Demystifying Kitely in 2016!! (UPDATED) - busting some common misconceptions.....

Kitelys pricing structure is confusing.

2016 - Kitelys price model has been greatly simplified in recent years and now a starter world is just 14.95! A Standard world is 19.95 and a full, 16 region world is just 39.95! The whole "time based" concept has been withdrawn.

You can also find very inexpensive rentals at my new Worlds End Estates sim. Parcels start from just 1USD per month for 1000 prims! The area is beautifully landscaped and a great place for users to start out or have a small home.

Worlds End Estates - Oakwoods

Kitely is empty.

Kitelys decentralized model can certainly make it seem like there is nobody around. Possibly my biggest criticism of Kitely is its lack of sense of "place". It would be nice to see the welcome center expanded to a 4 or 9 region mega with welcome area, shops and maybe a few residentials. A small mainland, if you will. It would also make sense that this was the main hypergrid portal once that is switched on.

There is no denying we are a small community right now, mostly consisting of builders. As anyone who has ever attempted to fill even just a single region with compelling content will know, its not a quick or easy job. I predicted last year that 2014 would be the year Kitely users come out of their cocoons and though it is still early days we are starting to see signs of the social element coming together. Residential sims are starting to open and the April Hunt is in full swing. However, there is no denying Kitely is a builders paradise right now which brings me to my next point. Why should you bother coming at all?

2016 - Kitely is feeling a lot less desolate these days. With plenty of events and meetups going on each week. If your lost. Join the inworld group Kitely Community and you will likely find someone to help you or to chat with. Might even be me :).

Why should I come to Kitely (as a Merchant)

Kitely has a small market now and a small userbase. However, its marketplace is configured so that you can sell to any avatar on any opensim grid (if you want to). Not only this, but as the marketplace is fairly new, it is easy to get in and establish your brand right from the early stages. How many of us wish we were there right at the beginning of SL? All those businesses with thousands of great reviews of their crappy 10,000 prim tea-pot. How I envy them. They still do well because they were there first. They have a higher prestige because of that.

Bringing your brand not only gives you the oportunity to embed yourself as an established hypergrid merchant, the act of more creators setting up naturally brings more interest and therefore more customers. Second Life is saturated and the market is flat and/or contracting. Kitely is much smaller but the market is wide open and growing. If nothing else, Kitely market can be seen as a minimum investment platform for your business growth strategy.  Fact is you never know where it might lead you.

The Kitely Market itself is impressive, much less painful to work with than its SL counterpart and has some pretty nifty features. A lot of merchants are scared that they can only sell “Export” items. That is, items without perm limitations. The truth is that you as creator are in TOTAL control. Perms work as normal, but Kitely market also has a 4^th perm – Export. Check this box as you create your listing to allow export….or not. Your choice.

2016 - All above is still true. I have switched to export only and my sales still continue to grow more than two years after this article was first published.

Why should I come to Kitely as a “resident”?

This is a harder question to answer, as generally every resident has widely varying agenda and expectations. Generally speaking, Kitely has a lot to offer. From Entertainment venues to educational areas. Cheap land means you will never be short of a home, and recently the first residential and roleplay projects (my own included) are starting to spring up. I can only speak for myself here but the next phase has to be finding some people who share the vision of what I am doing to take it forward. Any disgruntled fantasy/medieval roleplayers should head over to The Township of Llanfarian to see what I am cooking up there.

The Marketplace is a source of quality content that is growing at a steady click (EDIT 2016 - Nearly 6500 individual listings, not counting the myriad of variations). I am confident some of the best premium content in OS can be found there. 

If you are the kind of person who likes getting in on the ground level, helping out and building something cool….I would say Kitely is at the right phase for you now. If you are a “social butterfly” who wants a great avi, great venues and great social scene with minimal effort on your part……well sorry. We are not quite there yet. Some people what to be part of whats going on now, some want to be part of the future.

Plenty to get involved with

My creations are not safe in Opensim/on Kitely

Well....yes and no. As a point of fact, your creations are only safe when you do not upload them to any service. Once you put it out there, people can and will steal it from you. People like to point the finger at Opensim and say how everything there is stolen. Seemingly missing the point: Where did all that content come from in the first place? Exactly. "Fortress" SL.

Of course, lets also not kid ourselves that everyone in SL is running around fully paid up. Wherever you have commerce, you also have counterfitting. So, we have established that your pretties are not safe in SL and that those pretties often get exported to opensim. Glad your with me so far. 

This is the part where a lot of creators hit a cognitive wall. So if your stuff is getting stolen anyway, can it be reasonably assumed that if the opportunity was available, at least a percentage of those people would pay up for legitimate content if it was available? I think so, and the balance of my store seems to back that assertion up. That is money I would not have made otherwise.

Of course to some, the time invested will not be worth the income received. I certainly am not in this primarily for the money. I like to build and being able to sell my work is a happy bonus. Many people feel cooped up in SL and I can honestly say that recently I was in SL looking for shop space again and the whole deal with parcels and primcounts just made me give up. Many of us "creators" are artists first and business people second.  To truly see the benefit of moving to Kitely, you have to look at the creative possibilities as well as the financial aspects. But to come back to point, if you build it "they" will steal it, so why not maximize your earnings by reaching as many honest people as possible?

Before Kitely Marketplace this was not possible. Now it is.

Small grid owners are fly-by-night ....or wackos .....or technically inept. Or ALL THREE!

Plenty of small Opensim Grids come and go, but Kitely is different. Both Ilan and Oren are experts in their fields. They are responsive, attentive and open for new ideas. They have a clear vision (a BIG one) of where they want to go and a plan to achieve it. They have always been as good as their word.

2016 - Kitely has hypergrid. Told you so :P lol

Just getting the Hypergrid market off the boards is a remarkable achievement and should speak volumes to how serious these chaps are about what they do. 

Well, that's about it. Hopefully this post will be useful to point a few people at the next time you run into these kind of questions. 

Do you think I missed something? Is there some other question you always get that breaks a little piece of your sanity every time you hear it? Or perhaps you have another take on an issue? Feel free to comment :)