Feedback on the Mainland - continued

I opened this thread for anyone who wants to continue the discussion.

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Having seen some ideas for zoning previously existing mainland, here is my suggestion:

Make one of the zoning options a minimum land area ownership for the sim.

I think this would be a good tool, because its simple to understand, with no subjective grey areas. No changes to the SL software would be required, other than presenting the zoning information in the land covenant. Violators can be dealt with via AR. The software would still allow cutting and sales in the process of rearranging land, or creating small parcels for special purposes like media channels.

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I like the previous ideas of

* allowing residents of a sim to vote for a zoning plan, with some suitably high percentage required to pass (like 75% of the land area),

* a delay to implement the zoning (such as 30 days), which allows people who are zoned out time to sell or rearrange their stuff, and

* an offer by governor linden to swap equal area land elsewhere to people "zoned out".

* reserving some amount of area as permanently unzoned, for people who like their free for all anarchy. Perhaps one continent can remain "Unzoned".

(personally, I would not mind seeing 16m ad farmers moved to a sim thats ALL 16m parcels *smile* )

Best. Suggestion. Ever.

I want to go with all current mainland that is not zoned remain unzoned, and any new continents be zoned. This will reduce confusion and allow people to who want to move to a zoned area to do so.

Ad farms, I want visual muting, since LL is seriously not the greatest at consistent enforcement of already existing policies.

There is way too much focus on advertising and not enough on griefing. We're all being reeled in. Griefing is the issue, not advertising.

I don't know.. I want to say that ad farms are griefing. Regular advertisers know that a 16m plot in the middle of nowhere isn't going to generate enough traffic to cover the costs of it's tier. Thus, the ones owning ad farms are only doing it to extort money from surrounding land owners to get rid of the blight.

Yes, absolutely. I've said this recently - ads per se are not the problem, it's the griefing and extortion - the ads are just a means to an end. If they only make rules about ads then ad-farmers will simply turn to other methods.

LL's lack of timely and consistent response to AR's also makes the problem worse. I don't know what's going on with this preferential treatment, whereby victims are made to remove screening and the adstortonists are left to carry on regardless and not firmly dealt with at the same time. It's making a bad situation far worse and causing a lot of anger about the injustice.

Visual muting of some sort would be a great thing and put the remedy into a resident's own hands - the number of AR's that LL then have to deal with would hopefully be reduced.

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Aes

Ah, I see.. I'm running into the "definition of ad farm," issue. You see, I have nothing against well done advertising, such as those used in clubs and other popular venues. I can even understand some against Linden Roads.

The 16m in the middle of nowhere isn't going to get traffic, so the sole purpose of those are to extort money from neighbors to get rid of them.

I guess, I'm kinda defining it the same way as you all? Except I'm calling them ad farms?

Edit: So, I'm going with advertising and ad farms as being two separate things in my mind.

better idia ban all ad farms and all other land extortion practuses in all sim then have new sims where you can have ads

Right. But it's awfully easy to be too generous with "advertising" as a label for what we see in-world. There's a tremendous amount of disinformation around about how successful in-world advertising is, and what's really dangerous is that the Lindens intensely want to believe that in-world advertising should be a good business. But look around: the most common advertising networks spend almost all of their image-seconds with ads for advertising, not for real customers. And sometime when you're really bored, find one of the shops or venues of a self-advertiser, and look at the parcel traffic there: factor out on-site campers, and the numbers are abysmal. The only way in-world "billboard" advertising is making anybody any money is if the ad-runners are seriously deceiving the merchants who pay for the ad impressions.

Now, maybe that's just because there are so, *so* many advertising networks, all desperately competing (to absurd heights) for anybody's attention. Maybe if there were only one or two small ad displays in any sim, maybe, perhaps, possibly it could be a legitimate business.

My point is that, right now, there is *zero* legitimate billboard advertising on the Mainland. None. It is all deception--most generously, self-deception.

So, if LL is serious about making in-world advertising more professional, the very first thing they need to do is to dictate that any statistics about ad effectiveness are collected by a third party--preferably, LL itself. In this environment, no sensible customer would believe numbers supplied by any ad network; it would be complete folly.

But really, until there exists honest, reliable, third-party data that in-world display advertising can work at all, any attempt to make it work "more professionally" may be a fool's errand.

You'll have to include the 32s as well, and maybe even up to 64, from my recent experience. They are well prepared ror for a ban on 16s.

no definations needed really all bill boards exept those for bussiness on that land ,then it's not really a bill board ,forbidden ,signs inside the store not counted and if your land is set higher than 3 times the monthly average you can't have any prims on it

*nods* Thank you Qie, that is something to think about. I'd forgotten that the numbers for advertising are usually inflated in the favor of the ad network. I don't have any ads running with anything other than LL, which means that I have no real idea how these things work.

I once had a 16 with the standard three prims on it and was bored enough to watch it for a couple of hours while SL was having an asset hiccup. A good 90% was ads for the ad network and the other 10% were for non-SL related websites, usually of the XXX variety. Thus proves your point.

this is true. The problem that legitimate advertisers have to face is the fact that the griefers and extortionists are using advertising to grief/extort and it causes many of us (myself included) to lump them all together into one category. I will try to avoid doing this.

Whether the intention is there or not, having absurdly huge full-bright blocks hovering over your home does cause grief, and if it is advertsing, it is done to make money. Some advertisers are going to have to be much more considerate if they wish to avoid being justifiably lumped in with the more blatant extortionists.