Aug 15th, 13:56 SLIB SLIB, SL International Business
by Tyrian Camilo

CEO "preoccupied", slow replies etc. and about SL land market

Dear Investors,

Due to RL circumstances, and a new real life job i am rather preoccupied lately, and responses to enquiries might take a lot longer than usual. Weekends expect high activity, but during weeks i am rather busy and tired.

Due to the SL economic situation, i cannot rely on Second Life as a source of income at all anymore, there force i had to take a new job in RL to ensure bread on table.

We have also abandoned our cheap, low quality land business portion, and sold of the section to Ninjaland.

Also, here is what i sent to the "Mainland Discussion with Jack Linden" forum, for some reason this thread did not appear into the list:


"I am one of the largest realtors in Second Life mainland, owning SLIB (SL International Business aka SL Investor's Bank), and with it Kauppa Stores (retail chain), Mainostaulu Advertising (Yes, mainland advertising network), Garbage Collectors (get what ad farmers dump) etc etc.

The actions Linden Lab has taken has driven us into near bankruptcy state, making profits just needs a lot of sophistication in the management, like Ninjaland shows us, or luck. We had very high emphasis on marketing, yet, this was not enough. Not even stepping towards some automation (price management) brought us back to a satisfactory profit level.

BUT, let me please just talk about the advertising network for now.

First of all, the land sales were huge revenue source, why?
People were *WILLING* to pay immense amounts, all our parcels were priced *AS LOW AS WE DARED*, and our sales figures were high turnover wise initially, later on we increased as the network was *NOT* growing because people *BOUGHT THE DAMN PARCELS*

We wanted to sell only a very marginal portion, to ensure we always had enough revenue to cover expenses, in case of low advertising sales.

We made a huge emphasis on the appearance of the billboards, which i'm sure a lot of you can agree to, and placing restrictions (limit on number of instellation within certian range).

Yes, we received some griefing, a lot of land blocking, and binned as a ad farmer even by Linden Lab themselves, while always the goal was to have profitable means to do good for the mainland.

Since the *LAUGHABLE* "ad farming policy" came, we started to struggle, people didn't want to buy advertising as much anymore, parcel sales almost zero.

Those advertisers we had, were highly delighted on the effectiveness we deliver. Some of them are RL businesses, and they were stunned with it, increasing their revenues significantly.

Ironically, even when i think the sales figures of advertising are way too low, we had way more advertisers than any of the competition.

As it stands now (15th of Aug), we are considering the direction to take the company next, and i sincerely wish, that if we continue, Linden Lab would give *ENOUGH* upfront notice of the policy to adjust.

Linden Lab by large degree does *NOT* care about their users, especially their asset financial values. We, all the land owners, need to always remember that Linden Lab's fat profit margin comes first, and expect the worst out of Linden Lab in terms of land owner's perspective. (Personally, i've lost tens upon tens of thousands of USD by LL's direct actions, and do not have enough cash remaining to hire a lawyer to investigate the legality of some actions by LL). That all being said, i do not believe LL's employess are evil, nor the intended results are evil, but end result remains the same: A lot of people loosing A LOT of financial value, and that many of the decisions are not being made fully informed, and a lot of the statistics LL uses are very flawed, like the ~7.10L$/sqm average mainland selling price currently is LAUGHABLE. We at SLIB, and Elanthius at Ninjaland neither of us see many over 7L$/sqm sales, for many months now, and definitely nothing vastly over as the mean and median suggests."