Archive for September, 2009

Can you stand it? Digital Dish is now offering you yet another way to advertise your catalog or IMVU related website thus potentially sending you well targeted traffic. Best part? You can use your 20×20 sized widget badge that you already work so hard to market. Let us help market you too!

You have two purchase options. For an introductory rate of 10,000 credits (that’s 50% off!) you can purchase a gold, lifetime 20×20 slot. Or, you can rent a silver 20×20 slot for 1,000 credits per month. It doesn’t get any better than that!

The ad space can be found towards the bottom of the website and is apart of the footer, so it’s included on every page! Be truly apart of the website and leave your mark. Be one of the first to reserve your place to take advantage of the low, introductory price. It won’t last long!

If interested in this type of advertising, please please send an e-mail to me at IMVUDigitalDish@gmail.com with the following information:

Name:
Email:
Link:
Text Upon Scroll Over:
Badge (Either URL or attachment):
Length of Ad (Lifetime, Monthly?):
Total Cost:

The regular 180×180 side bar banner ads are still available. Check out the advertisement page for more information.

It’s been a while since I’ve discussed client updates with you. It’s mostly been a bunch of bug fixes and programmer jabber not really worth discussing. But version 422.0 came out yesterday (as did 422.2 which was disabled and now 422.4 to fix some more bugs) and it looks promising.

So what’s new!? Some nifty stuff to make life easier for you while using the 2.0 client. Let’s go through point by point shall we?

New Wishlist Feature

Now you can wishlist products as well as view your wishlist within the client. Unfortunately, it’s a little confusing. In order to view you wishlist, you must be in “shop mode” by having the shopping tab open as shown in the image below.

To add something to your wishlist, you merely click on the silver star under any product you’d like to add as circled in red in the below picture.

Due to performance issues, IMVU has capped the wishlist within the client to 500 items. However, you can add more than 500 and view your entire list via the website.

To make it easier, IMVU has also added a Sign Out link at the upper right-hand corner to the client (was that not there before? I never really noticed). See picture below.

Save Outfit Button

Finally. I’m happy to announce that a Save Outfit button has been added! No more typing *saveOutfit and struggling to type and time your avatar. Now there is a button within the “Dress Up”  and “My Room” tab. DOCers rejoice! Check out the image below.

And finally… collapse the top bar!

You can now do this by pressing F11 thus giving you more space to ake your awesome pictures! To make it come back, press F11 again.

And that’s pretty much it folks. Yay?

Today, an email went out to those registered at IMVUSale.com to the tune of this…

Our apologies, as much as we are working on sales we still have over 70 million credits stacked up, even higher than last month.

Imvu’s printing too much money again, giving away free credits for quizzes, contests and running sales with lower prices than us resellers do. Yet they still fail to shut down at least 12 fraud websites that are currently SELLING stolen credits at 30-38 per 100k. We really can’t do much about it until they stop this none-sense. Buying price is lowered to $39 per 100k, hope you understand the difficulty we are facing, hopefully the holiday season will bring some light.

Resellers are teaming up on protesting imvu’s recent financial decisions already, it should take some effect.

Sadly, I fear that a lot of resellers will soon face the same problems. Actually, my own credit partner DevCredits.com has already felt some pinching in the last six months or so as we frantically try to sell credits to whomever we possible can so that Tidy can continue to purchase credits from us at the rate of $46/100k. It’s been hard.

IMVU has been really pushing sales on their credits thus undercutting the resellers with ease. After all, IMVU can produce all the credits they want and sell them at whatever price they choose. And the more they do this, the less developers are paid. Need I direct you back to my post about the decline of IMVU and potential earnings?

I don’t need to say much more than what the email from IMVUSale has covered. Sad, sad day for developers.

As promised in my post about some big names leaving IMVU Moderating, here is the list of community members resigning their post as forum mods today.

• Kaffe
• MinhyrdinWindrose
• Badboy
• Ewe
• Mandie
• Shauncy
• Shira

Why are these people stepping down? I don’t exactly know and the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) prevents them and even me from discussing their reasonings. But you can wager that if that many people are leaving all on the same day, it’s not coincidence. Probably a group of people simply fed up over… whatever it is that’s going on.

Imagine how scary the Off Topic forums will be now. Yikes.

This information was given to me by a member of the community. It may or may not be 100% accurate. If it isn’t, my sincerest apologies. But since it was given to me by a reputable and long-standing member of the community, I can consciously accept it as truth.

Let’s discuss the future of IMVU… shall we? I know so many of you are eager for a place where you can discuss this topic and say what you really feel without moderators looming over you and cleaning up behind you. So here is your chance to use my personal space as your own.

As a pro developer who uses IMVU as a major source of income, it’s only natural that I hope and pray that IMVU as a company succeeds in the way I believe it should – meaning IMVU makes money as well as provides me with the tools and opportunities required for me to continue profiting from my work. Unfortunately, the last year has shown me a steady decline.

I’ve made a lot of excuses for this – the economy, the summer slowdown, more developers and competition, my lack of desire to create, file sales, etc. I’m sure any one of these and mostly likely a combination is to blame. That said, I just don’t think these things alone are enough to cause the horrendous decline in sales that I have experienced.

Sure, I’m willing to admit that I haven’t worked as hard and a lot of people view me in a different light now because of this website. I get it. But it’s not really even about me – it’s about all of us. How many of you are experiencing a decline so great that you wonder if it’s time to move on… pack your e-bags and take your talent elsewhere? Some days, I feel that way and I’m noticing that more and more IMVUers are migrating to other virtual worlds [not just Second Life although that is the major one].

How much money are we all really making these days? Whoever thinks pro developers are “rich” is sadly mistaken. Remember those days when earning 60-100k in a 24 hour span was a good day? Okay I realize not all of you reading this have experienced that – especially if you’re fairly new to our community. But believe me… some of us used to make that kind of money. I’m sure some still do, but there isn’t a developer that I know personally that is making that kind of money any more – sadly myself included.

IMVU is slowly turning into a monopoly of sorts. The big name brands are taking over and IMVU is quickly taking larger slices of the pie. All of the “sales” they are running for their credits and outright knocking the value of our credits lower with each campaign they run – it’s killing the developing community. Sure, it’s good for the buyers but think about how much you make from a product on average. We’ll say 150 credit profit. In order to make just $5 you would have to make about 10,870 credits (or about 72 sales). That’s a lot of sales to make a measly 5 bucks. But we pro developers used to get that – easy. We used to easily make upwards of 100k or more in a day meaning making $40-$50 for a days work on IMVU was likely.

That used to be $16,426 give or take per year! That’s a full time job getting paid more than the minimum wage in America. Not bad for a job you can do in your favorite pajamas while sipping coffee.

Except now we’re making more like 15-20k per day. That’s what I’m making and while I’m ashamed to say it, I think it’s only right that I be honest. I know a lot of you are making that too because we’ve discussed it. So we’re making more like $10 per day maximum. And now? We’re talking more in the ball park of $3,650 per year. That’s grossly disturbing to me. That means we’re making only about 4.5% of what we were making a year ago. Yes.. can you believe it? That much change in just a year!

Who is IMVU fooling? They suggest sales are up “across the board”… but for who!? More developers of course equals more money to IMVU in the long run, but if everyone were really making more sales, we’d all see an incline in profit and we’re not.

Do these numbers scare you? They should. They scare the hell out of me. They aren’t exact numbers but the ballpark figures are very much real. How do yours compare? I hope you all are doing a hell of a lot better than I am. In order to put food on the table, I have no choice but to continue to sell files thus sadly contributing to apart of the problem. I sell ad space here to help pay for my hosting space. I make a buck where I can. It’s the only way to survive on an IMVU income.

What are your thoughts?

• How much are you making these days? (you don’t need to give a precise answer… I realize that information is very private for some).
• Have you seen a decrease in sales and profit in the last year?
• How much of a decrease have you seen?
• Are you seeking out other online opportunities such as Second Life or another virtual world?
• Has your decline in sales meant that you needed to acquire a job outside of our community?

I’d love for you all to take time to discuss this. I will be moderating comments as usual but I will not edit nor delete your commentary unless I find it to be overly vulgar or potentially harmful to yourself or my website. While I believe heavily in free speech and that this is my website and we can pretty much do whatever we want – I cannot guarantee the safety of your account. IMVU has rights too. So please use caution.