Can Small and Medium sized Landlords have an apology please?

First of all - MOTD = Match of The Day, a very popular and long running football show on the BBC. However in Second Life terms, MOTD = Message of the day, I'm explaining this because I will call it message of the day and I don't care about the extra pixels, Match of The Day is always going to be MOTD to me. Moving on to second base.

Can small and medium sized landlords have an apology please? A month's free tier would be nice but I won't push it, a bloody apology is due. A huge apology, in massive letters saying "we're sorry" will suffice. Let's take a trip back to last summer, when there was a huge issue from small and medium sized landlords about large estates receiving an advertising boost.

Let's just remind ourselves of what happened, this sort of thing appeared on our screens:



Do you remember that? Do you remember thinking that those of us who complained were being whiney, that it wasn't much of a boost? That it didn't really matter?

So let's skip forward to today and Liana's blog post. Linden Lab are now selling advertising on message of the day, let's not forget that when this happened I said I wouldn't have minded if the large estates had paid for that advertising and I wouldn't have minded if I couldn't afford a slot because that's life, that's business, what pissed me off was the free advertising. So how much would an advert like that be worth? USD$100? USD$500? Well let's see.

Pricing is in the trial wiki and can be read here. Message of the day advertising doesn't come cheap, not at all:

All prices in US dollars.

    * 7AM-6:30PM Pacific Time (higher traffic)
          o US$4500
    * 7PM-6:30AM Pacific Time (lower traffic)
          o US$1500

Rates are for a period of about 11.5 hours. Linden Lab reserves 30 minutes at the end of each time block for administrative purposes. The time blocks above roughly correspond to the daily cycle of login activity, which usually peaks around noon Pacific Time and lulls around midnight. Scheduling will be done on a first-come, first-served basis.

    * Examples
          o An ad that runs on Sunday March 14th from 7AM-6:30PM Pacific Time will cost $4500.
          o An ad that starts running on Tuesday March 16th at 7PM Pacific Time and concludes Wednesday March 17th at 6:30AM will cost $1500.

Educational and non-profit organizations that qualify can receive a 50% discount on the prices posted above. To qualify, your organization must be recognized as a non profit or education institution:

    * Government recognition of your institution as that of education
    * Non profits must have documentation accessible via the website, or scanned copies can be emailed to your sales rep.
    * Currently for our US non profits we only accept 501 (c) 3 licenses.

This is why we complained, this is why we said it was ridiculous that large estates got a free boost, just look at those prices. Linden Lab you owe us small and medium sized landlords an apology, this is valuable advertising space, we said this at the time and you brushed us off but now we can see just how damn valuable it is.