What IS traffic, anyway?

I mean, I know that "traffic" is the big kahuna, the Holy Grail and 'be all-end all' of SL marketing.

But exactly HOW is traffic calculated? I track my visitors daily and it's usually between 70-100 people. Yet, my traffic on About Land says 2500-5000.

So what is the discrepancy here? Why isn't traffic exactly that - how many people came through today? And what consititutes traffic? How long must one stay on the property to be actually counted as traffic?

Inquiring minds want to know!

I don't know the exact figures, but given you estimates I would say one peron generates one traffic every one minute they are there.

100 people. 5000 traffic. So each person averages about 50 minutes on your parcel.

Check out this thread for some insight on how Traffic is calculated:

/327/19/194184/1.html

ty Travis!

Traffic is person minutes on the parcel in a 24 hour period. If you stand on your parcel for 5 minutes, and nobody else does that day, the traffic figure the next day will be 5. If 2 of you do it, it will be 10.

Traffic is only "the big kahuna" for the Places tab search, but not for anything else - not even for Places in the new All search.

For the common resident, true. You might be interested in "traffic" if you own a mall or are looking at renting floor space in a mall. Even then "traffic" is about as concrete as "residents".

from the knowledgebase
do not know if it has changed since then

"From Cory Linden at a Town Hall on 12/03/04):

Every user gets a set number of traffic points to give out during the 24 hours between midnight and midnight.

Any parcel of land that the user spends more than 5 sequential minutes on gets counted as a place that they spent time. [Separate] parcels owned by the resident (or group) are counted as if they were the same parcel.

The user's points are then evenly divided between those parcels. So, if I was online for 1 hour and spent 20 minutes on resident A's parcel and 40 minutes on resident B's parcel, resident A would get 33% of my points and resident B would get 66%. Alternately, if I only spent 5 minutes online and spent all of it on resident A's land, she would receive all of my points."

That's interesting. I'm inclined to think that it's now just person minutes. The only tests I ever did (they were in 2007) was to stand on a parcel for 5 minutes, and check the next day. I later did the same thing with 2 of us standing there for 2 minutes. The numbers on the following days were exactly the person minutes each time, which I think is highly unlikely if that 2004 way of calculating still operates. The parcel had ban lines up for those tests.

My guess is that the formula given by Torley is based on when they did pay out based on traffic. It makes sense then. I can't remember what it's called right now, but some of you old timers will refresh my memory.

It seems highly unlikely that's still the case today from my experience.

Good point, Bradley. I agree it was probably for for that purpose (before my time too), but not now.

Used to be called "Developer Incentives" or "Dwelloper Incentives"

Yeah you used to get DIRECT payments based on Traffic

It was called Dwell.

If it was group land all in the group would split it.



The top ranking places for the month got a further Developer Incentive payment.

From my understanding is if you are the owner of the land your "points" dont count on your land only visiting av's.

The traffic is calculated with an "exotic" formula (some parameters other than presence are in...) but the truth is that those other parms are affecting the formula with VERY small numbers, so considering them or not has really no effect at all into the final result (the traffic number). So the formula actually is: each avatar produces 1600 of traffic per 24 hours or 66,6 (number of the beast) of traffic per hour. So run 10 avatars per 24 hours no-stop on a sim and you'll end with approx 16000 of traffic.

vittorio where do you get your information from

I searched the kb and all I found was that stuff I pasted above

would love to know where you are finding this information and #'s

As far as I know, "traffic" is just person minutes.

The "distributed percentage of a 24 hour session" formula was for "dwell", the old system whereby you earned L$ by having people on your land. It was a neat system for encouraging people to build social areas... but with dwell, you could make a PROFIT by having nothing on your parcel but 10 camping chairs, and so:



Killed stone dead.

"DI" was a US$ prize paid by LL to the highest traffic areas. This went the same way:



In other words, it was just rewarding the same people over and over again, and was usually rewarding the people with freebie malls, casinos or sex clubs because they were the most popular builds, or rental land barons because they gathered dwell on the land they rented out - and most of those people were making a profit anyway. (You can still see the lists on the archived Announcements forum. As an example, Anshe Chung won a DI every time because of the huge traffic on her rental land, even though she was already making hundreds of dollars in profit from that rental land.)

How on earth they thought the Developer Directory would be an equivalent, I'm not sure, though..

Basically when Dwell was around - Linden Lab was the one funding all the camp chairs (indirectly).

So they eliminated it due to <camping chairs negatively impacting the culture of SL> (paraphrasing Robin)

BUT when dwell is gone and its Residents paying the campers - It becaome a viable "job" in Second Life - according to the official Guidebook.

So LOL Linden Labs didn't like camping when THEY had to foot the bill - But they are cool with it now that they don't have to.

Well, there is some argument that camping is a more legitimate job now that it was then. The owner of the chairs is paying for a service from the camper. Back then, the camper was an accomplice in a plan to game the system.

I think that LL now recognize camping chairs as a means for new users to get at least some involvement in the economy, and that's ok.

nah, I really think it was a case of not really being against camping at all , ever.

But they had to rationalize cutting dwell somehow. Was costing them money.

Dwell & Developer Incentives were originally intended to reward places that created compelling content. The theory was, if you created compelling content, naturally you'd be popular.

But it didn't work out that way. Sure, some places that created compelling content were indeed popular. But over time, they got drowned out by simple black-box clubs who's primary purpose was to drive their dwell numbers up by any means possible; no compelling content required.

To give an idea of what it was worth: When Developer Incentives & Dwell were still around, the Shelter received about L$300-L$600 a day in dwell payments, and between US$20 - US$100 in Developer Incentive payments per month, depending on how we did that month. (Keep in mind, weekly stipends were as high as L$2500/wk for premium accounts with good ratings back then).

Here's an example of what went on every month: /3/44/24236/1.html

What used to be known as Dwell, is now known as Traffic.

It was also the case that, because people like to socialise with other people, and because Search was directed by traffic, once a given area was popular it tended to stay that way.

That's why in the later months of DI (around 2006), you just see the same names over and over again. LL realised they weren't really encouraging creation of new content, but just subsidising some people who had created compelling content in the past; in fact, they were hurting the creation of new content, because those people just took the money and used it to grow even bigger or compete more aggressively.

Reading the numbers on my sims, that are more reliable (imho) than papers.

The Cory information posted above has not been accurate for some time. I'm pretty convinced that traffic = 1 point per minute spent on the parcel by an avatar other than the parcel owner. (I think if it's group-owned land the "owner" is counted.)

You can test this:
1. Set aside a parcel of your land and limit access only to you and an alt, so no one else can get onto it.
2. Stand your alt on the parcel for a couple of days. (We don't know exactly when traffic is computed; it's only done once a day but you should stay logged in for at least a couple of days to make sure you pack a full 24 hours into the secret traffic window.)
3. After a couple of days, check the traffic rating. It should be 1440 (there are that many minutes in a day).

I haven't personally done this test, but others have. You can also corroborate it another way: There are several sims that are basically full 24 hours a day. If you divide the traffic count of one of those sims, it frequently works out to an even number, equal to the sim's avatar limit. (Private islands can allow up to 100 residents, whereas most mainland sims are fixed at 40.)

I've never seen a non-linden mainland sim with traffic over 57600, which equals 40 avatars on the parcel for 24 hours. Also, if this theory is true, you shouldn't ever see an island sim with traffic over 144000, which is 100 avatars for 24 hours. I'm not in-world, but I don't think any of the Popular Places have traffic that high, do they?

What I find interesting is how Traffic has caused the Most Popular tab in Search to become mostly a bot/camper ghetto. It used to have some interesting places there a long, long time ago, but those days are long gone.

I would like to add an important information about the how the traffic impacts on the new search engine (that is progressively used more than "places" day by day... and it will probably be the "only search" available here in the future).
Initially (when the new search engine has been introduced) the traffic plaied an important role to calculate the score, so to remain at the top (with keywords indeed) you had just to increase camping/bots. But progressively LL has tweaked the weigth of different parameters, including the traffic, so actually the traffic plays an unsignificant role in the scoring calculation.
I've did some SEO working in the past months, because it pays (showing at the top searching for the most important keywords for your work, would means a huge difference in sales), and the traffic isn't there anymore... it just help (but a bit) to give to the users the illusion that someone else is walking into your store (a desert store would attract less ppl... exactly like in RL), but to do that 10 camps or so would be more than enough, you don't really need 90 users (or bots) on land.
I've also work for a RL company (that provides inworld services.. most advertising) and those RL companies (to provide the service to) aren't "stupid" (like just an year ago) anymore: they do understand the traffic spoiling, and they would not consider you more important because you generate 100k of FAKE traffic.
So... the traffic *today* does have a marginal role, and in the near future it will have ZERO importance, so i suggest to these ppl out there to find an alternate way to make their own business, if they won't end with nothing.