Keep Calm and Carry On

Last November, the Lindens announced an initiative that caused a great deal of controversy.

(What, another one? Yes.  Be quiet and listen. Did they change their minds again at the last minute? Hush. But I think I’ve heard this story before! Shhhh.)

As I was saying … last November the Lindens announced an initiative to clear XStreet, their online shopping forum, of freebies.

It wasn’t portrayed as that, of course.  It was portrayed as a Roadmap to start charging listing fees for free and very low-priced articles being sold on XStreet.  But the scale of charges were levered in such a way as to make free = expensive for the seller, moderately low-priced = reasonable.  You can read more here (but do it later, cos now they give the ending away in the first paragraph – and it wasn’t the butler who dun it).

It was clear that XStreet was a mess.  No, I’m not being culturally elistist here, or wanting only pretty, well-made things in XStreet.  But there was a lot of dross that made it hard to search, a lot of stale listings, and a lot of abuse – copybots and violations of IP rights all over the place.  One thing that could (and I believe should) have been done when Linden Lab took over XStreet was to tie abuse reporting inworld with a check on XStreet as well.

But the problem wasn’t to be solved by simply having a clean sweep of freebies – or by pricing freebies so draconianally that people withdrew them from sale (which was the apparent roadmap).  There were several categories of freebies that had very valid reasons for being free – for example …

• demos of products – such as skins and hair. People could purchase these, test them in the comfort of their own homes, and then return to make a purchase of the full value article.  If designers did start charging for these, then they would have to start charging inworld too, for one of XStreet’s rules was/is that goods should not be offered at a lower rate inworld than they are on XStreet.  And charging for demos would wreck a business model that designers have built up over the years.
• useful items given away free. There are altruistic people who create objects and scripts that they are happy to give away for free.  I’ve picked up a really nice dance machine script, for example, and a radar script.  Sometimes these are loss leaders, designed to encourage people to visit stores.  But quite often they are genuine giveaways too. We, for example, put out the Step UP! material on XStreet – and that included Freddie Bleac offering his amazing and spectacular Step UP! firework display.  We also put out the artbook, Images of Burning Life, and were planning to offer something similar for RFL this year too.
• there are some items (and this is where my horse is in the race) that work on the business model of a freebie.  Magazines, for example, which support themselves by advertising.  These have to be given away free – they are also being distributed as pdfs on the web and at Calameo where it would be impossible to charge Lindens for them.  I did initially try charging for Prim Perfect, but quickly realised that it simply wasn’t feasible – we were mentioned in the New York Times, and I could hardly charge NYT readers a 10 Linden fee to see what all the fuss was about!

The roadmap meant that all freebies would attract a charge and – to add insult to injury – they were to be excluded from the main search and dumped in a bargain basement bin that would make them invisible to people searching the regular marketplace.

The proposals, not unexpectedly, attracted outrage on a scale not seen since … oh, let’s see now.  The split-off of adult land? the Homestead debacle?  Probably the latter,  But sometimes it becomes hard to tell … and I’m sure that it must be even harder from the Linden side, where they must see the temperature of the residents as having only two levels: simmering and boiling over.  But even by the volatile standards of the active Second Life community, this was outrage on a serious scale.   People were prepared to walk.  And this wasn’t the Open Space in 2008; this time, some people found acceptable Open Source grids and moved their communities.  They’re still pioneering … but the level of improvement on the more serious grids over the last year has been impressive.

So some residents were lost.  And a lot were upset.  Many stripped their stores – others agonised over the changes they would need to make to their business plans.

We … waited.  For Prim Perfect and The Primgraph, XStreet is just one means of distribution; there’s the inworld subscribers (the largest), Calameo and downloadable pdfs on the website.  It would, for us, be a shame to lose that extra distribution point but there didn’t seem to be too much point in skewing our entire business plan just so we could sell maybe 250 copies a month on XStreet.  But, until the policy was activated, there didn’t seem a great deal of point in rushing in and pulling down all our stuff.  I checked with Pink Linden how best to pull back wheen the policy was enforced(and she said that that de-activating when the situation changed would be the right way to go), and then I sat back and waited.

Six months later, we learn this:

UPDATE (May 6th, 2010):

None of the plans in the following roadmap have been implemented.  They have been put on hold in favor of other features and functionality that merchants have requested.  We do not yet have a date for when we expect to implement these changes.  We will message the community and all merchants directly with fair warning before implementing anything in the following roadmap.  Until and unless you hear from us that we are implementing some or all of the following changes, they do not apply.

Based on merchant feedback on the importance of demo items, we have implemented a better way to link demo items and products in the new marketplace due to launch in the Summer of 2010.  Each product will have the ability to link to a demo item and each demo item will have the ability to link to the non-demo, complete version of the product.

So that’s it.  It seems that when the migration from XStreet to the new Marketplace occurs in the summer, what is left of the freebie market comes too. And that is good news for items like Prim perfect and The Primgraph.  And a great many others.

But … once more … we are in the baby out with the bathwater syndrome.  A lot of people took down their freebies in the panic at the end of last year.  Some were the bad and stale items that Linden Lab sought to remove.  But a lot … weren’t.  People took down useful tools that they had been supplying, useful information.  A lot of creators were forced into rethinking their whole distribution methods (e.g. those designers giving away demos).  Having to make such business decisions on the fly over and over, again and again … it doesn’t breed trust.  It doesn’t breed confidence.  It most definitely doesn’t breed security.

When Linden Lab has a sniffle like that, business people across the grid go down with influenza.  And some of them don’t recover.  Others decide to seek sunnier climes.  And you know what?  Air travel is getting easier all the time.

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