What's up with IMVU Shoutouts?

The other day, I noticed ChattyNatty, AKA Marcus at IMVU, was running a shoutout on all the IMVU web pages. I waited and waited and checked other pages on the site, it was like the all ChattyNatty shoutout channel all the time. This kind of well, freaked me out because I pay money for shoutouts every day and now here his shoutouts were taking over everything. I didn't know if it was a mistake or temporary or what was going on.

Supposedly, you can't really complain about the shoutouts on the website itself, because I've been told that what we are paying for isn't shoutouts on the website at all, it is only shoutouts in the IMVU client. So, any time your shoutout runs on the website, it's like you're getting an extra free bonus. But of course, the fact is more like we ALWAYS get our shoutouts there, and this is something people usually take into account when deciding if it is worth their time, credits and Developer Tokens to run a shoutout, and if IMVU isn't going to run them for us on the website, they should let us know ahead of time since it may affect our decision to buy them.

I signed into the IMVU chat client and checked the shoutouts there. They seemed to be running normally with no ChattyNatty shoutouts in sight, so I wasn't quite so concerned but I still didn't know if this was a new thing IMVU was doing where shoutouts bought by members would only show up in the client or what was going on. The next day, I saw that we had the normal variety of shoutouts on the IMVU website, so I guess it was either a glitch or a temporary thing.

It bothers me that I don't know which it was. Shoutouts in general bother me. Let me tell you why...

First let's look at what it says on the Shoutout purchase page:

Messages are priced by the broadcast. For each broadcast you buy, your message will be be shown to approximately 3000 users - buy 10 broadcasts and your message will shown to about 30,000 users! Each broadcast costs 500 credits.

You can select a duration that your shoutout will run. Duration does not affect the total number of people that see your message. For example, buying 10 broadcasts for 10 days will show your message to the same number of people as buying 1 broadcast each day for 10 days. There is a convenience surcharge for specifying durations longer than one day.

Oh really? So, supposedly my message will be seen by 30,000 users if I buy 10 broadcasts? Will IMVU keep track of whether an individual user has seen it yet? What if it starts scrolling by on the screen of someone who is AFK? Is it possible that it could scroll across someone's screen 100 times and they aren't even there? Or will that possibility be minimized because it's actually 100 different (or 30,000 different people) who are seeing it? How do we really know 30,000 users are seeing it anyway? I would think that if that were true, then sometimes there would be no shoutouts running because not enough were purchased for the number of eyeballs out there, OR sometimes you simply wouldn't be able to buy a shoutout because there would be too many shoutouts and not enough members/users running the program at the time.

Seriously, we need some kind of statistics or something. IMVU has NO accountability when it comes to Shoutouts. I don't think even THEY know what is up with them. I have been to the IMVU offices trying to ferret out this information and spent time messaging and emailing and even talking on the phone to different IMVU employees and no-one can even seem to tell me who created Shoutouts in the first place (maybe Chris) and they don't seem too sure who is in charge of them now, and they don't seem sure of what is going on in the code, either. C'mon, people spend a lot on these things, and they are completely unregulated.

Well, not completely unregulated. Apparently they have some kind of approval queue for them, and if you are not a Pro dev then you have to have your Shoutout approved by an actual person. I can see why this is necessary, but what I don't understand is if a real person has to approve them, why do we have to pay MORE to run a shoutout for longer? Wouldn't it make sense to give a discount in that case? I basically refuse to buy a Shoutout that lasts more than one day because heck if I am going to pay a premium to do so! It's IMVU's convenience. They are lucky that I am pro so they don't have to approve mine by hand because I make dozens of new shoutouts a day.

Hmmm...maybe I should run some shoutouts from an avatar that isn't pro, just to see if I can drive the people at IMVU cray-cray!

Really, that charging more thing bugs me...it's like Ticketmaster charging you a "convenience" fee to let you print out your tickets yourself instead of them mailing them to you. Who's convenience are you really paying extra for? Or the bank charging you a monthly fee for Bill Pay, which is really more convenient for them.

Let's not forget another thing that happens: problems with the client, the server, and the website. What happens when you've purchased shoutouts for a certain day and there is an outage for a day or an hour or whatever? Does that mean your Shoutout is seen less times? Do you get your time extended? What happens then?

Yeah so, Shoutouts...why aren't they more like adwords from Google? We should have more features. It should show users which Shoutouts people are clicking on and how many clicks we get and how many times our Shoutout was shown to how many people. It's an outrage that we pay so much and yet are kept totally in the dark about how it even works. But we all buy Shoutouts anyway, because...well...I guess it's better than nothing, probably. Maybe.