New Premium Features have been introduced for Premium Members, as announced on the official Second Life blog, which you can read here. The features include sandboxes for premium members only and some gifts exclusive to premium members.
I am a premium member but always have a bugbear when it comes to premium membership that people who are estate owners but not premium members should be taken into consideration. They don’t get the stipend and they don’t get a Linden Home, but they can buy an island, now considering how much they pay for their island, I think they should be included in perks such as these new ones and I asked that in the comments …. and got answered indirectly by Tateru Nino! Tateru’s blog post on the new premium features includes this comment:
“While it says premium only, Linden Lab spokesperson, Peter Gray, assures me that these two benefits are also extended to non-premium, ‘concierge’ customers.”
Good to see that response. However I think it’s a sign of getting old that I’m not up in arms about the free advertising for The Loft. Colleen Desmoulins has a highly regarded store there but these freebies do compete with other furniture makers and this is wonderful advertising for Colleen, usually I’d be all disgusted of Tunbridge Wells over this, but I’m not, maybe I’m used to it now, or maybe it’s because Rodvik is a Villa fan, whatever the reason I’m not too bothered about it.
However I would like to know how people get into this premium gift cycle because I’ve seen no posts about this. There will be other gifts, so how do people apply? This could be a good opportunity for a new or small content creators to get some great exposure, I’d like this process to be far more open.
The one complaint I’ve seen about the premium sandboxes is that they are all G rated, I’m not sure if this is true but I’d like to see sandboxes of all maturity ratings for premium members, as premium members will come from backgrounds that support all three maturity ratings.
I do like the fact that Linden Lab are looking at ways to make Premium Membership more appealing and I have some suggestions of my own. I’d like to see more choice in the premium plan and I’ve discussed this before. There are people for whom the free land tier is unappealing, they are happily renting land or don’t need land. There are people for whom the stipend is extra income but they would get by happily without it, so how about some options here.
A shoppers plan whereby you forego your 512M free tier, because you don’t use it maybe, and instead get a higher stipend so you have more shopping money.
A land owners plan whereby you forego your stipend but get a larger free tier allocation, 1024M maybe, that may be too high but it should be higher than the 512M.
A content creator plan whereby you get x amount of free uploads or a free classified advert upto the value of x in exchange for forsaking stipend or free tier or both.
A gold plan that includes all the extra options but is more expensive than basic premium membership and then variations of these options with different price points. For example instead of USD$72 a year for premium membership you might pay USD$100 but for that you get extra land tier, x amount of free uploads, etc.
These may be horrendously flawed ideas but the concept of options to make premium membership more appealing is one that I think has value. Another option, that I’m sure would be popular, comes from Ceera Murakami over on a thread at SLUniverse:
“As a matter of fact, if I could apply my “free Tier” allocation as a voucher that I could assign to my private sim landlord, for him to use in paying his private sim tier to LL, instead of me only being able to use it myself for Mainland, I would probably sign up as Premium member in a heartbeat. And not for just one account, but for several of my alts, as well! And this is coming from a 6-year resident who has firmly declined to even consider going Premium the whole time, because she simply has never seen sufficient value received for the money tied up when going Premium.
It could work exactly the same way that donating tier to a land group does, with the exception that the L$ value of the tier is converted to its USD equivalent, and allocated to the landlord’s sim tier balance as a cash payment credit. It isn’t any different to LL’s bottom line than crediting my tier to the USD value that I would pay them directly for Mainland. BUT, and this is a huge difference, I would have the choice of being able to live anywhere on the grid, and not solely on Mainland.”
Now I know this idea has been discussed at Linden Lab in some corners because Jack Linden mentioned it a couple of times at his office hours and I know this would be an extremely popular idea, I once had someone donate tier to my mainland group to claim a parcel on my roleplaying sim, they negotiated a deal with me that meant they paid lower rent for doing this, if they could have straight donated the land tier to my sim they would have done that and I do know that in the past, some people have been accidentally charged land tier for donating land to a group on a private estate, I had a renter who was outraged that they were charged tier for estate land and they were pointed to the parcel on my sim, so the mechanism could very well be in place to do this.
The bottom line really for me though is that if there are more choices in premium membership plans, they become appealing to more people.