I told those ad farmers, I told them so!

This is the best news ever - Well Done Jack and the rest of the Lindens involved.

well .. I can respect your position ..

But since its only Ad Farming is banned, I wanted to be fair to them. Even after they yelled at me.

Land pricing may drop a bit as well in the process, but probably only temporary.

Here's hoping LL will also develop some scheme for land consolidation, to group all the prim plots people have because the adfarms basically messed everything up. It's not uncommon for people with a 512 plot somewhere to have 2-3 prim parcels scattered around the sim as well. Combining all those primparcels into 1 plot would be convenient.

With a handful of good neighbours you could arrange this yourself ofcourse. Maybe even come to some agreement to all use 1 prim/parcel for landscaping together, or something like that. Something like a communal park with lindentrees and a little pond and a bench, simple things like that.
Or communal showers for the mature areas

…and then who will you go after? maybe you can target SL art that has spinning cubes in it?

This is my first truly angry response in the forums.

This is a cop out, the term 'ad-farming' has been used to pulled the wool over your eyes, you have lost sight of what the REAL problem is, it never was advertising per se, it was extortion, so far the solution offered doesn't address extortion at all. Sheep.

Well it does to a degree. Improper use of banlines, which has been the extortion tool of choice recently and no more spinning ad cubes are both designed to curtail extortion.

Jack's reply in the Forum thread (/346/78/280361/7.html#post2135303) makes it clear that they intend to follow-up with other Mainland problems, and I'm pretty sure we can keep their attention on extortion--it will be difficult to miss from all the posts on that thread.

A ban on extortion scams is not an entirely won battle yet, though. Just because of some laughably naive RL political beliefs that run rampant at LL, it will be very difficult for them to be disabused of the notion that magical "market forces" will fix the extortion problem. And I really don't know how long we'll have to wait for them to wake up and realize that the microparcel count will just keep going up, even after the adfarms are well and truly gone.

I don't know if they even understand why that's such a disaster for the viability of the Mainland, or why it's still the same moral hazard at work as it would be if each of those overpriced microparcels had a fullbright spinning goatse megaprim that gave out phishing URLs.

I really think they don't completely get it, still, and are politically predisposed to misconstruing the obvious. We'll need to keep educating them.

I would love to know if the spinning cubes ever actually got anyone extra sales anyway.

In four years of SL I have never once seen one of these adverts for any store which I had heard of, so to speak. I mean, none of the quality creators seem to use this form of advertising.

Surely, when there are so many, they must do SOMETHING for a store. But then so many people wouldn't be seen dead in a store that uses this type of advertising, I am intrigued how many stores have actually behefitted from this style of promotion.

I don't know, but most of those cubes I saw were actually for sexclubs and bussiness-inna-box vendors.

Already done, Dnali. A long time ago, I posted a kudos to LL (I think it was in support of the banking reform policy). I said, "ad farmers and bot runners, you're next."

And see what happened?

The generals of the bot armies shake in their boots at the mention of my name.

dear mister land extortionist:

i am writing today to offer you 1000$ for you land the offer droops to 200 come Oct first.

sincerely you vindicated neighbor


hehehehe

This afternoon, I noticed that an adfarmer across the Linden road from my property is now gone. He was on a 16m plot, and his adfarm kept growing higher and higher into the sky every time I looked his way. I know the Lindens had cracked down on him a while back for ban lines around his micro plots because it said so in his profile. Maybe some of these creatures are starting to feel the heat and they're packing up their ugly before the Lindens do.

I wonder what will happen to all the micro plots now for sale at outrageous prices now that adfarming is on its way out?

Hopefully they abandon them or sell them at the current market rate as tier keeps eating into their profits.

You'd think. But unfortunately, it doesn't work that way because tier for a tiny parcel is, well, tiny... so one can own a hell of a lot of them for very little or no cost above being a Premium member. And then sit and wait. Eventually somebody, somewhere will cave in and buy one of those tiny parcels at a huge price. That covers tier on the existing land for, oh, the next millenium or so, with enough left over to buy another bunch of such parcels.

Once the scale is large enough, the practice is monstrously profitable, selling land that has essentially no value to the buyer but that inconveniences the non-buyer.

That's the difference between opportunism and extortion: the opportunist sells land that offers special value to a buyer; the extortionist sells land that causes a problem unless bought. And that problem can be pretty subtle without degrading the extortionist's "business plan."

In a mass market where there's always somebody somewhere willing to pay the ransom, the only thing that does interfere with the extortion schemes is the existence of yet more extortion schemes. That's why the entire Mainland can never be fully paved with microparcels: eventually there's an equilibrium where there's just nobody left on the Mainland willing to pay anything because there's not enough unchopped land to make it worth trying to sew it back together. That's about where we are now in sims where even L$ auctions of abandoned parcels go without bids. This is what happens when the tactic spreads to multiple competing extortionists: they reach a density that's higher than the optimum even for the extortion scams.

It's a density *much* higher than optimum for LL revenue. That's why they need to do something about it, if they want to run the Mainland as a business.

I've noticed some 16M plots with banlines near some of my land, the owner is a guy called Governor Linden, can I AR him?

You can just for giggles. But I think we can assume that land used to be owned by some addfarm and was released to the gov. Or possibly, owned by someone breaking the rules and taken into custody while the Lindens are sorting things out.

You could do that. With all the faults the Lindens may have from time to time, they are known to have kept a sense of humour.

From talking to one mainland adfarmer recently, he said he owned over 10,000 plots. His plots ranged in size from 16m-64m. He couldn't remember where all his plots were.

thats over $400 a month in teir i can't see it working math wise,i can see people wanting it to work telling themselfs i'm making money but i think they have to end up losing money