Top Picks Replaced

you have yourselves to blame!

all the indignance over LL deciding for themselves what they felt was the best in game content to promote their product wasn't good enough for too many self centred players in this game.

so now here you go. a system that takes the decision out of the bias of LL employees and out of the bias of player populairty. what is the best system that cannot be abused? put your money where your mouth is. suckers!

i don't endorse this product, since i saw the old system for what it was and thought it was very useful, but i do think this is just desserts.

"I am simply blown away after reading this post in its entirety."
/laughs

who really cares? Who is actually in this world to collect dwell, ratings, and stipends?
I mean COME ON people get real!!!
LOL Is that why we are all really here?

Until the first Av is forced into bankruptcy

Actually, my first thoughts were that the Lindens did this as a replacement just for kicks for this very reason. I imagine them all sitting round the boardroom table with these forums on the projection screen laughing their asses off and going 'hah! that'll learn ya!'.

Update...

First, I hope everyone realizes this is an experiment. We want to get out of the editorial business. Plus there has been a lot of interest in ways to advertise in SL (as a side note, it seems like a lot of events have been thinly disguised ads to call attention to new places in SL, suggesting there's a need for this type of service). This gives people a way to buy an ad that will run for 2 weeks.

The use of eBay is to avoid spending a lot of time re-programming our auctions to include new items. Moving to our auctions will also make it easier to charge both US$ and L$. If there's interest, we'll make the resource investment to sell the space on our auctions. If not we'll just kill it.

I've just added 9 more auctions, so after 1.5.13 releases tomorrow, I'll start populating the page with the auction winners for the next 2 weeks.

Last thing -- the name of the directory where you can find these ads will be changed to "Sponsored Links" to make it clear they're paid ads.

I have to ask. Since The owner of Ebay has kicked money into Second life are Linden Labs Paying Ebay selling and listing fee's?

While I am super happy to hear you are considering the renaming of this section, "Sponsored Links" to some could still make them think it means "Linden Sponsored Links". I dunno, some name to make it 100% clear that these are paid advertisements by SL residents would be better in my opinion.

Just my thoughts!

Thanks for the update, Robin. I hope that if this is a successful exercise, that it will be moved to the internal auction site at a later date however.

Talen - absolutely. There is no relationship between Linden Lab and eBay except that we share an investor. We are a customer there like everyone else.

Do you really believe that? Ebay is being used for one reason only, and that reason is MONEY!

Cool. I can understand using Ebay either way when it comes down to money ...it's much cheaper than creating a new auction set up. One question I do have is say one person wins with a bid of $10.00 and another with a bid of $100.00 ....What will determine the placement on the list. You can bet people won't just want to be on the list they will want position on that list.

See!!! I told you! RIGHT after my post! They WERE all sitting round the table laughing their asses off!

Robin as Pendari pointed out maybe it should be renamed to something like "Citizen Sponsored Links" or "Player Sponsored Links" or even "Resident Sponsored Links" to eleviate the implied confusion.

Shadow

No but paying for advertising on ebay?? Come on....LL is trying to broaden their horizons and fatten their pocketbooks at the expense of the players seems to me.
And where ratings, dwell and stipend is concerned....There's so much more to it than that. I came here for the relationships, events are where most of my relationships started and were nurtured. Without event support that is gone, without event support I would not have found my soulmate. This change will cause me to lose 4K a week and all the fun I have with events. What do you have to lose? We all do different things in SL, this plan to pull event support is going to hurt more than half the community.

If we win a sponsored links auction, do we have resale rights?

I know I'm going against the popular opinion on this, but I'm really interested to see how this experiment works out.

This is not 'buying' your place on the Top Picks board, as Top Picks is being put to rest. This is another way for vendors to highlight thier businesses - advertising. It allows, with an investment, anyone to participate.

Another benefit, which LL mentioned, but nobody has really focused on, is that it kills off the time required by LL to find and evaluate Top Pick candidates, allowing them to focus that time and effort on other things.... like bugs.