Kitely Mentors Group Meeting, 24 April 2013: summary

[Dot Macchi]

Two regions, 100,000 prims, 30 hours, $5 a month...

Or...

Two 100,000 prim regions
30 hours
$5 a month

Strictly, they won't be able to combine the regions for $5 a month, so I think we're safe.

no upload fees only would apply to sl users...

You mean us OpenSim types will have to pay upload fees?

Graham -- good choice of themes; they cover most builds. But what sort of Rift where you thinking of? Those built by drama queens?

[Constance Peregrine]

bada ding!!!

[Constance Peregrine]

no upload fees only would apply to sl users...

You mean us OpenSim types will have to pay upload fees?

no, i meant the other way, but then, i think you know that...lol

To clarify for others who may not tho, only sl charges for upload fees, no other grid that i know of does [and i know quite a few...lol] [to many] [to many to even go to anymore] [waste of time][nods]

[Graham Mills]

Graham -- good choice of themes; they cover most builds. But what sort of Rift where you thinking of? Those built by drama queens?

I appreciate that at least one well-known SL blogger believes "drama" to be an essential component of any virtual world but I was (sadly?) thinking of the Oculus Rift. For some quite unfathomable reason I want to try out one of these gizmos in OpenSim. I suspect I need counselling...

[Bladyblue Bommerang]

Creating the banner is half the battle. having it point to something that makes sense to people is a necessity also. People that could be an asset to this community still cannot figure out how to get in here:

Sunbeam Magic: I believe I made a account on Kitely a while back (urged on by Miney lol) but couldn't understand the fees or how to calculate them.... with that said I can still come in Kitely and just explore I hope and will visit soon! I hope Singularity will work *smiles*

http://gridgod.com/group/certified-grid ... m_gr_forum

___________________________________________
This conversation about future advertising campaigns can continue AFTER the initial banner ad campaign and website corrections we agreed to is launched immediately. This unending back-and-forth is just another reason not to launch an ad campaign in our lifetime.

I signed up in June of 2012. I couldn't figure out the website until January 2013. I l know Ilan says that a high percentage of people that come to the website join - but I have had different feedback. I have never had a friend join without having to spend at least 40 minutes walking them through getting started. I stopped telling people to join because its too time-consuming.

I know this won't happen, but creating a "getting started" portal for residents and a separate "getting started" portal for new merchants would solve many issues and increase the amount of premium accounts created.

But I do hope that someday someone comes up with a real solution to this 2-year-old issue. I would like to start bringing people into Kitely again but without spending my whole night deciphering the website for them.

________________________

I said this all in January when I finally got in (because there was no ability to find anyone to ask for help last year when I tried to get in). I was told that the website is PhP and cannot be changed (that's odd).

In February I said just point it to a blog posting explaining how to get in., I was told that it would confuse people.

In March I said just make a HTML website with a start portal that the banner ads would point to. I was told that Kitely had no one to make such a website.

And now it is May and we still sit here spinning our wheels talking about issues that were ignored and not resolved 10 months ago.

And still no one is re-writing the pages that the banner ads will point to. I have never seen a company that keeps creating reasons not to advertise for three years. I ran a banner ad campaign for my worlds several months ago. There is no valid excuse as to why Kitely will not advertise.


I do not know photoshop (I use publisher), I had no idea how to make the banner the right size (the owner of SLU did that for me) and I managed to launch a banner ad campaign a month after I arrived here.

A banner ad running 90 days on SLU costs $35 USD. That's just one Gold account payment from one customer.
http://www.sluniverse.com/advertising/


Summer is dead season for virtual worlds. Any marketing campaign should have been up-and-running at the beginning of April to get anything out of the summer months. Now we will be dead all summer while the concentration is on helping merchants get into their marketplace accounts (because recruiting merchants benefits Kitely financially).

Not everything is about creating direct income for the owners of Kitely. Some of us are not here selling merchandise or just decorating out computer screens for fun while paying tier. Some of us run virtual business' that create real life incomes for us based on Crowd Sourcing in a virtual world with community traffic. Kitely being devised as a place for separate, walled worlds to co-exist without having any contact with one-another does not allow for crowd-sourcing business' to flourish. And I know Kitely does not really care about that (actions speak louder than words).

This VR is based on virtual currency sales and collecting fees from merchants making sales here. But I hope in Kitely's future, they see a reason to support the social business structure and show concern for the needs of that demographic also.

I took my time to fly around and collect images for Kitely banners, I created banners and turned them over to Kitely months ago, I suggested alternative solutions to the confusing webpage months ago and I gathered all of the banner ad information for SLUniverse in February. Nothing I do matters - there always seems to be a reason why there is no banner ad campaign pointing to a website that makes sense.
______________________

OK, I got that out of my system so I won't waste anymore of my time in this thread talking about banner ads and websites while absolutely nothing happens for me and my social circle.
/end

[Dot Macchi]

Blady, Ilan has said in this thread that what the banner ads point to is going to be discussed once the focus of the ads is sorted. See http://forums.kitely.com/viewtopic.php?p=1900#p1900

I suggest we try to create one-liner ad concepts and then turn to discussing the landing pages once we have those one liners done.

Step by step...

[Bladyblue Bommerang]

Blady, Ilan has said in this thread that what the banner ads point to is going to be discussed once the focus of the ads is sorted. See http://forums.kitely.com/viewtopic.php?p=1900#p1900

I suggest we try to create one-liner ad concepts and then turn to discussing the landing pages once we have those one liners done.

Step by step...

It doesn't take January, February, March, April and May to make a one-line banner that will cost $35 USD to run.

Some of you are here for artistic purposes and advertising is not essential to what you are doing in Kitely. I'm not asking for anything I am not willing to work for. I spent two months and 20-hour days on the Plaza and I even re-designed the start page on March 15th and sent it to Ilan as he requested.


I was then told that my revisions were unacceptable because they would not fit on the page properly.


I just want something besides "wait until we make a profit from the marketplace" for all of my effort and time. I am not going to make a profit from the marketplace so I do not care about the marketplace. But I created a mall around the social Hub because I knew that merchants were important to Kitely Management. I wasn't just focused on what I wanted.

I care about:
-Creating a portal for new players to come to (done - the Plaza)
-Creating a Volunteer Initiative that will be a resource for new players (finally got the green light this week to make this happen)
-Crowd source the residents using the Plaza as a social hub (won't happen until volunteer initiative is in place and advertising is in place with a understandable website entry portal)

I realize that I have just been given a lot of 'busy work' tasks and excuses to make me go away while Kitely works on getting merchants into the mall we built (because merchants are important to them). And I am really just mad at myself for being so gullible for so long.

I'm just throwing a temper tantrum now because I was just informed that the team that was to build my RP HUD FOR FREE will not be doing that now because things aren't where I promised they would be by this time here. They can see that the only focus is on the profit from the marketplace and no community development has begun at all. So now I have to fund the hundreds of dollars it is going to take to get my HUD designed and maintained.

I won't interfere in your discussion again.

[ShowStopper Eclipse]

PHP can be edited easily (as long as the web designer knows the language anyway). Who's in charge of the website? Is there only one person running all of Kitely or is there a staff where each person has different duties? I know how hard it can be sometimes to be one of a few (or the only one) in charge of a complex project.

[Bladyblue Bommerang]

PHP can be edited easily (as long as the web designer knows the language anyway).

The person that designed it said they did no have the time to edit it.

I know how hard it can be sometimes to be one of a few (or the only one) in charge of a complex project.

That is why I spent the last 4 months of ALL of my free time volunteering to reach these goals.

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Blady,

I understand you're upset but please don't misquote me in an attempt to make a point.

Kitley uses GWT for its website not PHP (though PHP is used for these forums). GWT is a Google framework for creating web applications. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit

As our website is actually a Java-compiled JavaScript web application, I told you that just giving me an HTML page wouldn't be something we can use to replace our homepage without effort. I later told you that we can use a landing page written in HTML and have it redirect to our web application (the Kitely website as you know it). I told you that designing such a landing page would require us to delay the marketplace which is something which many people are waiting for and for which we were already behind schedule. I told you that our conversion rates from the homepage are also very high (which they are) and that we are therefore not eager to replace the homepage itself unless we have something we are sure is better.

We have limited development resources and can't do everything at once, that's why we try to crowdsource things to you, our users. I therefore told you that if you want you can create such a landing page yourself and that if it's good enough we'll use it. You didn't come up with something we could use (see below) and we started discussing this issue in the last Kitely Mentors Group meeting and are continuing to do so now in this thread.

You have your priorities but other Kitely users have theirs, I have personally spent a lot of my time working with you on things that were important to you at the expense of working on things that are important to other people (all of them being important to our success). It's not that we don't want people to be able to create a community in Kitely. Quite the opposite actually, as people who've attended the weekly Kitely Mentors Group meetings over the last year can attest. We do however have to prioritize what we focus on at any given point in time. We can't make everything important to our success a priority, working on one thing delays another. We have to balance multiple people's needs and focus on what we believe will have the most impact first. Obviously that is not optimal but it is what we'll have to contend with until we have more resources.

I haven't been giving you busy work, I've been working with you on things that you said you'll organize. In fact, just last week I spent many hours with you discussing a greeter program. You worked very hard to organize the building of the Kitely Plaza and deserve a lot of credit for. However, you seem to be ignoring the amount of time I've put into the Plaza as well. It isn't that I sent you to do something to keep you quite, I've been working with you and other people on the same project as well. I needed to not work on other things at that time in order to be able do so.

It's true we didn't stop everything else we are doing to address the unresolved issues that you wished us to work on. This isn't because we don't think the issues you've raised are not important, it is because there are many other things which we think are also urgent for us to work on. Focusing on things that can increase the amount of money we make can help us have more resources to quickly address other issues. This isn't putting our interests above those of our customer's, it's in everyone of our customer's interest that we have more resources to use to make Kitely better.

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The mockup you sent me for the homepage redesign was (A) too crowded and presented too many payment options at once therefore increasing confusion (what we have now is already confusing enough due to the amount of options it presents), (B) would have required using very small fonts for it all to be displayed as you laid it out (important things have to be above the fold and need to be prominently displayed), and (C) was focused on one selling point, the ability to get 20 regions for $35/month (and as you can see from this thread, this isn't the ideal pitch for everyone).