“Prok -

I’m slightly confused as to where we disagree, other than perhaps your interpretation that I subscribe to Maslow. I quite clearly said in my post that I have issues with Maslow’s hierarchy.

But never mind that. Because basically much of your assessment is in line with my own. In my post I propose that successful business models in SL evolve, often from a grounding in an object economy, and then moving into the domains of management systems (vendors, land rental systems), environments (themed sims and events), branding (”Caledon” as a brand), and finally the extrapolation of content into other media (blogs, youTube machinima, etc).

What you describe reinforces my belief that it’s not sufficient to be in the “Victorian Chair” business - you need to evolve past that into environments, community, branding etc.

I also fairly clearly made the point that land is a key driver of the SL economy because it provides a counterpoint to the lack of scarcity for virtual goods - because land is not infinite, and yet virtual goods CAN be infinite, you end up with a dynamic coupling of one thing which is scarce, and one thing which is less so.

I also make the point that even if virtual objects are NOT scarce, you still benefit through the use of distribution and management tools, environments, and branding.

So, I’m not sure I see the disagreement, other than I used that damned pyramid when I could have used concentric circles or something.

Where I strongly disagree, however, is in the comment you made on my blog about “attention”. There’s a lot of mindless clap trap out there by the pseudo-marketers about “attention” and I hate to advance their cause. They’re trying to disguise business models that don’t have any foundation and using the “attention” argument inadvertently supports what I believe Rezzable was after, or was the main basis of their “business model”.

You commented:

“Attention is the greatest scarcity there is in a virtual world and online in general. In real life, attention to organic needs are more basic and there are more duties calling — indeed these are all the things that pull you “AFK” away from the online world.”

You also said that I made the mistake of tekkie literalists.

Give me a break. There’s nothing tekkie literalist about it - I’m an ad man, if you will, and like any ad man, I’d look at a world with more blue jeans than we know what to do with and I’d propose that you either put them in a nicer store, create a brand around them that’s worth more than the literal product, or find distribution channels that no one else is tapping. What’s so tekkie about that exactly?

In any case, the error in talking about “attention” as a driving factor in how we think about business models is that it subscribes to the drivel out there about an “attention economy”. Frankly, it’s a load of crap. It’s the same thing as “aggregating eyeballs” just with different window dressing.

I mean really - what’s advertising? Or selling products? You can’t just MAKE the thing, you need to get someone to buy it. And sales and marketing is fairly simple and it goes like this:

Look at me!
Aren’t I pretty!
Buy me!

Now, I subscribe to getting people’s attention, but only within the “Dusan’s Master Paradigm for Success” - yes, you need to get people attention, but it needs to then communicate a positive value, and it needs to end in a transaction.

All this noise about an attention economy is focused on the fact that it’s harder and harder to get people to look at you. And so entire businesses are being built around the erroneous idea that what you REALLY need to solve is the “look at me” conundrum and somehow the “aren’t I pretty/buy me” stuff will take care of itself.

And isn’t that really what Rezzable tried to do? They tried to get your attention. They tried to look real pretty once they had it. But they forgot about the “buy me” thing, except in a half-hearted way…somehow, they had this idea if they could crack the first two parts, the ‘buy me’ part would follow.

Sounds a lot like Twitter. Or youTube. Or Facebook.

They all figure they can continue to generate lots of attention in this attention economy you’re talking about. And yeah, maybe they’ll be able to tack a business model on to the back end of it, but none of them were built with an actual, well, PLAN for how that would happen, and so the success in the “buy me” part of the equation isn’t guaranteed.

Maybe Rezzable had a plan. Something like “look at me, aren’t I pretty, now someone ELSE buy me (or fund me) and figure out how we could have made money at this.”

So bottom line, I just don’t subscribe to this “attention economy” meme - I subscribe to the idea of getting people’s attention towards the goal of eliciting a transaction of some kind, and in my old school world, that’s called advertising.

Everything else is just an excuse for people to spend lots of money trying to get your attention, with the faint hope that once they have it they’ll be able to convert that into something more meaningful than your time.

Now, I believe I built this idea of attention into the constraining and enabling factors for SL business. Without better social tools, with audience limitations (sim limits), and with lack of access to channels (other than a select few, such as MOTD), there is a constraint on your ability to reach people and to get their attention.

The rest of the attention is built into the model itself - the tools for managing stuff, the environments for keeping people somewhere, and the brands for making sure your message is louder than the next guy. But again, none of it works unless you have some land to sell or some things to sell at the end of that long process, otherwise you’re Black Swan with a tip jar.

Having said all that, I think this is an interesting discussion, because it strikes me that you propose something that’s very much at the heart of SL - it takes careful craft….it’s an artisan economy, and yet we’re seeing a subtle shift towards mass market tools, and I wonder what that will mean in the long run, and how far the Lab plans to take us as they march in that direction.

The “Belonging” part doesn’t really belong as a middle goal with “self” at the top for many people. Belong is more important than self in many, many cases, especially for people in situations like — being a teenager, being a partner in a relationship, being a worker in a company, etc. etc. which they encounter throughout life or daily.

This very incomplete “hierarchy of needs” just does not explain everything there is to explain about human beings, nor does it even explain the priorities of every secular humanist who might find some justification for invoking it. As such, it dumbs down thought by trying to get people to shoe-horn themselves into some really inadequate template.

Hamlet nee Linden Au is fascinated with this template because for him, it’s comforting and he likes it as a theory. It passes for deep intellectual thought for him, and he thinks it’s thrilling that a nightclub owner (Jenna Fairplay) could invoke it in a virtual world. He returns to this big “journalistic find” again and again as he thinks it’s a fabulous insight. But it’s just…tedious. Hamlet’s thinking never seems to have gotten much past a few books he has read in college, if that.

As for everything else you’re writing about the virtual economy, you’re making the classic mistake that every tekkie seems to make in looking at this too literally, and in obsessing too much about the fact that prims replicate easily and freely.

And that is: attention.

Attention is the greatest scarcity there is in a virtual world and online in general. In real life, attention to organic needs are more basic and there are more duties calling — indeed these are all the things that pull you “AFK” away from the online world.

But online, attention is scarce. I might have a limitless ability to keep putting on new outfits, but nobody but me might see them. There are only so many friends with so many attention spans who can see them. Same for cars or houses or any accessories — and the same for trying to advertise them, or trying to do anything, profit or non-profit or educational or entertaining in SL — attention.

People sift through a huge amount of stuff and make conscious or random or accidental choices and the economy lives or dies on this.