Lina's posts

Posted in Would you join a new classic Avatar Website? Posted 1 year ago

I would love to join a new one.
I'm not sure they're popular with young people these days though. I think a lot of the audience is older now. I'm not sure if that means they need to change styles to fit a younger audience, or instead lean into the older theme.

I logged onto gaia to see if any old friends are still there, and noticed they have a lot of ads. And at first I was annoyed, but they haven't closed yet.. So I feel like if having ads helps a site stay open, I wouldn't mind them. If they had other ways to get revenue to stay open (aside from selling items) like video ads or whatever for site currency that would be good to help them hopefully stay alive and help get users who can't spend money on the site to make real money currency still. Stuff like that I think is good to engage younger people who don't have spending money.

I do think the style of the website has some affect on how popular it is. The good ones have a lot of lore/world building with npcs and a general theme. And I feel like some themes are more successful than others. Like Ernya was sort of soft/cute fantasy and did really well until the ownership fell apart. Syndrone was dark and cyber punk kinda themed, and again was really successful until ownership fell apart. Where as, Caedon was more futuristic/steampunk themed and kinda fizzled out over time. It needs to have a general theme that attracts people without narrowing the items down too much.

Having a solid set of item colors is pretty important too. Gaia is endlessly annoying because every item just makes up a new color or shade, so nothing really matches. And it's so frustrating! So a specific set of palettes for the artists is super important.

There was also at once point 3 sister sites that were technically all different owners and everything, but they agreed to promote each other and had a few events that crossed together. (I think they decided they were alternate realities of each other) as a way to get members onto all the sites. I really liked that because often avatar people are on multiple sites. I think overall it helps more than it hurts, even through you might have some people divide their budget between sites.

If anyone is actually considering starting an avatar forum, please make sure you write up legal documents!! For the owners and any staff, even volunteers. There are too many instances of the owners starting as friends and things fall apart and the site goes under. Put it in writing!! Also, if anyone is planning to start one and has more specific questions, I was staff here, Caedon, Syndrone and briefly at Virtual Popstar.. and I might be able to answer some things. (not coding tho) Best of luck!

Posted in My Little Hangout (Open) Posted 1 year ago

FUZZY:
@Lina: awe thank you, I love this color a lot.

Bubblegum is one of my favorites on here. But honestly, it's a great collection of colors in general. There's a part of me that wants like 200 colors, but It's lot easier to have commons and design items with just a solid color set. And I don't feel like we're missing anything, so I think they did really well.