OpenSim: Kitely’s Market Place Second Look

My recent article OpenSim News: Hypergrid Market 2014-12 drew more comments than most of my posts. Maria Korolov, WhiteStar Magic, and Ilan Tochner commented making good points I feel worth further consideration in regard to Kitely’s new market place.

Kitely Market in Android S4

Kitely Market in Android S4

Maria believes the Kitely market will help with the DMCA problems. Her thinking, if I understood, is that having a single market for many OpenSim grids it reduces the work one needs to do to file a DMCA take down notice. Rather than keeping track of all the grids and filing with each, a merchant/creative can file with just Kitely. This is a good point and addresses the concern I raised about the added complexity of the Hypergrid spreading products across a number of virtual worlds.

If each grid has its own market, we have to deal with all those markets and defend content in all those markets. I see that as a big problem. Maria is likely right that a concentrated market would simplify the problem and not present the massive work load I foresaw.

Filing only with Kitely does not get things removed from all the grids. But, that may be a temporary thing. They hope to be able to implement that feature with cooperation from grid owners. For now once an item is in a grid’s asset database it is there until the grid manager removes it. A DCMA take-down will stop sales from Kitely and that may be all one really needs to worry about. More about this farther on.

Maria also points out that like Netflix and iTunes the market place can make getting legitimate merchandise so easy the illegal content is displaced becoming an insignificant part of one’s sales. The idea being that more merchants will move away from small local grid stores to the centralized Kitely market with a larger customer base. Set up one store and get more customers, that works. These are free market forces coming into play. Humans tend to go with whatever is easy, cheap, and works.

My point in counter to these ideas is: While Kitely may be willing to pull things from the MP, that just creates a channel for abuse too. Pirate, DCMA the legit competition, tie things up as long as possible, and sell as much as possible before repeating. We see this in SL. I don’t know that Kitely has the staff to devote fighting such abuse. But, Ilan addresses this point further on. They have a solution to this one.

Whitestar, who I know from OSGrid and respect, points to the Export Permissions. His thinking is the permissions are working. I am not at all sure they are, but that depends on our definitions of ‘working.’ It also depends on what one thinks Export Permissions are. I misunderstood their purpose. It is not to stop or limit theft, but to allow a merchant to decide what can be transferred outside the Kitely grid. In that respect it works.

Whitestar points out that Linden Lab (LL) decided not to add Export Permissions or participate in the Hypergrid and its markets. I think participating in the Hypergrid market could be a big step forward for SL merchants, just as the Desura connection may eventually help merchants. We may yet see an export permission in the SL MP.

Kitely Market on Desktop

Kitely Market on Android

The problem is SL people see the Hypergrid as a channel filled with pirates. I expect considerable resistance to other grid sales from SL users. An export-ok flag would eliminate that resistance by giving a merchant item by item control.

I also suspect that the Lab is seeing a major headache in their future from a choice to market to other grids. The up and down sides just don’t seem to work out for a future where SL sells to the Hypergrid. But, they may surprise us. But, don’t expect Whitestar or my self to hold our breath.

Ilan Tochner, CEO and founder of Kitely, makes the most convincing arguments for the new market and selling in OpenSim worlds. His comments here got me looking farther into how the Kitely market works. there are some surprises.

Ilan referred me to a video where he presented the Kitely Market at the  OpenSim Community Conference 2013. (Video) The first 20 minutes is a promotional explanation of the market covering the goals they have and how the market works and why one should be in it. Its worth listening. The goal is to be an excellent market place. Features from SL, Amazon, and other online market places have been adapted to Kitely’s market.

An explicit part of the goal is to be better than the SL Market Place. Not to take anything away from Kitely, but being better than the SL MP is not setting the bar very high. Fortunately Ilan has a much higher goal in mind. I think you’ll get that from the video.

The Kitely people are looking at the SL MP and avoiding the problems and mistakes made by the Lab. For both shoppers and merchants the Kitely market is a step up in usability. Free market competition is a good thing. 

10 thoughts on “OpenSim: Kitely’s Market Place Second Look

  1. Thank you Nalates for taking the time to view my presentation and consider the points I’ve made in it.

    Like most websites it takes time for activity to pick up speed until it crosses a tipping point and word of mouth creates a big influx of new users. While we can’t promise people who don’t sell well in SL Marketplace to start selling well in Kitely Market, people who do sell well should find that many OpenSim users are more than happy to pay good money for high quality content.

    We have a few merchants that have already sold close to $1000 worth of goods (in USD and in Kitely Credits). The merchants that have done so are the ones who are successful inSL and took the time to create good marketplace listings which leverage the various content discoverability features we have in place (such as product attributes that help refine searches).

    If you’re considering listing in Kitely Market please make sure to read our online documentation to ensure that you maximize your likelihood of attracting buyers. Also, listing a nice number of items gives potential buyers a much better feeling about buying from your store than only listing a few items. Buyers want to know your brand can be trusted in OpenSim. All common sense advise, of course, but still it shouldn’t be overlooked.

    • You made good points in your previous comments. That convinced me to take a look. But, I appreciate the kind words.

      As I can take time, I plan to put some things in the Kitely MP.

      • Great 🙂

        Our online documentation is located here: https://kitely.atlassian.net/wiki/display/doc/Documentation

        Our blog (with detailed blog posts about new features) is located here: http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-news/

        Our forums are located here: http://www.kitely.com/forums/

        Please let me know if there is anything you need.

  2. Very good article Nalates.
    I do hope you will join our merchant base soon. Kitely is growing and new good, quality merchandise is in need;-) If you need any help just drop a line. Keep up the good work and see you in world soon;-)

    Ami

  3. I can see Kitely Market helping in a huge way to address what for very many people is the sole reason for avoiding OpenSim grids: the lack of quality content.

    As a merchant myself, I’ve been surprised at how ready people in OpenSim grids are to spending money – in fact, in proportion to the grids’ populations, users of OpenSim worlds seem far more likely to pay for goods than those in SL. I’m actually already selling somewhat more in OpenSim grids than in SL (despite selling at roughly equivalent prices everywhere).

    Combined with Kitely’s low costs, this means that the Kitely Market is an easy and low-cost way for merchants to greatly increase their revenues by expanding outside of SL (like many, I have absolutely no intention of abandoning SL or even reducing my presence there).

    And that’s even before the snowball effect begins. As more merchants list on KM, making OpenSim grids more attractive to potential users, the revenue will increase and attract more merchants … and so on. It’s a very exciting time to be involved in OpenSim and especially in Kitely.

    The upshot of all this is more choice for the consumer, even in the most general ways, and that has to be good news for everyone.

  4. Excellent and well thought out follow up.

    I would add that for Merchants, there are in Kitely now many people who run worlds privately who need content badly.

    The fact that Kitely runs Megaregions of up to 16 regions that do away with border crossing issues, and the fact that their land pricing is in line with trending pricing, allows people such large spaces that need content to fill, of which much of it currently is filled by much of Linda Kellie’s creations, for many.

    As well, the fact that any user can get a free limited use region [which I take advantage of] is pretty cool.

    As well, there is a largely unknown hypergrid market for potential sales. I say largely unknown because they are not able to be counted in any kind of surety for statistical purposes, or, they do not wish to be counted.

    As my own primary interests are with the HG aspects, I see quite a bit of this, though by no means whatsoever, all.

  5. Hi, I’ve done an interview with Ilan Tochner regarding the Kitely Market recently which may be of interest in regards to this topic. You can find it here: http://themissingimage.net/2014/03/29/the-missing-image-018-ilan-tochner-kitely-market-kitely/

  6. I myself will wait for High Fidelity, it will offer the best of both Secondlife & Opensim
    https://highfidelity.io
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxTSbMU_XWw
    while it might be another year before it opens, it will be worth it to me.

    • I think a year is optimistic, but it could happen.

      I thought Blue Mars and Cloud Party would do way better than they did. So, I’m not holding my breath for HyFy.

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