200,000 Banner Impressions on XStreet SL

My translation agency is recognized as Official SL Solution Provider by Linden Lab since March 2009. During a promotion for solution providers I recently got 200,000 free banner impressions on XStreet SL. This means my banner would be shown 200,000 times - not necessarily to 200,000 different people. Excited about this opportunity I submit my banner and the link to Kimmora Linden, and a little later my banner went live.

One question was where I would like the banner to link? I checked out some banners and saw they mostly link to an XStreet item, some to an external website, and some to a SLURL. I asked on Plurk for feedback on banner ads, and most people reported they never click on banners at all. In the end I decided to link it to one of my free promotional offers on XStreet itself, so I can track if the banner ad made a difference.

I had no idea what to expect, or how long those impressions would last. Two hundred thousand sounded like a large number to me, but I could not estimate what kind of visitor traffic XStreet SL would receive. A banner on XStreet SL changes whenever you come to a new page. So if you look at 3 products, you will see 4 randomly selected banners (including the front page banner).

I was rather surprised how quickly the impressions got used up. Only a few hours after the banner went live, the first 10,000 impressions were gone already. In the end, the 200,000 impressions lasted about 3 days. Of course I was curious to see the results.

The XStreet backend gives a nice realtime overview about the status of a campaign. In the end my banner received 58 clicks - this means out of 200,000 times the graphic was displayed, only 58 people (0.029%) clicked on it. This is somewhat sobering, but then again I offer niche services only suitable for a small fraction of residents.

Of course, those 58 clicks might have resulted in additional exposure and business opportunities. The linked product - my Language Kiosk - is a useful tool and free of charge. Surely those people who clicked my banner should consider my kiosk an interesting thing and "buy" it.

Alas, it does not seem like this. While there is definitely an increased exposure - those 58 clicks really end up on the product page - it does not seem to result in an increased attractivity of the kiosk. The number of purchases stays in the range of sales outside the advertised period.

Conclusions

Without doubt, a timeframe of 3 days is way too short to draw any generally valid conclusions. My product is pretty niche - a service offering rather than a retail product. Nevertheless the pricetag for those 200,000 impressions would be 7,999 L$ - had I actually paid for them I would have been extremely disappointed. To cover a full week I would have needed 500,000 impressions at least, at a whopping 17,499 L$.

• To get a better impression, a merchant is well advised to do A/B testing with 2-3 different banners. My banner was static - the majority of banners is animated to overcome the "banner blindness" of most shoppers. A proper test would consist of various versions of the banner, animated and static, with different wording as well.
  
• One of the biggest problems I see is that the banners are not context sensitive. A merchant books 200k, 500k or 2 million impressions, and the ads get randomly displayed. It would make much more sense to ask for a list of keywords and/or categories, and only show the banners relevant to XStreet products of a certain category or keyword.
  
• A by definition intangible and immeasurable effect is exposure. My banner got shown 200,000 times, so a lot of people have supposedly seen it and might remember it in the future.

Still this has been a very interesting experiment, and I thank Linden Lab to give me this opportunity. I would be interested in hearing feedback both from merchants who use banner ads, as well as from shoppers who click or not click on them.

Have you clicked on a banner before? If yes, did you buy the product? If no, why not? Did you buy banner advertising before and where you happy with the results?

I look forward to hear your feedback!

Watch your avatar name with Google Alerts

Everybody has "googled" their avatar name before, and the more vocal ones of us have certainly found a mentioning here and there. But did you know you can automate this process? Google Alerts is a nifty little gadget that allows you to store Google queries within the search engine itself, and get an email report (or a personalized feed) as soon as one of your searches gets a new result.

I am using Google Alerts both for my SL avatar as well as for my RL person, and it has become an essential tool for me. However the other day I read an article by metaverse consultant Ener Hax and realized that probably not everybody knows about Google Alerts. You might notice that against my usual practice I did not link to Ener's article. The reason is that Ener writes she has - just like me - set up extensive Google Alerts "so if someone mentions me, i wanna say hello back". I hope Ener Hax shows up in the comment then to prove the effectiveness :-)

As you can see from the screenshot I have set up Google Alerts for my name and the name of my businesses and the projects I am involved in. In my particular case I have also set up Alerts for the common misspellings - some people never get my name right. Basically you can set up Alerts for every valid Google query. The "link:" queries you see in the image for example fire if someone links to my blog.

Admittedly I have edited the screenshot. I have also set up Alerts for my avatar name in conjunction with my real name - I want to know right away should they ever appear in the same context. I have also set up Alerts for my competitors so I can keep an eye on them.

I hope this helps you keep a better eye on your online persona - and of course these things apply to your RL identity too.

XStreet and me - a personal analysis

I have not yet made my mind up on the upcoming XStreet SL changes. I see where Linden Lab comes from with the announced changes, and I think this is not all bad. I also see where Linden Lab goes to with these changes, and I am not sure whether I like it. I heard many good arguments against the canges from residents and merchants. And I heard many good arguments for the changes, also from residents and merchants. What I am sure of is that the changes were certainly not a majority-wish, as the Lab wants us to believe. At least not a majority in the sense of the majority of people. Maybe a majority wish in terms of amounts sold...

In the process of making up my mind whether I am for or against the changes, I looked at my own XStreet SL listings. This has, in fact, been overdue, so that is a good thing that I now got forced to do it.

Regular Merchandise

The good news is - all of my items sell. Even the most expensive one - Plywood Man - sold 12 times this year, giving me 1508 L$ of revenue. Instead of the 5 L$ commission, there will be another 120 L$ per year to keep this item listed. However if I only sell 2 in the next year, I already make a small profit. Two other items, my Celtic Cross and my Dasher, are also in the "green zone" and will continue to generate a profit, even with the new charges. However the Lab will get 786 L$ share of those items (same amount of sales anticipated), instead of 182 L$ prior to the changes - so 604 L$ more for the Lab.

It gets critical with my 2-prim-couch. This items is based on a 5-prim freebie, which I trimmed down to look exactly the same but save 3 prims to clever prim parameter and texture repeat selection. I set that item at the more nominal price of 5 L$ and since I listed it back in the day 183 people thought these are 5 L$ well spent because it saved them 3 prims. Up to now, Linden Lab got no share of the sales of this couch. In the future they want 3 L$ for each sale and 10 L$ each month, so I need to sell 60 copies in order to break even. Unfortunately it only sold 53 times last year, and since it is not really stylish anymore, I will most likely delist it.

Promotional Items

The next two items are listed for 0 L$ - freebies. Those two items are actually a good example for promotional items as Linden Lab states. I do not give them away for free because I am such a nice person. I give them away for free to raise awareness of my in-world business and find new clients. Up to now, Linden Lab gave me free advertising - now they want me to pay for it. Of course I would have preferred to still have it for free, and I do not really buy the explanation that the running costs are so high. However 1188 L$ per year is easily affordable for my business.

There are two problems however:

1. Freebie listings will not be searchable anymore and can not be put into suitable categories anymore - they go into a special freebie category. This makes it basically unusable for me. Potential clients find my Language Kiosk in the "Business -> Signs" subcategory. They will certainly not look in a freebie category. And those who will look in a freebie category, are usually not the ones requesting my services. If it is a promotional tool, and if I have to pay 1188 L$ per year to keep it listed, then don't give me a worse service than before!
   
   
2. Even without the first item, I would not keep TWO items listed. Both have basically the same aim and effect, so I would only keep one of those. Sorry, LL, not 2 x 1188 L$ for you.

Another solution would be to set a price for those promotional items. If I set them at 1 L$ I can assign them to whatever subcategory I want. However I would still need to pay 3 L$ commission on them, so I lose 2 L$ per sale. With a projected amount of 200 sales a year the cost would be 12 * 10 L$ monthly fee + 200 * 2 L$ commission after sales = 520 L$ - or almost exactly 50% of the intended cost of a promotional item. Sounds like a no-brainer.

General Considerations

I mentioned in the beginning that I understand where Linden Lab comes from. XStreet SL is like the Wayback Machine for Second Life. There are thousands upon thousands of obscure items. Admittedly there are thousand upon thousand of outdated items like pre-sculpty-age shoes. The fact that listing items without cost was a blessing and a curse. There is a lot of - well - trash on Xstreet. There are countless grossly overpriced items. But also countless very good items, items from philantropes who give them away for free as community service, as well as items from content creators that never bothered with shops and just developed for fun. Many of those merchants have panicked in the meantime and pulled their stuff. Which is an immense loss - even from a istorical point of view.

A second consideration is that Second Life does not have an effective object search! The closest that comes to an object search in SL is in fact XStreet SL, exactly because of what I said in the last passage. To be honest, searching in XStreet is a pain, but at least you can do it.

How would I have done it?

Accepting the assumption that XStreet SL needed changes at all, there still would be things I had made better:

1. Linden Lab claims that the changes were wanted by the majority of users. There are reports that this is somewhat of a euphemism. Fact is that those changes affect definitely way more merchants than got involved in the process. The proper way would have been to send a survey to all merchants on XStreet SL, and a second survey to all people who made at least one purchase in - say - the last 3 months on XStreet. This would be in my opinion the only way to get qualified feedback.
2. One approach would have been to automatically disable items that have not sold in a certain amount of time (6 or maybe even 12 months). That way, the "clutter" (as LL calls it) would be gradually removed. Merchants could manually reenable those listings - and maybe this would be a place where a monthly fee would apply.
3. A better distinction between promotional-freebies and philanthropic-freebies could be found. Someone whose whole XStreet inventory consists of 0 L$ items is certainly not promoting his regular merchandise with them. Someone who has 50 hairstyles on sale, and 50 associated demos is clearly promoting them, but is probably not in a position to pay 4950 L$ for all of them. Why not extend the functionality of XStreet with a "deliver demo" option? Maybe as charged-for option?

My bottom line

From my point of view it is not the end of the world as we know it. I can subscribe to some of the motivation behind it, but I think there would both have been better ways to get a true majority vote, as well as better ways to implement some changes.

I will not pull my items from XStreet SL, as it is still the major web platform. I will adjust my inventory to minimize cost and maximize effect - something every sensible merchant should do. Linden Lab will get more money from me - no way around that - but less than they probably thought they'd get.

I definitely got the motivation to seriously consider alternatives - but not to abandon XStreet SL. The alternatives will be used to widen my exposure and give additional revenue.

What is your take on the changes?

Betting with Trinity regarding Linden Lab actions

Back in January Linden Lab announced to take over Xstreet SL and OnRez, and I had some heated discussions with my friend and SL sister Trinity Dechou about future developments.

While we both agreed that the major reason for the XStreet takeover was the control of the Linden Dollar exchange run on that site (and its eventual blending into the LindeX), we disagreed on sales commissions. Trinity assumed that in order to make XStreet even more attractive, the commissions will fall, while I was (and am) convinced that LL would be foolish to plug what turns out to be an addition to their portfolio of L$ sinks (upload fees, tier, partnering fees).

Another area of speculation was the limitation on group slots. Linden Lab keeps telling us that the 25 group limit is deeply coded into the structure of SL and that changing it is far from easy (which does not keep them from occasionally granting 26 groups). However systems like Subscribe-O-Matic have effectively taken away the pain of the group slot limitation and basically taken away any sense of urgency for the matter. While we both agreed that incorporating a SoM like system into SL would bring a whole bunch of benefits, Trinity could not agree to my speculation that rather than making a system of their own, following the XStreet/OnRez example LL simply buys Subscribe-O-Matic. She rather suggested LL will implement a two-tiered system of their own, with "real groups" as we have them now, and "watered down" groups used for announcements etc and no limitation to the number of them.

What happens if an anglophile and a Scottish lass strongly disagree on things? They wager! So on January 22 the following bet was placed:

Peter: I bet 100 L$ that by August 1st LL has bought Subscribe-O-Matic. And I bet 100 L$ that by August 1st we still have commission for sales on what used to be SLX.
Trinity: I bet 100$L that by August 1st LL won't have bought Subscribe-O-Matic and instead will have introduced their own two tier group system. And I also bet 100$L that by August 1st commissions on what was SLX will be gone.

As defined by the conditions of the bet, tonight at midnight SLT the time runs out. And as far as things look like, my beloved sister Trinity owes me 100 L$:

• We still have commission on XStreet, and while many changes have happened to the system - and some obvious ones (like unifying the XStreet balance and the in-world L$ balance) are down the road, there were no indications that the commission will fall. Unless this changes in the next 22 hours, it is a full win on my behalf.
• Linden Lab has not bought Subscribe-O-Matic, nor are there any indications or signals they will. So this is a full fail on my behalf, however...
• ... Linden Lab has neither introduced nor announced nor showing any hints that they will touch the group system in the foreseeable future. On the contrary, they still claim extending the 25 group limit will turn SL in a screeching snail if ever extended due to database issues. So this is a fail on Trinty's behalf too, and according to the conditions nobody wins this part of the bet.

There is still 22 hours to run, and the folks at Linden Lab are known for surprises. But I think I'll be 100 L$ richer by tomorrow.

Getting my hands dirty again - my SL6B booth

People have been complaining that I was rather uncommunicative the past couple of days, did only reply sparsely to GTalk, did not show up a lot on Plurk and was rather busy in-world. The reason is that I was busy building my SL6B booth, and I am quite pleased with the process and result so far.

The theme of this year's SL Birthday Celebrations is "The future of virtual worlds". While exhibitors are encouraged to give their vision of the future, the nature of the 20 sims assigned for the expo are somewhat limiting. A barren, volcanic rock - supposed to be an asteroid - with dark ground textures. An sky featuring permanent starry night. And a grid of roads and paths reminding of the Bladerunner movie.

I initially had a different idea for my exhibition space, trying to build a futuristic version of the tower of Babel. But at the same time I wanted my contribution to be educational, so I needed some display room. Seeing my assigned plot and the atmosphere of the sims, the ideas started to float and almost automatically this type of museum-style building emerged.

One key feature about my building is the concept of "floating words". I chose the words "Language", "Culture", "Context" and "Understanding" in the major languages of second Life and have them floating around my space like bubbles in sparkling water. They are small enough and few enough to (hopefully) be not annoying.

Here is a closeup of me with some floating words around me. So this is what kept me busy the past days, and now I need to work on what I will show on the 32 display panels. What? Thirty two? PANIC!!!

Observations on the Xstreet SL rating system

Whenever I buy something on Xstreet SL I leave a rating, and sometimes even a review. For me it is normal to give this kind of feedback, since as a shopper I look for it as well. However I seem to be a minority - my own items on Xstreet SL barely get rated and I hear this from others too. Looking a bit closer at the rating system I started to see discrepancies. Items I got sent from Xstreet SL did not appear in my to-be-rated list. Items the store-alt for GREENE concept bought did not appear either. I even filed a ticket with Linden Lab and got some interesting tidbits of information.

In a nutshell, this is what happens:

1. Your own items send as gift can not be rated. You can send your own items from Xstreet SL to others with the "send as gift" option, however they will not appear among the rateable items for the recipient. This is most likely to prevent "friendship ratings" where you send an item to a friend (or an alt) in order to get a favourable rating.
   
   
2. Items bought from the same system can not be rated. This is a bit more complex and I could not find out with enough tests what Xstreet SL considers to be the same system. But if the GREENE concept store alt buys an item from me - even though the store alt using Google chrome as browser and me using Firefox - the store alt does not have the option to rate it. Whether this is a simple IP address check, and whether this info is stored persistently, needs more testing. And while the reason for this is the same as above, it can be tricky if for example a friend uses your PC to access Xstreet and after that Xstreet assumes forever that you and your friend are identical.

My friend Gumi Yao contributed another interesting observation: if you change an item's price by more than 50%, the ratings get deleted! In Gumi's case it was an introductory offer for some of her flowers, who got a lot of favourable ratings. After the introductory period, she set the price to the initially intended one - and the ratings got lost!

I tested her observation with an item of my own, that received a lot of negative ratings due to a misunderstanding in the description. The item was offered as a freebie and has received 35 ratings. I changed the price to 2L$ and once I reloaded the page, all ratings were cleared. I changed the price back to 0L$ and have a "clean" item again.

What are the implications of these observations?

Certainly there is a great potential for abuse in the Xstreet SL ratings. I witnessed a few times groups of friends openly discussing to make "fake purchases" in order to increase ratings. Since Xstreet SL gets a commission even from those "fake purchases" they have little incentive to stop it. However there are many legit reasons for a merchant to send their items via the "send as gift" option, and I wonder how many are unaware that the recipients can't rate those items. actually with the business I was involved with last year, we considered using Xstreet SL to send out review copies to fashion bloggers.

What I consider problematic is a "black box" that determines whether you come from the same system or not. Especially problematic since there is no way to know how long this gets stored in the Xstreet SL databases.

Using Gumi's documented technique to get rid of unfavourable ratings is legit I think. Many merchants complain about "rating trolls" or fake purchases by competitors for the sole reason of negative ratings. as long as Xstreet SL has no official way of appeal against those ratings, as long as a merchant does not even KNOW who did the ratings, a way to clear the record is important to have.

My own consequence: I will keep monitoring my "cleaned" item after I have clarified the description. If it continues to receive bad ratings I will go back to the drawing board and see how it can be improved.

Client feedback on translation services

The second anniversary of Babel Translations is only 3 months away, and looking back is exciting and also satisfying. Building this business was challenging fun, and getting the brand recognition Babel has today, was hard work - but work that makes me proud.

In the past two days I got some very nice customer feedback, which I would like to share:

"I just wanted to tell you that, since yesterday when I updated the French translations, sales of 2 of my items have shot up."

I got a lot of comments like that over the years, and each time is as wonderful as the first time.

"You are 5% more expensive than competitor, so I had no choice, I cannot trust my translations to the 'cheaper'"

Almost exactly a year ago, the pricing issue came first to my attention. By then, I was known to lose clients because my services were too expensive. But in that case I had almost lost a client because I was too cheap! In the last year I was often tempted to lower prices or offer large discounts. But I did not. We offer quality work and try to give best customer service - and there is a price to be paid for that. Quotes like the above, and clients who come to me after being disappointed with a competitor, show me that there is something to be said for my approach.

I thank all the clients over those 21 months for their trust and their business!

Why I became Premium after 27 months in SL

Yeah, that's right, nobody is more surprised than myself. There must be dozens of comments on other blogs where I ranted what a bad deal Premium membership is, that the only halfway visible benefit is to be eligible to buy Mainland parcels and that this is a dubious benefit at best. And that Premium membership is really unattractive and a waste of money. So why did I change my mind?

What changed is my perception. When I ranted about Premium membership, I primarily had the Mainland parcels in mind. Paying almost 120 US$ a year to be able to buy parcels in a constantly changing, ugly neighbourhood seemed like a bad joke to me. But if you change the perspective, things seem more attractive again. In a recent discussion fellow blogger Uccello Poultry suggested to me:

"As for you not having a premium account, I can only encourage to you think about it more seriously. A successful and influential business owner friend of mine had a basic, No Payment Info on File account when another resident (falsely) accused her of stealing his product designs. Her account was canceled without a hearing or any reasonable recourse for appealing. She lost land and property of substantial value."

This made me think, especially since I had similar notions from two other people in a rather short time frame. Like it or not - Linden Lab seems to deal different with Premium and non-Premium members. As a non-Premium member I can't file support tickets, and can't call support. So I started to look at the Premium membership as a sort of insurance.

Another thing that bothered me was that Linden Lab wants hard currency for the Premium membership. All I ever put into SL was 15 EUR - and my personal situation does not allow me to spend the amounts each month some of my friends spend. My friend Rika Watanabe opened my eyes to the possibilities of the LindeX, explaining to me that Linden Lab first charges your US$ balance before they start to charge your credit card. Provided you have enough US$ balance on your account - and this can be filled by selling Linden Dollar on the LindeX - your credit card never gets charged. So I can - with only a little complexity - pay for my Premium with Linden Dollar. With this final piece of information, I sat down and did the math:

26.78 US$ quarterly Premium fees, thanks to Linden Lab's double taxation of European residents, equals 6990 L$ at an exchange rate of 1:261. I could game the LindeX a bit and probably get a better deal like maybe 1:259 but that hardly matters. In those three months I will receive a stipend of 12 * 300 L$ = 3600 L$. This effectively reduces the Premium payment to only 3390 L$. The bottom line is that I will pay 283 L$ per week to become a Premium member and have a direct line to Linden Lab.

Up to now, this only focused on the "insurance aspect". However I am entitled to get a 512 sqm Mainland parcel at no extra cost with my Premium membership. As ugly as Mainland is for the most parts, a Mainland parcel has a few advantages, the major one is that Mainland won't go away. My translation office and the GREENE concept shop are on a beautiful sim, of which I am resident since August 2007. It is owned by a company who has various other sims in SL, and managed by an employee of said company. For all I know, right this second the folks at that company might have a meeting and decide to stop their SL efforts. Or right this second my landlady might get an offer from a different company and leaves her current employer. I might log in tomorrow and the sim is gone. There is no guarantee it won't. However, Mainland will stay. So if nothing else, a Mainland parcel is a pretty secure server location for your SLX, OnRez, Apez and Hippo boxes.

But why stop here? Rika shared a few other interesting facts with me. I can donate my land to group and get a 10% bonus. Ivanova, my partner in GREENE concept, could donate her unused Premium land allotment to group as well, and together we could buy a 1126 sqm parcel with approximately 256 available prims - at no extra cost. This would make for a nice little rent free shop - provided a stable neighbourhood can be found. An additional benefit of group owned land is that it can be in arrears with tier payments for a pretty long time before being reclaimed - a fact that not a lot of people seem to know (and which can change anytime).

Finally I expect Linden Lab to make Premium membership a better deal in the short term future. It has been discussed that Premium members might be preferred access rights during high concurrency. I assume there will be other benefits as well like maybe lower upload fees or more land. I also expect the additional benefits will come with higher Premium fees. And since Premium accounts are known to be grandfathered I might get a better deal by getting in early.

Bottom line is: my perception changed from "why should I pay hard currency to buy an ugly Mainland parcel" to "for 283 L$ / week I get recognized better by Linden Lab, can file tickets and get at minimum a secure server location or even a small shop for free".

Sometimes a change of perspective is a good thing.

A case for a universal gift card system in SL

My friend Alicia Chenaux brought up the idea of an atomic-world giftcard system for Second Life:

"You're at the store, you pick up a card because you have a little extra cash since you decided NOT to buy the double fudge brownies, and then whenever you need some $L in here, you punch in the code and there you go. Or your friends/family can buy you a card for holidays or special occasions[...]"

This is similar to two ideas I had in the past:

1. One of the large web portals like XstreetSL or OnRez should issue giftcards that can be used on their web backends or - in case of OnRez - their in-world vendors. Once purchased, the card could be used for any purchase with any of the listed items - the merchants would get L$ put into their accounts after the purchase.
   
   
2. Content creators should join forces and create a giftcard system that would work across shops/brands. An extension to Escort DeFarge's TMC storecard system comes to mind. Basically this would mean I could take a storecard from Insolence and use it at Truth. Of course the financial transactions behind the scenes would require quite some thought.

I gave out a few of giftcards for Christmas, and even though I got positive feedback I always was in doubt if the card for a specific store was the right one for the recipient (for example if a single woman would really enjoy an Insolence storecard with noone to show her lingerie off to).

A universal gift card system, or at least one supported by major content creators, would be a significant enhancement. Of course there are issues to consider:

• Acceptance
  There needs to be a critical mass of shops to accept the system. In case of XstreetSL or OnRez, the individual merchants would not need to do anything while at the same time providing a really large base. In case of a content-creator developed system it would not be good if only 2 shops accept it. Again an extension to TMC would be my preference.
  
  
• Security
  The questions is not IF, but WHEN there will be attempts to hack such a system. So there need to be tight security mechanisms, but not as tight as make the system unusable. For a web-based system, entering a simple code seems most appealing, but might be subject to brute force attacks. An in-world system might be less in danger.
  
  
• Trust
  Gift certificates I saw (and used) so far ranged from 200 L$ to 2000 L$. Newcomers trying to establish a giftcard system might hit reluctance based on trust, especially for higher values. Again, established players will have an advantage here.

I see large potential in a system like this, and the first to come out with one will have a large advantage on the market. I look forward to it.