Business

Well, lately some of my friends (hello, Aquela, Eve, Kyz and Juliet ^^) either bought a club or are thinking about opening their own club. Since I am a frequent visitor of different clubs, some asked them on my advice how to get it running. Well, there are some insights I’ve got to share with this world about opening a club in Second Life.

So, here we go:

1. Don’t. That’s right, don’t do it all, don’t waste your time on it at all. Why? Clubs and also malls come a dozen on a penny in SL. They come and go, it’s one of the most frequent business types opening up and closing their doors very soon to be forgotten again and leaving their former owners with a big loss. They can be happy to have their expenses covered at all.
2. Having said that, if you’re not already scared off on opening your own club, don’t expect to make big profits with it. Running a club is a hobby for most of the people, so if you want to make real big bucks with a club, you’re on the wrong business model. Better sell clothes, start building, scripting or other high paying stuff!
3. Ok, so you’re still convinced to open your club? Good. That’s rule number three: be sure of yourself and your goal. Opening up your business is a hurdlesome task in SL and expect it to take quite many hours before you can open your club at all.
4. Be observant. If you want to have success, first take a good look at the established club scene, visit them, especially some of the bigger clubs, find out where their strengths are, where they are weak and for which kind of club there could be still a chance. For example, if 80s music is popular and there’s no such big club in SL covering this topic or you think you can do it better, this might be your chance. Go for it then.
5. Be unique. This can cover many topics: music wise, design wise, people wise. My opinion is people come most for the in crowd hanging around the place and the music. So cook up your own in crowd, your own special staff, your own live djs and keep it running. Some of the best running clubs in SL don’t have fancy architecture at all. It’s the people who keep a place running!
6. Hire staff. Yes, that’s right, to have a good crowd hanging around setup a schedule of hosts, who are there around the clock. Peak usage in SL happens at North American evenings and European evenings, if you want to cover both areas, hire them from those countries/continents.
7. Make events on a regular base, perhaps with some contests. It helps you to spread the word around and people are more likely to come when there are special events and they can win something.
8. Create something like a corporate identity on your venture. This means getting a club logo for your own, that you can use on freebie give aways, in the ads and so on.
9. Get your own stream. Nothing is more boring like the 42nd club running on the same music stream coming from an established web radio. If you are not willing or unable to hire a dj, at least get your own stream running with music that’s being in good vibes with your place.
10. Do you want to make money or just make it as a hobby? Some bigger clubs have attached malls or vendor places to get some of the money back. But not all places/clubs go well with them.
11. Make yourself a limit of how much money you’re willing to pay per month for the club. This should be pretty clear.
12. Some clubs have escorts, dancers and in former times games. Be sure before opening a club, if you want such hanging around or not. Normally not worth the money, they also come for a dozen per penny.
13. This also means: be sure, if you want to go into a mature or PG rated region
14. And at last: make your mind up, if you want to open at the mainland or a private sim. Mainland is cheaper in the beginning, but you’ve got normally the avatar limit of 40 on most places and when you club is good running, expect complaints from your neighbors. Private sim is better on that aspect, but normally you’ve got to pay it then for yourself, so that’s only an option if you’ve got enough money or already a big club making much money.

That’s all, folks. Could be, that some would make other main focuses on their own pet club, but those are my experiences so far.

I teleported today onto the Phat Cat’s dancefloor. Well, strangely it happened that I was teleported under the dancefloor, take a look at this picture here:

It seems that Dilbert Dilweg really wants to get rid of his club fast, the price for it already went down to 800.000 L$ or 3.000 U$. Why he’s selling it? Because he’s moving in with his love and having much less time for SL, then. Quite easy.

Under Phat Cat’s dancefloor.

The biggest and most popular jazz club in SL, Phat Cat’s, is for sale, again, but this time for real, as it seems. The owner, Dilbert Dilweg, wants to get at least 1.000.000 L$ (equivalent to about 3.501 US$) for the whole private island including all buildings and objects.

Now I wonder if we are going to see the most popular place in Second Life at all according to Tateru Nino under new management soon…

Let me quote the in world sales pitch here:

Phat Cat’s is for sale. The sale is 1,000,000 Lindens and will include full transfer of simulator and costs.

Buy at time of tier payed and get 1 full month without having to pay tier.

All transfers will be completed WHEN ALL monies have been transfered.

Paying thru pay pal without Lindens is also acceptable payment. Payment should be the equivelent of 1 million lindens at current market rate the total would be US$3,500.72.

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SLMillions, the in world lottery where you could win one million Linden dollars, is gone for good. Seems to me that this project was creating way too much loss for the people behind it to let it run much further.

When you take into account, which big waves the announcement from 05/04/2007 of the age verification system made and that Lindenlabs wanted to implement this on really short notice and since then it has been over one month of time and it is still not there nor any new announcements about it, it makes you wonder - when is it going to happen, finally?

I haven’t even seen a public beta test of it so far, and if you consider how fast Windlight was integrated in the client, which is a far more complex piece of technology - what is taking Lindenlabs so long? And why?

The Second Life Herald is running an article named “Blame Europe” about the “virtual child pornography” by Carl Metropolitan (who dislikes it clearly) reported by German reporters.

The main thesis is this:

Sexual “ageplay” in Second Life–as repulsive as it is–would almost certainly be legal under current US law. In the United States, only virtual child pornography that is “indistinguishable from” real child pornography is illegal. [1] However, many European jurisdictions are far more restrictive. In Germany–source of the recent ARD “Report Mainz” news reports–laws against “virtual child pornography” are even stricter, [2] making little distinction between real and virtual child pornography.

[…]

The First Amendment has led to United States having some of the least restrictive laws on freedom of speech in the world. But as Second Life’s real life users become less and less American, and its servers cease to be wholly US-based, Linden Lab will inevitably be forced into more limits on what it can and cannot allow its users to do.

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When you take a closer look at the key metrics of April or make diagrams out of them like here by Tateru Nine, who has been interviewed here about the growth, you can only come to one conclusion: growth is still there, but it has stalled.

What are the reasons? There could be many. Perhaps the bad performance - but that’s something you experience after you’ve created an avatar, so perhaps not really. I personally think that the times of the big hype as Second Life as Web 3.0 are gone now - the time for bashing Second Life starts now, meaning usage and new account creations are going down and after that somewhat up again.

The question is: is this a good thing for a while? Yes. It gives Lindenlabs more time to work on their next generation architecture and some air to solve out some big issues. It is bad still in business terms since land sales should go down a little now, so I wonder how this affects the income of LL at all.

The next big thing in the community hasn’t been the upcoming voice features or the introduction of sculpted prims (which are going to have only somewhat limited use), but the introduction of age verification to the platform. I’ve also written an entry about it, too.

Now we know the company which is going to do it. Well, they had to choose one, anyway, and there are not so much companies in that field.

Many people have disgruntled by the fact they need to verify their age if they want to enjoy mature content. The whole verification is a paradigm shift of Lindenlabs, meaning they are using the community to keep the platform cleaner. Now that the battle has calmed down, we all can take a somewhat clearer and better look at it.

Most of the people, who already have got credit card infos on their file, don’t see the usage of it, since other sites take you as verified just by entering your credit card number. But this is not even sufficient and enough in the USA, so you need to provide other data.

There is one thought that hit my mind when I read again the news about the possible opening of the server side software of Lindenlabs: it would really, really nice to have regional datacenters at least. Ok, having the possibility to host the servers on your own would be even better, but at least this step would be really nice in addition to the two datacenters in the USA.

Why? Simple: physics at work. What we all dislike is the almighty lag. Though the internet has become very fast, the connections between the continents are very fast, too, they still cannot beat physics.

But how does the lag involve physics? Well, even if the internet is fast, the maximum speed data can be transferred theoretically is light speed (roughly 300.000 km/s). You cannot cross that border. This means, the longer your connection gets, the longer it takes for the data to reach you. That’s quite simple physics.

Eric Kintz, the vice president of global marketing strategy and excellence for HP, is running a very critical blog entry about second life. Taglein: Top 10 reasons as why I still need to be convinced about marketing on Second Life.

While he raises right points there, there’s one point missing: this is going to be the next big thing[tm], if done right, the start of something new in that kind of matter, if done right, so getting experiences in SL will help you adapt later to other virtual worlds more easily.