Bye bye adfarmers?

LOL, anyone take a look at the Incident Management report yet? That did not take very long...

Edit: Used to be called the Police Blotter.

http://secondlife.com/community/blotter.php

It's gonna get busy....

hehe youd think they had a list of the worst offenders all lined up for after the announcement -

So they could be seen as proactive right away.


Thus building a rep before allowing enforcement to lapse.


Like with everything else.

I'm pretty sure I said that anything like this would never happen. But it did so I guess I was wrong. Of course this is a very exciting move and it could develop in a number of ways.

Naturally my first thought was about what it would do to the price of land. Personally I'm hoping for a downward shock in the price of 16s (buy! buy! buy!) and then a slow upward creep. Also, I think it will cause the price of larger parcels to fall. What? Fall! Yes. Why? Because now there will be more decent large parcels. Land prices aren't really based on quality, they are based on supply and demand. Supply will rise, demand will stay the same. The only way demand will change is if mainland starts drawing more people away from private islands and although that is sure to happen I don't think the numbers will be significant.

The other thing I wonder is what this will do to real ad farms. There are a lot of ad boxes out there run by "legitimate" advertising networks that we all hate. Those parcels are for sale for very high prices because... why not. Is this going to be outlawed? My gut tells me it won't. In which case we'll get rid of the people who just cut parcels in order to screw up the land but if they stick some kind of rotating banner ad on the parcel (perhaps advertising themselves) then what are you going to do?

I think the best result of this will be that essentially any 16 with advertising on it suddenly cannot be for sale at any price. The worst result will be that ad cutters start sticking phony ugly ads on their absurdly priced parcels and we gain nothing. I guess we'll get somewhere inbetween.

Woot - I'll be able to get the 3 big cubes rezzed above a 16m plot for sale at L$999,999 removed - even though it was there before I was - woot!

I don't think so, to be honest. This land is still costing them tier.

The whole ad-farmer business model is buy 16sqm for a small price, then fill it with crap and resell it to make a huge profit, then use that to pay tier, buy more 16sqm plots to fill with crap, and keep the rest for whatever they wish.

If they can't sell the plots through any means, the only income they can have on them is from advertisments - which generally pay through clicks on the ad. That is likely to be quite a miniscule income which in no way covers the land tier, even on multiple ads and multiple plots.

I just don't see how people relying solely on advertising plots can afford to stay in business any longer doing only that. As 'extortion' per se has now effectively been outlawed then you can only put crap on them - thankfully limited on a 16sqm, because anything like spam, sound, particles etc can be called harrassment instead.

Have just logged into home to inspect a nice clocktower I had erected around a certain root vegetables spinning ad... and it's gone (the ad, not my nice clocktower). The 32 m2 is now Governor Linden land...

I hadn't sent an AR so either he saw my nice clocktower and thought wow, that's cute... don't want to ruin that.. or....

Have any other instances gone from the grid?

Oh I mean the land is still for sale for some ridiculous price but that it ALSO has some ad on it. Making it legimate advertising.

The price of the land isn't the problem, it's the annoying ads. Without the ads, it would just be open land which isn't a problem. If they want to donate tier to LL, let them. Eventually, they will sell reasonably.

I haven't read all of this, so if someone else made this comment too, then good!

I thought the issue was about blighting the landscape, the extortion comes from the blight not the amount asked for a plot, if the 16 m plot is 'attractive' and isn't a eyesore then what does it matter what price it is set at, the only reason it matters is that the person complaining wants the plot for themselves.

This could very easily become an area where LL doesn't have enough staff to keep up with all the ARs that could pour in.

It's not really the price that's the problem - it's the spoiling methods that are used, and that's being addressed by the new statement.

And, of course, if it's a pretty plot - or even blank apart from maybe a scanner prim as part of some data mining network underground - , then why would anyone need to buy it unless they're needing it to extend their prim allocation on land they otherwise own in that region.

And increasing your prim allocation by 3 is really important! LOL

Could be if you wanted one of Phil's chairs, I guess...

I expect to see a *lot* of 16sqm plots being dumped off cheaply over the next week or so... so keep an eye out if you have any near you.

This is a positive development, but I am a bit afraid that the dependence on intent, and the advertising-specific wording, will be problematic later on.

The problem is that if quick fixes to those potential problems are employed then the result could be a slippery slope.

I have a concern too about how far the Lindens are willing to go on this and for that matter how far a 'neighbour' will go to AR a space that is not unattractive.

I am a RL graphic designer and suppose to be very good in my field. So for example if I had a 16 m plot and construction a 1 prim 4 x 4 x 10 on the area, had it dead center on the ground (not floating) and had 4 very well professionally designed adverts on each side, each with PG content, without having the land set for sale how many people would object to that?

Edit: … and would it be worse if I had 3 of these prims on top of each other with 12 adverts?

Not really. Once LL start banning the creator for multiple violations, that will disappear like the Casinos did when they banned gambling.

Well, but think of the folks with a bonus 512. They can group-deed it, buy themselves three 16s in the sim, and up their prim limit by 8.5% without having to pay tier; in my house, 10 prims is a fireplace, a bed, a table, a chair, and a couch.

It will be interesting. This is one of those things where we'll just never be able to tell, since LL is surely poised to role out much more Mainland to keep the prices roughly steady. I remember all the sturm und drang over the gambling ban's effects on land prices, when LL was simultaneously minting Mainland at an unprecedented rate; nobody can really say if the gambling ban had any effect on land prices at all.

But definitely, if this is half-way effective, it will change the Estates rental market. Themed estates will see little if any impact, but your basic tropical island will have to work harder harder to compete. The Mainland can be a huge draw--it's just more interesting--if it's managed even slightly responsibly. This step is a huge indication that LL is beginning to realize this asset is a competitive advantage for their grid.

The same people that have been objecting to adfarming for two years would object. But under the new Linden ruling there would be nothing we could do about it. So onward and upward people. Keep the advertiser boycotts in place and let them know about it. If re-selling the land does make a profit and legitmate advertisers were steered away from these plots then we may see a future without these eyesores.

Well this is just the sort of thing that was being talked about. According to a certain person's blog, there are already cases of adfarmers removing their land from sale, and not even mentioning selling the land in the description, but making the ad towers even uglier. The theory here presumably is that if the buyer makes the first move, the farmer can claim they hadn't ever intended to sell the land.

Another worry is the case Carl identified, where a 512 parcel with a house on it had a separate 16sqm plot in the middle. If someone places an ad there, it's going to be intrusive even if it's the most beautifully designed ad in the history of the world, but the farmer can argue that the buyer willfully bought the land with a hole in it, so "caveat emptor".

Same here.

Tho, they disappeared this morning about 12 hours before the blog post.

I wonder what he thought of my Mr Potatohead holding the "You know where you can go" sign.

Well yes gray areas, but that example is outright extortion and an offense directly in conflict with the TOS that should get the player banned, that practice is done by someone who is really the lowest of scum.

The ad plots near my land are still there and as ugly as ever,just not for sale anymore. I wish we could AR the ugly.

I'm rather late getting to this, but I was *SOOOOOoooooo* pleased to read that Blog post this morning

Thank you to everyone in RA (and Blog-land) who has been making an issue of this lately, and I think can take a lot of the credit for this change. And thank you to the Arbor Project, who have kept this issue alive.

Most of all THANK YOU to Jack and the other Lindens for listening. Anything they will do will be better than the nothing that is done just now.

I am a happy person today


Like Alicia said... Blog of the year!