Traffic Figures

Can anyone explain how the traffic figures actually work. In our club and surrounding land our traffic figures seem to be somewhat erractic. One day they will be a reasonable figure and go up the following days and then all of a sudden drop real low.??

There doesnt seem to be a steady increase in the figures, although we do know our figures go up every day, and then some days they dont alter at all.

Totally confused!!!!

Trafiic is gauged by who TP's into your land and how long they stay

So essentially .. the more AV's stay on your parcel for the most amount of time will get your figures up...

Hense why CAMPING works for the owners, BUT to be honest, its expensive to get higher in the listing and doesnt really get you a good enough return.

If you have a good club I am sure your reputation will get around.

Marty

As Marty said, Traffic is bunk, worthless, outdated, gamed, etc.

If you don't game Traffic, it can be a ncie tool to see you does come to your land. However, aside from that, it has no use, imo.

Many of us actually AVOID the stupidly high Traffic numbered places. Why? Because it's highly apparent those places are gaming their Traffic. Probably with campers.

I see a camping chair and I'm back out the sim. Sales lost to the area, vendors and landowner.

Why? If the area was any good, they wouldn't have to place out camping items to glean Traffic. And before the arguement is put up that some camping devices help newbies, I say to find a better way than to fill up the sim needlessly with idle accounts and to lag the sim needlessly with those idle accounts, most of which use anti-idlers, some very poorly made and laggy in their own right.

With bots ruining the camping anyway. If you want to help newbies interactive is the best way. Have events or contests, or just walk through your buisness and talk to newbies and just hand them 50L$ (or whatever).

If you're product/buisness is doing well despite what the Traffic says....ignore it. I do.

~Jessy

Traffic is also recalculated every day. So "yesterdays" traffic does not affect "todays" traffic. So traffic can go up and down heaps. It just indicates how many people and how much time they spend on your land any given day (it only resets once a day too). So really each day sort of shows the "previous days" traffic. But.. traffic itself is a day to day thing.

Meaning. Have a big party? Your traffic will be huge. The next day, lock your sim so only you can be there and on the next days traffic-update the number falls.

But i agree with a lot of people, traffic is almost meaningless (when using it to try to find a shop i want to explore in search - 'cause so many people exploit it, it's not really a true indication - a lot of the times - of how genuinely popular or "good' a place is)

Traffic is that Metric that measures how well people can game the Traffic system.

One of the benefits to a Traffic scoring system is that new residents have something they can sell: Their time lingering on a parcel in exchange for Linden dollars which they then spend. Some of these people are insanely unskilled in SL and their traffic points are (presently) their only commodity. For other residents, this is where they're going to get the first smidgen of dough to upload textures, rent a space to work or vend space, etc.

Plenty of gathering places and stores still earn "legitimate" traffic (if our definition is to exclude things like camping chairs [passive]).

If our definition is giving away money to drive up traffic is bad then those gathering places (and stores) which host games [active] are illegitimized. If Bob solves a word puzzle and wins L$100 while interacting competitively for an hour against other residents are the traffic points the parcelholder derives either more legitimate or less legitimate?

Actually, it mostly revolves around a capacity problem. Private sims can contain more concurrent avatars than mainland sims; 100(+):40(+). This also means the highest potential traffic score is finite.

The majority of people are unskilled (referring to building or designing skills). If everyone had skill there would be no economy since noone would have to pay for anything and that's where the whole "buying L$" comes into play.

There is just no legitimate reason to camp. Noone can not afford L$10 to upload a texture, no matter what sob story they type up on their sparkly new puter.

Money has nothing to do with it. Lucky chairs, mobvends, etc are no different from camping, the sole purpose is to increase traffic and not sales.

Colette wins the thread!

Linden Lab doesnt publicize the the way traffic is calculated, all they allude to is that it is a fairly complex calculation. The one thing that they do say is that an avatar must dwell on your land for at least 5 minutes for their visit to be counted towards traffic. Also, staying longer than 5 minutes has no effect.. i.e. a 6 minute stay is the same as a 6 hour stay....

it used to be that land owners would get lindens for traffic (when I first joined back in April of 06 this was still happening).

I owned a small piece of land, and would hang out there with a friend or two, and I would get what was called a dwell bonus. Lindens paid to me via linden labs for the traffic on my land.

I think this is where camping items first came about, the more a land owner could keep ppl on their land the more lindens from dwell they would earn, as you can imagine it must have been a lot, being my low low traffic (under 1000 per day) would bring me average of 50L that day hehe

now multiply that by the 60,000 plus traffic I sometimes see on camped sims....

heh so yeah it made sense then to use camping devices

It's not complex at all: 1 point per full minute per avie.

That wasn't even true for dwell.

I can be skilled in one thing and need to buy things that I coulkd not make on my own - or pay for professional services.

I don't use camping but I have a telephone booth that people can step into and teleport their friend's list onto my parcel. They get some $L for every sucessful teleport. The person that was teleported does not need to stay but perhaps I have managed to introduce a new person to my parcel for the cost of the teleport.

Its all interesting stuff thanks, but I still baffled why figures can drop as much as 500 in a day? that is totally baffling.

It's very simple. More avs visiting? More traffic. Lower avs? Lower traffic. No events? No traffic, except maybe curious passers by and yourself. While the exact algorithm isn't known, it's not rocket science to figure out that traffic is going to vary based on what events are going on and how well the fact is known/attended.

Even if everyone was a master craftsman there would still be a market derived from each other's fantastical objects and a desire to possess them.



The legitimate reason is someone is giving money away. "Oh, noes! Please don't give me that free money." The L$10 has to come from somewhere. What other people want to do with their money is whatever people want to do with their money. The transaction, whether delightful or deleterious from one's point of view, cannot be stopped as it involves the pockets of two other people.



Without input from a merchant using camping we have no idea whether or not it's either positively or negatively affecting their sales.

Traffic scoring, in and of itself, measures presence. It's more effective than the previous ballot system as it measures people on parcels.

Lucky chairs can generate sales - if people look around once they get to the store. I know that I've bought things from places with Lucky Chairs. I also know that I am not the only one! All this contempt for devices that, when used wisely, can generate real revenues is unwarranted. Sure there are always going to be people who want something for nothing, but there are people who actually spend their cash too.

Or by paying Linden Labs loads of money to ensure they get higher up the listings, it's just how you distribute your advertising revenue, do you give it to LL or campers?

Only for the first 5 minutes as they said or no matter how much time?

The question is: its the same have ONE avi 5 hours that have 5 different avis for one hour each?

1 avie x 5 hours = 1 x 300 = 300 increase

5 avies x 1 hour = 5 x 60 = 300 increase

Same thing.

It starts counting from the first minute (or did when I tested it months back), and it's easy enough to just test things again for yourself.

I'll be glad when there is another way. Traffic figures at my place depress the hell out of me ... despite everyone who has been there raving about it, there's just too many nice places in SL for it to be an overnight success.

However, I am patient.

You are right.
Its only a matter of choice.

Traffic is not calculated by 1 point per 1 minute. Its an insanely complicated formula devised to keep people from gaming it, but it did not work. I don't have time to look up the thread in the archives, but as I remember it was something like: The percentage of an av's total time logged in to SL that was spent on your land, multiplied by the m2 of your land, divided by a fixed 10-digit number, then multiplied by a different 10-digit number. Add them all together at the end of the day, multiply by the total number of avs to log in that day, divide by a third 10-digit number and multipy by a fourth number. It is correct that none of it counts if the av fails to spend 5 minutes on your land, But having someone on your land for 15 minutes counts almost the same as 15 hours if that is the only place they visit during that session of SL.

Here we go again .

Feel free to prove me wrong by laying out your method of testing and the results you obtained.

What you're describing is somewhat similar to how the old dwell system worked and how it calculated traffic, but it hasn't worked like that in over a year.

And if you thought about it at all you'd realize that that system wouldn't work anymore: register 50-100 alts, write a scripty/proggie that logs one on for 15 minutes, logs off and on with the next one and the next day you'd be at the top of the list without the need for any camp chairs.

I was recalling the way it was explained to me in 2005 and I was not aware of a change. Please excuse my ignorance.