What does "traffic" actually mean?

All I can seem to find out is that each player generates 1 "point" per day, and this point is divided amongst all the parcels the player visits for 5 or more minutes in the day. So, for example, "ELEMENTS at Goddess of Love3" has the most traffic today (108842, although "108,842" would be much more readable ). What does that number actually mean?

Yea, I'm curious about this too! You can have 50 unique visitors per day, but at the same time you can have a 4 people per hour traffic, which would be 4x24=96 per day. It's two different kind of things yes. But how does SL's meassure traffic?

I gues that's what u asked

Perhaps the answer can be found in one of yesterday's threads on the subject of how traffic works: /327/f4/157114/1.html.

Or maybe the knowledgebase article: http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=278 .

(Note: Knowledge Base articles are often out of date, but it's still worth checking the knowledgebase.)

old information here but informative somewhat (what do ya expect this is SL)
http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=278
i dont use traffic in a search at all i skip all the high traffic places
none iof it is real traffic and they will not ever have what you searched for,
its just a way to get you to give them more traffic? LOL
but very basicly every AV for 5min = 1 point ? or is it 5 points ?
-LW

The only half useful information you can get from it is that on average there are 76 people (aka camping zombies) on that sim throughtout the day.

108842 / 24 hours / 60 minutes = 75.58

Well apparently the knowledge base article is totally irrelevant and should be replaced.

From article: ". . . the general principles of traffic still apply."

Um, no?

So the apparent answer is that it's 1 point per minute per avatar in a parcel (which the knowledge base article makes no mention of but discusses something entirely different). Um, is this not correct? And uh, how is it possible to have that much traffic (an average of 76 people each minute) if only up to 40 people can be in a sim? I am guessing that this is because it's two sims combined as one place, which I didn't expect to be possible. Is this correct? (I would have checked, but SL is down for maintenance.)

Another thing that confuses me is the supposed nightly pool given out based on traffic. Is this true, or is it just some useful historical information? And if so... any idea what it is?

Yes, the KB entry is inaccurate, there are no more dwell payments.

Traffic is used for ranking Places in Search. Traffic is measured PER PARCEL not PER SIM. My parcel in Papa had 1576 traffic on Christmas Eve, for example. A friend's parcel had 8.

Max

I'm fairly sure this part of the knowledgebase article is still accurate:

The section below is from /139/b5/156265/1.html


Blue's post does not say that we get one point per day to distribute among the places we spend more than five minutes at during a day, it says "imagine that every Resident has one point" so there is some question as to how many points we each get per day, but the method of allocating whatever the per avatar per day amount that Blue describes is the same method that the Linden staff has described for three years.

Here's a statement Kelly Linden made Thursday 12-28-06 on the topic:

I spent a whole week trying out different things, it really no longer works like that. If you doubt it, it's easy enough to investigate it yourself .

Exactly what procedure would you suggest to test it?

These posts all point to a KB article that doesn't explain the traffic number at all. It says how you give out traffic, but not how the actual parcel traffic is calculated for display. Does each day show the previous day's total? Is it cummulative in some way? Averaged? Who knows?!?

Also, the most recent problems may have wiped out traffic counts. My home parcel was stable around 100 traffic when I moved in a couple months ago, then it climbed to around 900, and bounces between 500 and 900 it seems. I log in today and it reads *tada* 87! 87?

Anyone know what's going on with this number?

In my experience (and for my goal) traffic does not say so much.

What I am interested in is how many unique persons visited my land. So I think it a better to use one of the visitor counters that are around. Those give in my opinion clear data. This in contrast with traffic.

Morwen.

I can usually tell within 10 seconds of arriving whether somewhere is worth visiting - and it has nothing to do with traffic - something we all know is easily abused.

As soon as I land, I head for the nearest group of green dots on the map.

If they're on camping chairs or dance pads, and there's absolutely no chat whatsoever ... then I'll go somewhere else.

Anywhere that uses those cheats to try and make their place look worth visiting is, to me, admitting that really they aren't.

I'd much rather visit somewhere with a genuine traffic of 100 than somewhere with 10,000 traffic that's just campers. My experience has been predominantly that places with camping chairs have little otherwise to appeal to the average user, and in fact are often of a lower standard (due to the excessive lag caused by the chairs) than those without. After all, the slower something is to load, the less likely many people are to actually want to stay.

Broccoli

Good questions.

In a story by The Street's SL reporter the author says "The traffic point total is cumulative over the life of the island". I assume the writer should have said parcel. If this is true, traffic woud never go down other than through error. I'm not saying that what this writer said is true, just adding to the confusion.

Yes, I agree here.

Often when I look for places to make pictures, I can see indeed within 10 seconds with places I absolutely don't want. Good looking places may take a bit longer.

But for the first kind of places I would not be counted as "traffic". If visitor-counter does!

Morwen.

Restrict access to a parcel that otherwise gets no traffic and spend varying amounts of time there, alone, as an alt (that doesn't go anywhere else that day), with others, each time waiting for next day's traffic and see what it says.

Easiest way would be a split it in several smaller parcels so you can try different things at the same time since you'll always be waiting till 8-10am the next day for traffic to be updated and see how what you did affects the number.

I don't own or rent any land.

Since you've spent a whole week trying out different things, perhaps you could post your raw data for examination.

I thought I had explained what the result was.

I started thinking the knowledge base article was how traffic actually worked, the only thing I was personally curious about was how many traffic "points" an avie got assigned in a day so I logged my alt on and let it idle for about 15 minutes and logged it off. The next day the traffic read 17 which wouldn't account for places being able to get 60-80k+ worth of traffic.

Next was letting my alt idle for much longer than the original 15 minutes which according to what the Lindens keep telling, shouldn't affect the generated traffic in any way as long as it's the only place it visited that day. The next day just showed the amount of minutes I left it idle.

Next was letting it idle for 5 minutes there on the parcel and then idle for just under an hour somewhere else which if the article were true should give a negliable rating since it spent 10 times more time on the second parcel than it did the first. The result just reflected the number of minutes.

Idling along with my alt added twice as much which definitely contradicted the article since I'd be logged in for the better part of a day and only spent 10 minutes idling/testing so whatever I added should have been close to nothing, not the equal amount my alt did.

Take a look at what's on popular places at different times throughout the day, and make your own average of how many people are on the sim during the day and then multiply by 60 minutes and 24 hours and you'll get a number that's on the same order to what their traffic reads the next day.

I honestly prefer the old way, it puts greater value on social gatherings since whoever attends those isn't likely to idle online 24 hours a day and their traffic would be more valueable; with the way it seems to be right now, it doesn't matter if you attract a zombie or a live person, they're worth the exact same in terms of traffic.