Eyecatcher and slapt.me move back to mature land

Eyecatcher, the store owned by Lord Sullivan's partner, Constanza Amsterdam, along with slapt.me, the e-commerce company that Constanza and Lord Sullivan both own have chosen to move their land holdings from Adult rated Zindra, back to mature mainland.

The move, Constanza explained to me, was based purely on business reasons:

"it was a business descision as slapt.me is not really an adult business and as we wanted to be found by more people, we thought it would be better to move back to Mature."

slapt.me, for those who don't know, is an e-commerce site similar to Linden Lab's XstreetSL. Everything has moved back to mature land, the market, the Eyecatcher store and the slapt.me brand. This doesn't surprise me because as Constanza points out, slapt.me is not an adult business, nor is XstreetSL, although both list adult items.

However what of Eyecatcher itself? Fetish clothing, collars, items for use by adults but in reality, this is mature content, use of the content could well be deemed adult but the items themselves are really mature items when being sold. However I asked Constanza about keywords and land descriptions, whether changes had to be made for the return to mature land, Constanza told me:

"for slapt.me we havent changed any keywords as those were not Adult anyway, for Eye-Catcher i have changed keywords, i cant use stripper, bdsm etc, So i left those out."

This is interesting because an issue that has been raised about Zindra and other adult sims is that they flag everything as adult. So if you have a business that isn't adult, you'll be flagged adult and this has been one of the complaints about the move to adult land, that reach is impaired. Take Constanza's first comment I have quoted where she talks of wanting to be found by more people, this is one of the key issues with how Linden Lab have enabled the adult content policy, adult businesses feel that their reach has been impaired, that people can't find them and now we have a business with around a full sim's worth of land moving back to mature land because they want to extend their reach.

I asked Constanza whether she had changed her mind on the meaning of the adult content policy, she replied:

"Yes, in the beginning it was made clear that anyone with an adult business had to move, as we owned bdsm-life ( profile website for bdsm lifestylers with presence in sl) we had to move too. Now after being to all those monday meetings etc... not all businesses had to move and could have just stayed were they were with an adjustment in search keywords."

I can't disagree with Constanza's assessment, those Monday meetings are held between Zindra business holders and Blondin, time and again people have raised the issue that they can't be found and others who sell beds have stated that they thought they had to move, whereas LL have always hinted that beds were ok on mature. They just need to change their keywords but how does this assist with the so called predictable experience Linden Lab were after? Well it doesn't really, but plenty of us told Linden Lab this from the get go, we told them they were missing the point. They didn't want to listen.

I would expect other business owners to take the decision to move back to mature land, it makes perfect business sense to be in a place where you will be found. The few businesses who need to stay on adult land will have to work out how best to make that work. They need to lobby Linden Lab for better visibility. For the well organised business owners this won't be a huge problem, although it is a problem but for the small guy, adult land really isn't the place to be as it stands.

The fear has to be that Zindra will be awash with the sort of activites that the press love to make a fuss over, this was always the fear, that Zindra would be the ghetto. Now with business owners who would have diluted the extremities giving up because the reach simply isn't there, the ghetto may well become reality.

Constanza also told me that the slapt.me website is going to undertake some design changes and that some new vendors are on their way, so it seems that their business is moving along quite well.

If you want to visit the new Eyecatcher store and take a look at the markeptlace outside that is on slapt.me land then the SLURL is here:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Bastet/119/127/27