In addition to traffic, let us sort by money spent

I had an idea...

since dwell is gone, and we need some new metric for determining how useful or valuable land is.

Since the only objective way of measuring real estate in SL is based on how much money you can make in a spot, how about giving us a new column in the Find Places box: Money Spent. This would be a number based on the money paid in to vendors and money used to purchase items via the Buy command.

To make it interesting, and to help prevent fraud, perhaps a system similar to dwell calculations could be used: the "money" score would be based on the number of unique avatars who buy things and be weighted by something like the average spent per person per sq meter.

The key here is to show a better metric for land value than just traffic by also find a system that can't be "gamed" easily. This would be valuable for both people wanting to rent from malls and people wanting to buy land.

What about the people who will pay their alt acounts and have the alt account spend thousands on the parcel?

That idea will not work.

Well, that's one of the most obvious ploys.

I also addressed that in my origial post. The key is in not letting one user skew the results; unless a person spent all day logging in different accounts to try to game the system, they wouldn't be able to affect their individual money rates very much, compared to the places that cater to hundreds of people every day.

The point is to get away from Traffic as the metric of property value. It just doesn't reflect anything other than "I found a way to get people here." Well, as we already found out, camping chairs skew that (and ruined dwell as a source of supplemental income), so we need a new measure of popularity.