me simply quirks a brow at the OP.

lots & lots of furniture makers will not give discounts for bulk buying, like you do Phil. Your discount makes it very attractive for a rental landlord such as myself, added to the fact you're generally around when Iam , means I get that discount paid back almost instantly..always gratifying and lovely

I will also state...Im quite shy really about asking or discounts for bulk buying..Id much prefer that the retailer had a sign up, or packs out...rather than have to approach to ask about it. You freely offered the discount when I said how many I wanted..which was super of you, because at your prices & quality, I wouldve just bought the items anyway .

I find that the more "mature" store owners (not meaning age here, but mature in terms of length of selling in SL) means that they understand their markets & customers better anyway. You also had rental homes at one point..so you understand my position very well

@Phil Deakins:

Actually Phil I've done both - sold copy and no copy - and And I wanted to share my experience.

And my experience is that estate owners are very charming and good business people but unfortunately if you make land based products they're not really your customers as they effectively compete against you and deprive you of potential future sales.

As Faithless Babii above states - 'Imagine the benefit of 100's of homes with YOUR creations in them'

It would only be a benefit to you if the 100's of items had actually been paid for.


What's really happening is that it's NOT to your benefit as a creator to have land owners rez 100's of copies of your items when they only pay a slightly higher price to get copy perms

You as the creator are not getting the benefit of the 100's of rezzed items. And there's very little advertising benefit as the people who are seeing it already have it rezzed on their land.

And also note that land owners always charm you with - 'I will pay a premium (a little extra) to be able to pay ONCE and rez AD INFINITUM

The only people who really benefit from Copy Perm Land products are the Estate owners and it erodes the whole SL economy as less sales are made overall

Having businesses that do both copy and no copy perms, I am here to tell the truth. You make more money as a creator if you do No Copy for land based products. Estate owners are NOT your customers.

The reality is that I make far more money from No Copy land based products than the Copy ones I sell. Estate owners will NOT buy the No Copy products so I get the REAL sales instead of the Estate Owner sales.

How many Estate owners are there ?
How many Residents are there ?

If you sell to Estate owners with copy perms you are reducing the market for your product

If you want a large customer base target the 1000's of residents NOT the handfull of Estate Owners

As I said, I never sell copyable items and I do sell to estate owners, as you call them, Ralph. I give very good quantity discounts (5+, 10+ and 20+).

There is truth in what Faithless said about the advertising though. Many people who rent furnished places move on to their own land, or to unfurnished places, and sometimes they want some of what they had in the old place. I found that when I used to rent skyboxes out. Quite a lot of people wanted to buy a skybox when they moved on - often so they could have a nice home on the ground, and a skybox out of normal view for some privacy. Also, those renters have friends round who can see and like some of the furniture. Having stuff out there and in use is good advertising, and the more the better.

I no longer have a house in SL because a handful of no-copy items in the build made it too difficult and complicated to keep a good backup, and when I lost the in-world copy of the house I'd spent six months tweaking it was just too much trouble to go back and start over.

No-copy means no-backups of the build as a whole.

No backups means you're dancing in the failure pasture wearing fail pheromones.

Something has to be real damn special for me to get it no-copy these days, particularly when it's rezzed in-world.

So by going no-copy you're spiting a few estate owners who aren't buying your no-copy version anyway, and in the process alienating everyone who's ever suffered content loss in a sim.

Well, I guess you're OK so long as there's plenty of newbies who haven't been burned yet. But experienced residents are going to pass you by, especially if you dismiss their concerns with "the only people who really benefit from Copy Perm Land products are the Estate owners"!

That gives a false impression. While it may be that a few experienced residents will pass him by for the reason you stated, experienced residents in general won't - and don't.

I find its not worth it to buy no-copy most of the time.

If I can find copy somewhere, even of slightly lower quality (but its often higher), I will go there instead.

no-copy is just rude to the customer.

I am not a large estate owner. I am a resident. I have one property. Quarter of a sim. On this property I have a building. One copy of it. No extra copies floating in the air above it, no copies rezzed on other people's properties, just one copy for me, myself, and I. And of course for the use of my SL wife, and the general public in the case of one small area of it.

That's just one copy. I'm not making money off of it by rezzing hundreds of copies and then "selling" said copies to other people (which would be more accurately stated as selling the USE of said copies, since nobody ever gets to keep those copies besides the person who rezzed them).

But this building is copyable. And I do benefit greatly from that fact. If something goes wrong, I always know that there is a backup copy waiting for me in my inventory to make it right. Second Life does have things go wrong, you know.

So you are in fact missing the forest for the trees here. Copyable land-based type builds do serve an important purpose for the Second Life resident - your customer - as a whole. Please don't insult the intelligence of your customers by telling us that you know better than we do, what's good for us.

Of the things I offer in copy or trans permissions, copy is far more in demand than trans. Any smart merchant offers what their customers want to buy because it's a hell of a lot easier to sell to someone who is ready to buy than it is to create a new customer and convince him to buy. If Gwyneth Llewelyn is right, you have a relatively small number of potential customers to sell to.

http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2008/10/13/the-hard-facts-about-the-second-life%C2%AE-economy/

Which to me means that you find a way to get those customers buying in a manner that you can still make a profit on. Freebies have chiseled away at the number of people willing to spend money in SL, so those still out there actually buying need to be nurtured and played to. If they want copy, give em' copy. Just make sure you price it in and can still cover tier doing it.

If you want to go after what's bad for business and bad for the economy, go after freebies.

I will also add this.

Once I find a copy/no-trans merchant in a niche I am interested in, that merchant goes on my good list - and when friends need things, they get told about people on my good list, and told to avoid people on my bad list. And anyone with a only no-copy items goes on that bad list.

And if you're one of my friends, I'm perfectly willing to bug you for hours on end until you shop right. (though its a lot friendlier than that sounds. )

There's exactly one no-copy/no-mod/no-trans merchant on my 'ok' list, and she's going to lose that spot the moment I find another merchant who can fill her niche: making furniture that is -both- sensations and xcite compatible. I've got all such furniture I want, but if I found a competitor who was copy/mod, I'd likely replace the items I got from her as the budget allowed.

FWIW.... I will never buy a no-copy/no-mod home - same for prim clothing. And I will rarely buy no copy furniture. So if you sell transfer only of any of these things, I won't be a customer. But that's just me.

Frankly, it's no copy items that put me of a mind to build pretty much everything I want. It's VERY seldom that I buy anything at all these days, and when I do it's NEVER no copy.

And as for the grid being stable and lost items being a myth. . .HA HA HA HA HA HA HAHAHAHA.

I have a powerful computer and a fast stable connection and it's STILL happened to me on a number of occasions.

You go ahead and set perms on your items as you please. But if they're no copy, as far as I'm concerned they're No sale.

Just about every single copybot thread also ends up with one fool posting the comment:

'but... isn't it ok if I just copy no-copy perm items I bought?'

- Of course... the real problem with that fool is that while his PoV might make certain sense... selling him a no-copy item boosted his motives / excuses / self-rationalizations for getting a copybot tool...

So no... no-copy doesn't help the economy. If anything it might subtly be helping boost the ranks of people running around with copybot tools.

Its a thin rationalization line to go from:
a. Hey, just copying things I bought. --->
---> b. Hey, just copying freebies. --->
---> c. Hey, just copying to give to my friends. --->
---> d. Hey, just copying to give out free, its ok because I'm not charging. --->
---> e. Hey, you rich capitalist pigs deserve to get ripped off anyway.

No, ethical people don't go down this line... but just drop into any copybot thread and there's at least one person claiming they're just fine for being on one of those steps and its everyone else who's wrong...

And I know I'm making a -BIG- leap here saying no-copy encourages IP-theft. I don't think it does to a large degree, but it is one small motivator on the list.

I think no-mod and "no-perm" are more powerful gateway drugs.

Agreed. I'll even admit to copybotting "no-perm" stuff because their idea of "mod" was a menu.