Ad Plots & Land Trends

So, I bought a little plot of land in one of the new sims, adjacent to what I assume in the future will be a Linden road (ie, alongside a strip of protected Linden Land). I have my store on this plot, and chose it on the basis that no-one would be able to build right in front of me. So far, all is good.

That said, I am somewhat astounded that having read land prices are at an all-time low, that the majority of land along this "road" has changed hands several times over the last couple of weeks - I can tell by the ever changing landscape of For Sale signs. The land goes up for sale, someone buys it, puts it up for sale again, someone else buys it, and the cycle continues. Obviously there is still money to be made in land.

Over the last couple of days, however, it has all changed somewhat. All along the "road", the land has been bought, then a 16 sq m strip has been cut along the roadside, which is then divided up into plots of 32 and 48 sq m. These plots are for sale for L$1,000 and L$1,500 respectively. The remainder of the plot behind is also then put up for sale again.

I am curious. Is the fact that they are 32/48 sq m something to do with LL's stance on 16 sq m plots? Would anyone really buy a plot right next to these little squares, knowing that sooner or later there will be giant rotating signs on them? It makes no real difference to me if the entire landscape goes to shit, as I don't have my home there and I would hope people would come for the store, and not for the surroundings. However, there are people who have bought plots there, probably because the land is cheap and there wasn't much else there at the time. They have spent time and money in setting up a beautiful home, only to wake up and find the whole landscape going to pot around them. I really feel for those people - I've been here long enough to know that the only way to guarantee your view is to buy the land it sits on, but these folk must feel really disappointed. I know I would.

I've been rambling so long I've now forgotten what the question was. Sorry!!

I had a 256m plot that's almost roadside as prim land in my home sim. Recently I was able to buy some land closer to my home and so needed to sell the 256m plot to keep my tier level down. I sold it cheap and the next owner flipped it for a small profit. Now another person has carved it into 16m ad lots at L$ 275. It's almost roadside, behind a single row of 16's.

Is there a whole hidden sub-culture of ad-consumers in SL who fly around looking at ads and then following them up? I don't think so.

I reckon the ad lots are a waste of time, except for ad cutters and adspace renters.

16M plots are allowed, I have them next to one of my parcels, they put up ban lines to grief and try and extort but they've got more hope of seeing Jesus than me buying their plots, although the Lindens do act if you put trees in front of the plots. Ban lines are ok but trees are parcel abuse apparently, well I guess they must have been hanging over their oh so precious plots with nothing on them but banlines so I'll just put a landscape in front of them.

The numpty with the corner one for sale for L$9999 seems to have failed to notice that my plots are front and side of his and on the other sides he has other 16M cutters so the chances of the plot being sold are slim in the extreme.

I won't buy land next to 16, 32, 48 or 64M plots so the land around them is devalued, which is of course the ploy of these extortionists, they hope someone will buy them because they're devaluing the surrounding area, what the numbskulls haven't noticed is that the land market is flat meaning that paying extortionate prices to try to regain value isn't wortwhile at the moment, you'd lose more than you'd gain.

What surprises me is the longevity of some of these 16m plots. The very first land I owned was in October 2006, a month after I came to SL. I bought a few 16m lots in Sourmilk Ghyll and joined them togerther and built a little chalet there. Next to my land was a 16m lot with two of those gold money pyramids stacked un top of each other, and for sale at some ridiculous price.

Recently I went back to look round Sourmilk Ghyll and it had changed beyond recognition. Eventually I found where my land had been and the stacked pyramids were still there, the 16m lot was still for sale at the same absurd price.

Linden roads are a blight upon the land. Doing away with them would be a major step to ending the ads.

I suspect the people doing this buy up huge amounts of 16's, and probably don't even look at them after they buy them and price them, as long as they are getting the income stream they find acceptable from their inventory of hundreds (thousands?!) of 16s.

A very good short-term answer to this form of extortion is nice landscape screens that block themoff with a beautiful view.

Full disclosure: I sell such landscape screens at my shop which you can find by looking at my profile in-world. ((/me Ducks head and shuffles feet, all sheepish-like; gawrsh).

I like roads, railways, canals, ocean waterways and other public rigtht-of-ways. Not on every mainland sim obviously, as variety and choice are always good.

The easiest way, as many people have suggested in the past, to held rein in some of the excesses of spam ad-farming along the right-of-ways, would simply be (with new mainland sims, or even existing whole mainland sims that have been abandoned to the Governor) to covenant them so that parcel-cutting to less than a 512m contiguous block, is not possible. A minimum 512m would render spam ad-farming as its currently exploited, uneconomical.

Why 16m + 3 prims was decided in the beginning I've no idea. Probably was just one of those arbitrary decisions that sometimes get made which in hindsight doesn't have alot going for it. And just because thats the way its always been, is not always a good reason why it should continue in every instance when new, or recycled, sims are introduced.

Its the hangover that will get you everytime.

Some underhanded dishonest scum level snake bellied residents have ways of owning land and not paying as much tier as honest residents do.
LL know about it and asay they are working on a fix that might sort some of these landscape terrorists out.

A couple of the plots near me have ban lines up, and when I saw them I wondered why would someone do that. It never occurred to me that they would be using them to try and force the people nearby to buy them just to get rid of them.

I agree with Tabliopa. LL should simply confiscate all plots under, say 256m, or even 512m (although I know that will have some of you jumping up and down!!), and then compensate the owners at the going rate for the square meterage. Then, those people with land adjacent to the little plots could be given the opportunity to purchase these from LL, again at the going rate. Anything left could be converted to Linden Land and used for landscaping. That would probably see ad-farming gone in one hit.

Simple, effective, but not going to happen!!

But they don't have to do that, even. Just mint some new islands somewhere, and sort by size: all the 16s in one batch of islands, all the 32s in another, etc. Plant a palm tree on any vacant ones, then when new ones spring up on the Mainland, just silently transport the land ownership and any rezzed prims to the proper island, no muss, no fuss. Keep collecting tier till the owners abandon their little pieces of Paradise For Microparcels.

There are legitimate uses for remote smaller parcels, but most of them involve hosting a scripted prim and a landing site for a bot. Really, that can all be handled with renting rights from other sim residents much more cheaply (and, in fact, more reliably) than paying the tier for an actual tiny bit of land. Everything else is just window-dressing for extortion schemes, or extortion schemes-to-be.

(Except, maybe, advertising. I'm a little bit hopeful that some workable solution to the current advertising nightmare may be in the offing, if LL can just work up the intestinal fortitude to use the Mainland as a business, instead of futzing around with it as a "government" with better things to do. It requires them to be smart and brave enough to take what they can from advertising instead of just giving it away as they do now--with the resulting disaster of advertisers goading each other to absurdly offensive heights, etc. We'll see.)

Confiscate ??? ooo! =)

Painful as it is for me to say but ... where land reform like compulsory acquisition, comes to a screeching halt is that while parcel-cutting down to 16m remains permissible on that sim then there is nothing to stop the new, or future, owners from cutting the parcels down again after getting the land virtually handed to them on a plate.

LL are fully aware of the mainland flight, probably more so than anyone. They also know how much tier they're not getting from the mainland thats being abandoned. There's not a lot of profit in having racks of simulators that aren't paying their way. Mainland reform will come to SL in the form of upsizing parcel minimums in some EDIT [new] areas of the grid. Its just a matter of when really.

The vast majority of money made on spam (and yes, ad farms are spam) isn't because the end user receives any value.


Rather, spam serves two social niches. The first being minimal action by the stupidest of customers.The second, and far more lucrative of the two, are vendors who *think* their ads are being served and acted upon when they are not.



This is commonly known as a component of the long tail:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail#Marketing

(I leave sifting through the rampant BS in the linked article as an exercise for the reader)



Interestingly, while a sucker is born every minute, those suckers aren't necessarily the slobbering fools that sit down clicking these ads.

Rather, they're the otherwise competent fools looking to advertise using these "networks".



Funny how this was said about telehub malls and avatar-catching nuisances. As long as there is a buck to be made on foolishness and stupidity, these networks will continue to exist.

Mind you, the grid is far, far better off without telehub malls and av traps. I am not always convinced of the benefits of removing telehubs entirely but that is one point on which I will not be moved.

It was actually, I believe, the subject of my first post on these forums.

No, please, no. I've owned three different mainland parcels for my shop and every one has fronted a Linden road. I haven't thought about the reason for that much at all until I noticed this post, but here's what I came up with in a few minutes over coffee this morning:

- For the Very Small Content Creator who doesn't want to end up in a mall, roadside land is one of very few ways to ensure an accessible storefront over time. The land next door may change hands and builds may come and go as close as the parcel boundary, but facing a road you're at least free to build your entry right up to the edge of the parcel and know you won't get blocked in. On small parcels that can be very important - the alternative being to pay tier on an empty buffer zone of unusable land up front.

- I see over and over the same advice to noobies wanting to get into the content creation game: do it because you love it, not to make money. Well, in a virtual world like SL, part of loving it can be living the life of a virtual shopowner with all the trappings of a small RL business - including a roadside shop, a place to "hang your shingle". These are ingredients of what is really a RP game, and while I don't seem to get people walking down the road and stumbling across my shop as much as I used to, the notion that it *could* happen and occasionally *does* happen is part of what makes this whole thing real for me. In that sense, it's not that much different from wanting to have a residence on the waterfront.

I firmly believe that the only way to eliminate ads is to make them economically unfeasible, either by manipulating land requirements in some way (I hope it doesn't come to this, mostly because LL has demonstrated again and again that if they do something here they are guaranteed to botch it in the worst possible way) or by waking up vendors to the fact that these things don't work and aren't worth investing in.

I never said it wasn't -- just that the focus has changed from them to mass marketing.

I like being able to instantly teleport without having to cross multiple sims and avatar-catching monstrosities these days.