RodVilla has at long last spoken on the blog, a rare treat these days, a blog post that talks about Second Life and Linden Lab. I could go off on a tangent about how the blog isn’t being used efficiently but for now I’ll just look at the content. I’ll split this into two parts, because I like doing that! First of all we’ll look at tier, Linden Lab branching out and the new creators program.
Tier won’t be going up in 2012, Rodvik tells us, but in reality tier needs to come down, however, as I’ve said before, Linden Lab need to find alternative revenue streams for this to happen, it’s totally unrealistic to expect Linden Lab to drop tier prices before they have other revenue streams in place but these alternative revenue streams are needed for the long term future of Linden Lab. Some may suggest that Linden Lab are addressing this by talking of branching out in completely different areas to Second Life, I’m not convinced about that, Second Life needs to be self sustaining, relying on other products probably won’t fly, but for Linden Lab, branching out makes perfect sense.
The problem Linden Lab have is with turning Linden dollars into US dollars, their previous attempts to incorporate advertising on the website failed in part due to the GlamAdapt advertising program being US dollars only, however it surely wouldn’t be that hard to have a service whereby you had to sell your Linden dollars to pay for advertising in US dollars, that’s how many land owners pay tier, the problem really was a third party being involved. I know some people don’t like advertising but really, it’s not always intrusive and I really think Linden Lab are missing a trick by not having advertising on their website, but this is all old territory for me, I still can’t fathom out why they aren’t trying to get the likes of Adobe to advertise on their websites, maybe they have and Adobe aren’t interested.