OK...Your turn..."Honest" Solutions for Business Owners

Bernard Madoff came up with a "sustainable methodology" for "investing" people's money for longer than SL has been in existence. Just because something has been around a while doesn't make it legit, let alone ethical (or in Bernie's case, legal). Ginko came up with a "sustainable methodology" for running an in-world virtual "bank", and it ran for a couple years, until it failed spectacularly.



That is one of Desmond's points. Collateral damage could be that bots are disallowed on SL, or that they remove traffic from search. Could be, at some point, the Lindens realize the futility of ANY kind of metric for search and ditch metric-based search altogether, leaving everyone without a tool for finding anything. All because some people couldn't act in an ethical and socially responsible manner. "This is why we can't have nice things!" I mean, if that is the way people are going to think and behave, just start shutting systems down altogether as soon as they are abused. Pretty soon, there won't be anything left to abuse.

Personally, I would jump on abuse early and solve it early, before it turns into these monstrosities that ingrain themselves into the foundation and culture of the virtual world, but unfortunately, that's not part of the Tao of Linden. Thus, we get years of adfarming, landcutting, and extortion, years of Ponzi schemes, and years of people gaming search facilities.



Sure, we can couch it in a comfortable metaphor, if you want. However, at the end of the day it is about how the tool is used that makes it good or evil, right? In the case of traffic bots, it is using a tool (a bot) for evil (gaming the traffic system). It's a small evil, but an evil nonetheless.

Explain that to the HUNDREDS to THOUSANDS of "upstarts" that get started and do amazingly well all the time using "honest" methods.

Traffic count may equal (some) sales, but it certainly is not the sole prerequisite to success.

Given two competing businesses making the same quality products and giving the same quality service, one using cheating at every opportunity, and the other using tried-and-true "honest" methods to achieve a similar level of popularity, who would you rather give your money to?

That answer is academic for me.

Desmond's post was decidedly not anti-bot. He eloquently outlined a long-term ethical rationale about running businesses and choosing between business methods on that basis.



I think that you've gotten a lot of good advice so far, but it isn't highly-specific to your case. While you may have "tried this and that", you might not have tried it in effective way, tailored specifically to your situation. Honestly, I think that, to take your mall to the "next level", you might need to make some radical changes in it. It is possible that your current business model is not one which is viable in this market climate. Until you consult with someone to do a detailed analysis of it, specific suggestions are going to be difficult at best.

In the example you gave about dress designers (and shoe designers and skin designers et cetera), someone who just "does casual dresses" might find it a difficult market to get into, much like you are having getting your mall known. You have to find some angle, or even a gimmick, to get people in there. It could be a unique theme. It could be a niche. It could be freebies. It could be events. It could be certain kinds of vendors. It could be one of a thousand different things that would set your mall apart from all the others, and get people in there to shop.

The key thing that many here have said is that it isn't trivial. In fact, it is rather difficult. Not all malls survive. Hell, you may end up being popular simply because of persistence. 2-3 years down the road, your mall is popular simply because it has been around for 2-3 years, and people know of it and talk about it all the time to their friends. It certainly is a factor for venue popularity, in general.

Just to make sure we are talking about the same thing, an "affiliate vendor" is someone who basically rents a space in a mall and puts vendors out for one or more other creators, taking a cut of the money.

I think the reason why is because it tends to appear cold and impersonal, and that it appears too cookie-cutter, as the same vendors are selling the same products in a hundred other malls all over the grid.

Doesn't really make your mall stand out when it is filled with the same-old same-old.

thousands doing amazingly well and not doing 'unethical' botting and seo? i doubt it.
ive never claimed traffic is the be all-end all, you obviously need to have the product. but i know i do far more sales when my traffic is high than when it is not. with that in mind i have to decide whether to pay tier or to appease .005% of the residents that are forum posting anti-botters.
at the end of the day, if nobody that reads this forum is willing to buy from me it is still worth it due to the massive increase in sales that a high traffic rating gets.

how exactly is it i am cheating anyway? im not selling traffic, i am selling furniture. traffic is a means to rank higher in the search, it isnt a false claim regarding my furniture.
whether a creator makes it where they are by bots or by fanbois doesnt matter to me personally. i wouldnt mind seeing an end to botting, but at this point it is a necessary evil that i run them.

i think they are trashy and the epitome of a lazy creator. a good mall is about unique creators, not stall after stall of noobs selling the same products through affiliate vendors. that sort of activity goes hand in hand with freebie/biab reselling imo

Why not skip all the foreplay and go straight for Hitler?



I would hope they remove the traffic rankings and leave bots alone. Which is far more practical and sensible. And with the purchase of XStreetSL, I rather suspect (and hope) they do.



I completely disagree with this opinion.

No, not an evil plot.. but it's also not a tool either, it's an exploit.
Exploits are considered cheating when they have an unbalancing effect, are used in an unintended manner, their use is unintended, or their use contributes to the user's prosperity in a manner not intended by the developers.
The mere presence of the 5 alt limit per account suggests that traffic numbers were never projected to be skewed by one person beyond what 5 AV's max would get you. That's not anything close to the stupidly high numbers you see people stuffing into a parcel since open source. Just because LL's been lax on enforcing the alt limit and they've been turning a blind eye to the traffic exploitation lately, that does in no way mean that using more (sometimes tons more) than the allowable number of alts to skew traffic for a personal advantage in search rankings is acceptable, or intended use of that metric. All it really means is that they haven't been enforcing the alt limit and they've been turning a blind eye to the traffic exploitation lately.. nothing more.

Bots and campers are really destructive.

It was good enough for Winston Churchill.

If you accept that there is a limit to acceptable behavior, then we're just arguing about where those limits are. It doesn't matter whether THIS action is too extreme, or THAT action is too extreme: if you consider assaulting people for money is too far, or spamming for money is too far, then you accept that there IS a point that is too far. Camping holes caused a huge amount of damage to Second Life... camping, and Linden Labs reaction to camping, led directly to several major sims that I spent a huge amount of my time on going under, while at the same time massively increasing the number of logged in users at a time when the grid simply couldn't take it. Bots are simply camping turned up several notches. Both are destructive, abusive, and unacceptable.
I didn't at any point insert "merely" in there.

It was good enough for Winston Churchill.

If you accept that there is a limit to acceptable behavior, then we're just arguing about where those limits are. It doesn't matter whether THIS action is too extreme, or THAT action is too extreme: if you consider assaulting people for money is too far, or spamming for money is too far, then you accept that there IS a point that is too far. Camping holes caused a huge amount of damage to Second Life... camping, and Linden Labs reaction to camping, led directly to several major sims that I spent a huge amount of my time on going under, while at the same time massively increasing the number of logged in users at a time when the grid simply couldn't take it. Bots are simply camping turned up several notches. Both are destructive, abusive, and unacceptable.
I didn't at any point insert "merely" in there.
It's not an "evil plot", it's just evil. Mundane, grey, dingy, smelly, nasty, evil. It's not Goldfinger, it's the guy sitting in a boiler room with a row of telephones calling up little old ladies to sell life insurance for their cats, thinking up new variants on "Make your pecker swell" for his spamming business.

Telemarketing is a tool. Spamming is a tool. Bots are a tool. They're also evil.

The problem with affiliate vendors is they're all over the place, and people get used to seeing them all over the place, and they get to your mall and see all the rest of the stuff that's just like all the other malls, and don't bother coming back.

That doesn't happen in RL because you have to drive to the mall, so you go to the one that's closest to you. To make malls really succeed in SL you'd have to make teleporting cost money so people flew or drove or walked around, or make it so you could only teleport to a few places, so people would build malls around those places.

Of course in RL the mall doesn't crash when you get more than 40 people in it, either, so that scheme didn't turn out to be workable in the long term.

Here's a few malls, or whatever you call them, that interest me. I found myself there and went back, because the build was interesting and charming and worth exploring.

The Magic of Oz.

Fantasma Plaza in Five Sisters.

Starlust Motel and the other builds spread over Lloyd, Floyd, Horst, and I forget the name of the other sim. They always have something different in the pool, and somehow I always fall in the pool.

New Toulouse.

The great majority here seem to be sellers. Why don't you consult buyers - preferably those who aren't sellers as well - about how and why they buy what they do? A supply side driven economy doesn't work unless you have a monopoly of essential resources. All you are doing is guessing about the behaviour of buyers and trying to relate that to different types of marketing efforts. By that argument you might think that it is because lots of single men buy lots of perfume on December 24th that Christmas happens the day after.

Pep (Sounds like a great idea for a survey . . . )

Just to be very *very* clear....I didn't say that Desmond's post was anti-bot. I thanked him for his post. New paragraph, indicating new thought. And then the general "anti-bot" statement.

I like Desmond and truly appreciate the time he put into that post.

But, as I noted, once again, the thread became about bots.

The results in the poll thread don't seem resounding to me. 45 (at this time) said they didn't care or would shop with someone who uses bots. 66 said they would not.

Some of you think that my products (affiliate vendors) suck because they are the same old, but you're making assumptions having not even been to my mall. Some are, some aren't.

Some of you think that my mall should just be closed down because malls are boring, done to death, whatever. Well, that's not happening.

Several people have contacted me inworld and offered good, solid, valid and valued opinions and thoughts...that I will move on.

I hope some of you will shop with me...and for those of you who don't, thank you for your opinions anyway.

I don't see ANYONE saying that.
I don't see ANYONE saying that.

I love affiliate vendors, it puts the responsibility of getting customers firmly in my hands, I don't see it as any different than a store owner renting in a mall. I much prefer the single prim ones for each object but they are time consuming to setup.

Even better would be a mall owner who strikes a deal with one creator to have exclusive affiliate vendors, or maybe they do a deal with a few malls so that as someone else pointed out, we don't see the same stuff everywhere.

The advantage to an affiliate system for a creator is surely that they can spend more time creating and less time dealing with search and marketing isn't it?

Then you need to re-read, Argent. It's pretty clear.

I see people saying "a mall needs something more than just a mall to be interesting".

I see people saying "affiliate vendors produce a homogenous environment".

I don't see anyone saying "give up, shut it down, get rid of the affiliates". The message I'm seeing is "you need to develop a mall to be more than just a mall".

Did you check out the places I suggested?

Tell me where this is any different than seeing Target on every corner, in every mall. Or Macy's. Or [insert large brand name store here].



Neither does my sim. Private island. 80 people.

If I chose to, I could put 10 bots in a box, and my sim wouldn't be affected in the slightest, other than the 10k traffic.

However, I don't choose to do that. I *do* choose to park an alt or two there all night. I will find methods to drive my traffic. I've been given some ideas both through this thread and inworld that I will implement, and somebody else gave me an idea last night that I found very attractive and will put into place as soon as I can.

Thanks for the discussions everyone

Hi HoneyBear
Not sure if this will help answer your question or not...but i was speaking to a well known female fashion designer last night (won't mention names or amounts) who happens to rent in my Mall too. She told me, the kind of figures she was earning during winter 2006 to summer 2007....i nearly fell off my chair! (lets say it was quite a bit more than Phil!).....now in spring of 2009, she is generating only around 20% of those 2006/7 sale figures, despite still churning out new products and marketing even more aggressively than before.

She sited the increase competition in Female fashion design sector (personally i think this sector is saturated) and the enormous growth of the grid (land size)
So when the grid was smaller with just 15-20k logins and less fashion designers...she was selling 5 x as much as today.

Now, i think the Mall sector..kind of plays out in a similar way....plus you can add in a new Search system that handicaps Malls too.

honeybear, i have never been to your mall. i dont know what goes on there, and my remarks regarding affiliate vendors wasnt intended for you specifically. it was merely a general observation.

No, was busy last night and not inworld this morning.

I completely agree Rene, clothing is a very difficult market these days...well, except for men's clothing, which there isn't enough of. If some of the female clothing designers would turn their talents to menswear, sales would probably pick up for them.

Fortunately for me, I've recently become involved with a couple of "affiliate vendor" projects which are new and I anticipate they'll do quite well...If I can get people in to see them

In real life, you can't teleport. If I could teleport, why would I bother going to the local Target to get 10 items instead of going to the 10 factories... wherever in the world they are?
The difference between 40, 80, and 100or even 120... when we're comparing it with a RL mall with thousands of cars parked in front, is quibbling.