Kitely

Ciaran Laval has an article up, Kitely’s New Pricing Structure, that explains how Kitely pricing changed January 1. Most of the blogs I have read describe the pricing structure as confusing. Ciaran does a good job of explaining the pricing mess. After reading Ciaran’s article it isn’t all that bad.

Few bloggers provide anything other than the raw gross cost comparisons between gris. That comparison makes Second Life™ pricing look really bad. But, it is easy to make raw monthly cost comparisons.

I figure visitors don’t really care about the region owner’s cost. Only those that want a region care. Those operating businesses or trying to sell goods in a grid would care, if they understood free markets… which may not be that many.

In SL the peak daily concurrent users is 60k+. For Kitely the month of December saw 600+ ACTIVE users. Those numbers are not really comparable. Can we make some guesses, figure out some comparable numbers, and make a rough comparison.

Consider. OSGrid is the most visited grid other than SL, according to Hypergrid Business’ statistics. OSGrid puts stats on their main web page: OSGrid.org. They report 95,000+ users signed up. Their peak concurrent users per day hits between 200 and 300 per day. That is 0.3% of their signups. This number probably has nothing to do with reality for numerous reasons, but… we don’t have much else.

If that 0.3% number were to hold for Kitely, of their 16,625 signups that would indicate a peak of 53 concurrent users per day. Let’s be generous and say they have 100.

So, US$15/month, Kitely’s single region cost, divided by concurrent users gives us: 15/100=$0.15 per concurrent user.

For SL that is 300/60,000=$0.005 per concurrent user. You’ll hopefully notice I’ve rounded numbers to help Kitely.

From a business perspective it is very roughly 30 times more expensive to reach a customer in Kitely than it is in Second Life. But, cash out-of-pocket Kitely is cheaper.

Disappearing Breedables

Over the holidays, from Dec 24 to Jan 2, it seems breedables were disappearing. Reporting of the problem stopped after Jan 2, once the Lindens returned. The Dwarfen people are working on the Preview Grid to reproduce the problem and solve the mystery.

If you are seeing the problem, now is the time to file bug reports.

Fabfree ’30 Days’ List

I remember coming into Second Life, looking around and realizing I looked horrible compared to other avatars. As I explorer I found Free Dove. At the time GuRL6 had a free hair offer for those in SL for less than 30 days. I got my first ‘nice’ do from GuRL6. Once I was making money I bought my next 4 or 5 do’s from GuRL6. A couple of them I still wear now and then.

Recently I haven’t seen many of those 30-day type offers. I’ll admit I don’t look for them like I did in 2008. But, I did find a list of merchants providing new avatars their first deals. Hazle1Nutt made the note card in Oct 2013.

I think it is a great note card to hand to noobies I meet. You can get a copy at the Adult Hub. This is an adult region and there are nude noobies wondering around from time to time. The greeter offers the note card.