'Mini hubs'

This first of 'Mini hubs' has been set up to test the concept. The Silk market will only sell Silks and camisks.
The advantages.

• Almost no lag and fast loading of textures.
• All products are easily found without missing a single one.
• Easy and quick access to main stores from easily found map teleporters.
• A merchant grouping when large enough should become a first port of call for anyone shopping for a specific product.

The Idea of grouping merchants has of course been tried before. I first realised the advantages two years ago. Unfortunately all previous attempts have either not been able to isolate a single group well enough and resorted to filling the market with just anything to make up the numbers or were part of a larger market so were lost in bad directional signage or lagged to oblivion.. I've come to believe the whole idea of a huge successful market is flawed by the simple fact that you can never have the volume of 'general' traffic on the same sim as 'general' merchandise. IE .. you need to get 50 avatars to find one person who wants to buy a eg,. a collar. Better as in mainstores to direct the right person to the thing they actually want to buy.

I have the volume of people coming to the hub already ( and traffic despite the lag is still rising ) so the challenge is simply to get people to the right market. To do this I'll make 20m wide showcase boothes right next to the Hub landing to advertise the various markets with a tp to them. I hope to include actual examples or in the case of the silk market 'models'. maybe who hand out notecards or LM's. With the huge prim saving and script reduction at the hub we can create far more interesting promotions .. 'roon sets' etc for furniture.

With the lag hurting sales in the market I'm moving this forward as fast as I can. This would not of course be remotely possible without the huge support of Hub Merchant group which is what makes the hub possible at all. I can sometimes hear the groans as I post another change but I hope everyone looks back and sees that together we've all come a very long way from where we started. I tried focused markets before over a year ago but couldn't get the numbers. I got 7 silk vendors after a week.. This time I got 19 in 4 hours. Good ideas have their time I guess and having them to early never works. When I first tried advertising I got blank looks 'advertising ? you mean ..make a graphic ?... to advertise our sim ?....oh "

it'll never catch on.......