How to help newbies financially?

Huh! My brain must be on holiday today. I use such a method in my Security device because it used to return avs that were in the next sim.

I agree about bot filtering being the biggie, especially since only real people to look round the place are desired.

I don't get the premise. Why does giving free money for n00bs doing nothing help the SL "economy"?

Payment for camping made sense. The campers were providing a service by pumping up the landowners' Traffic. Maybe it's about as unskilled as labor gets, but it was actual payment for service.

Payment for doing nothing makes no sense.

People don't starve if they don't make money in SL. Very few people are making enough money in SL that they can translate it into something akin to political power. There is no thriving credit industry sucking the wealth out of SL. None of the reasons that support welfare or redistrubition of wealth in real life exist in SL.

If you want to draw from charitable programs from real life, pull from workfare or small business grant programs. Pay new residents to pass classes in basic content creation. Give some free advertising to new businesses. Let someone with a startup business have 30 days of traffic bots, for example. (Because if your product is good, you only need a few weeks of the bots; once you get people in the door to begin with, repeat business and word of mouth sustains you.)

I don't see any reason to just give handouts. Financial incentives to contribute to the SL economy, now that might be something useful.

Good idea.

Who would pay?

Again, please bear in mind that what sparked my suggestion was to call out the humbug in the Blog. So much noise about how camping was good for newbies who had no means of getting RL money into SL. Removing camping was to make the sky fall.




No more than any camping/gifting system can guarantee that the money is going to newbies and not to oldbie alts.
See Carl's post re pulling the altruistic device at NCI.
A system that is run by LL would stand a better chance of detecting abuse. They see the IPs, any linking data, and the profile of all activity. "Alt abuse" is already a category of AR. Alt abuse to steal money donated by the community for the benefit of the community should be a perma-ban offence.





It's not quite true to say that there is no search benefit at all in what I propose. While traffic remains as a search factor, there *will* be a search benefit to people who donate to the Community Pot.
Those avatars have to be somewhere. The key point is that they will tend to be in a somewhere that has been made attractive to them. They have choices.

The type of system that I propose challenges people.
If someone wants a Search benefit from their donation then they have to present a compelling content to the avatars that will arrive.
They can't just buy search ranking by stealth. They have to earn it by retaining the eyeballs of those that arrive.

Anyone who want to simply buy search ranking would quite obviously hate what I propose.
They might bluster about how wonderful their offerings are, but they don't have the guts to put it to the test.
Someone who can produce compelling content would benefit from their donations - even if that were not their primary driver. The avatars have a choice about where they will linger in between payout times. The places where they chose to linger will benefit from their traffic.

*IF* it is true that there is a great body of residents who have no way or bringing RL money into SL and who have no way of earning L$ then the system helps them.
It helps them financially - and therfore the merchants who will sel them 'stuff' - and it also moves them to get out and exploring a variety of places. It gives them choices.

The only people who will get less than a good deal are those who donate to the system in the expectation of reward but who are not creating content that is compelling enough to retain the eyeballs that are guaranteed to arrive.


** Reality Check **
If it is true that the newbies/oldbie-alts arriving in are primarily fixated on getting L$, then they would probably just go AFK between payouts. This would mean that the doner who produces less-than-compelling content would benefit from their AFK time. In that case, their 'donation to the community' would in reality be buying traffic.
SO: If they think that everyone else thinks like them, then they should welcome the system. It's buying traffic!

It might pan out that the thing becomes a disguised traffic-buying mechanism. It all would depend on the typists behind the newbie avatars getting L$ out of it. It also very much depends on the quality of the content being presented to them.
**/ Reality Check **


That's the challenge to content creators. Do you really believe that you have something to offer? Put your donations where your mouth is then.
Do you just want to put up some stuff and work the percentages by stealth-buying your way up the search rankings? Somebody posted that 25% of their sales were down to ranking in Places search, and that wasn't even #1 placement. The percentages do work. It's a no-brainer to understand why they do.





Again, see the 'disclaimer' at the top.
I'm an idealist. So sue me already.

Had it about 2-3 weeks now. I get about 15 visitors a day....i just drop 30 L here, 40 L there....sometimes it runs out and i'm not aware of it.

Well there's the thing....if camping chairs are banned, this thing could potentially explode overnight. The creator ought to get Jack over and clear it first...then there are no doubts about its legitmacy. To be honest i can't it see it being an issue as it does not yield high traffic numbers.

i say make a lemonade stand they can wear and go around selling lemonade for the summer. oh and tea too for the fall!!! and egg nogg in Christmas shopping season!!!
omg i just gave away the secrete to saving SL economy and i can't remember how to make a lemonade stand!!!

Maybe read Jack's blog....and take note of messages written from the Campers themselves...that should give you some insight.

Not everyone wants to create or the desire to create or take classes or whatever....a ton of people come here just to socialise, meet new people, meet a potential partner....umpteen different reasons really . You can't broadbrush a whole section of the population, it's too complex to understand. You'd only going get a clearer picture if you researched this subject by asking campers individually.

LL use to give free members LL$s weekly just as it does premium members.It went form 250L$ to 0L$ in te time i have been here
If one wants to give noobs a hand out its easy click on them and hit pay. I still feel if the noob wants to spend in here they will get money on their own. If you want to help SL businesses go forth and spend yourself

Reading some of the blog comments, I get the impression that some of the typists make heavy use of the ALT key.

I don't know what key MAC users use. But who cares? THey are only a tiny minority.





OH SHIT!!
I've just outed myself!
Only guys can make geeky jokes...

Dammm!

Thats because you have no real perceptions what goes on in SL....you talk smack most of the time. If you're such an idealist...find out the root cause behind the traffic problem involving campers...do your own research and ask....don't just write your non-validated assumptions on RA forum.......research it you're going to blow your own trumpet about being an idealist.!!

How can you ever present the solution if you don't undertsand the specific problems.

By the way, I'm not so sure this should be limited to newbies. Granted, one should hope that oldbies won't care about the L$s, but they would still make good participants. For one thing, they might be more likely to buy stuff during the visit.

And anyway, it could be an appealing social pastime "for young and old alike." The pace is leisurely but participants aren't zombie campers. There are live people to chat with who probably have nothing better to do than chat for a while. And a built-in excuse to break-off the chat when the next available destination comes up.

Hell, I'd do it. It certainly beats infohub vagrancy.

(By the way: To really boost sales with this, a merchant might hire some stoolies to chat about their exciting discoveries on the sim. I wouldn't consider that deception--more like "atmosphere." )

Oh, and Windsweptgold: Are you sure the basic stipend used to be L$250? It was L$50 when I started, as best I can remember.

Personally I'm surprised someone hasn't devoleped a system similiar to mechanical turk for SL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

This would benefit SL highly im my opionion, it would provide jobs and money for the unskilled (nOObs) and actually boost the SL economy by bringing in money that wasn't destined for SL (whereas camping just redistributes money already in SL).

Most of the jobs pay out in cents so would be perfect for the micro $L.

I can't think of any benefits for creators though (apart from extra $L in the economy), I guess they could set up workers terminals on their land and gain traffic from that but someone will probably say this is gaming the system too.

The reason this doesn't already exist is it would probably cost a decent amount to develop, I assume amazon must earn something for being the site host so there must some sort money it for them. Myabe LL should develop it themselves, although I can't really see it happening unless someone else does it then LL buys it from like they did with xstreet.

That MechanicalTurk looks a good idea actually....yes it would need to be intergrated into the LL system for it to really work.

I'm far from the smartest cookie in the barrel but over the last year or so I've been trying to work out some useful task that SL residents can complete in the style of this mechanical turk and really nothing comes to mind.

Best I could come up with is solving CAPTCHAs but that's pretty evil, and besides, not something I could personally use.

If anyone has any other ideas I'd be very willing to put cash down for the development work or try it myself.

Oh, the only other possible option would be an actual SL-Amazon gateway that just straight presents Amazons tasks to SL residents directly. That might work, but sounds damn hard to program.

People are really confusing 'getting customers' with 'getting traffic', a whole new mentality is needed to correct this. You say "Could very well turn out that 95% of these people are NOT potential customers" well in the real world a 5% increase of customers from advertising is a success not a failure.

Jacks approach seems to be kind of right, but not in the context of how 'search/traffic' as manipulated second life users mindset to date. What if traffic was worked out per unique resident on a 7 day period, rather than daily. With the removal of excessive bots, in theory a land owner would only be able to send in one alt every day for 5 of them, does this make sense?

When I first came into SL I was totally unaware of money trees, FWIW.

Was 250 for free members and 500 for those that joined.

I wouldn't have a problem with adding 5%....as long as it's not huge effort that takes away from something else that would add 10%.....doesn't sound like it would be....I'm not opposed to it....after reading the details....I like the way it sounds.

Yes...your second paragraph makes sense.....but if I understand it correctly....that would really blow a device that some of us use to judge daily traffic. Like if I run a promotion....I do like to check the next daily traffic recorded to see how much of an increase it was as to far as effectiveness....sounds like that would be difficult with a weekly figure instead of a daily one....if I understand that correctly.

One day total traffic may be around 800....but after a promotion it could be 2000....really need to see that daily....which is why I'm not on the list of people who want to get rid of the traffic figures altogether.

Rene....what if you dropped in 500L? Maybe I missed this....but do you have it set at a location where you have a visitor list maker....that will give you names of these visitors only for cross reference on your transaction list?

I don't think there is a list of people who want to get rid of traffic altogether, Mickey. I think the people you mean are those who want to get rid of traffic rankings altogether, which includes me.

In the Future of Traffic meetings a year ago, we were asked what metrics we would find useful as well as traffic. There hasn't been any discussion about doing away with traffic as a metric - only about doing away with traffic rankings.

Good question. I'm interested in the answer to that too.

I'm also interested to know the sort of ball park size of the collecting usership; i.e. not so many or so many that I don't see repetitions too often. It's that size that I'm most interested in.

Even more important for me...
I'd also like to know if anyone who sees a cone can click on it and start using the system, or if they need to join first. Ideally, I'd like a "click and use" system so that the people using it would mushroom and the potential for unique visitors would continually increase.

We need SuperQie to make it for us

Or we need to invite the Cone maker into this thread to answer the questions and discuss things with us.

So we would just refer to our parcel info to get the daily traffic counts? And the Places search would just be eliminated altogether? I still like looking at other store's traffic counts....I would miss that.

Something like that. They wanted to know what metrics would be useful to landowners as well as traffic. There was no suggestion of hiding the metrics from other people though. Traffic isn't hidden now.

OK - so if the metrics were not hidden....but the rankings were removed....how would the stores/metrics be listed?

I've no idea. Perhaps the same way that traffic is shown now in the About Land box.