Feedback on Ad Farm post

Thanks for listening to us Jack, it finally gives us the feeling that we are been taking seriously ! Let us hope the pleasure, repect and trust will be back on the grid soon !

Hoping to see simular postings from you about extortion & land cutting too : If you need some feedback about this you know where to find us : At your office hours !

cheers ..

how about 1 ad per sim per avi?
how much to get licensed to advertise?

Whooo Hooo!!!

A great step toward responsible estate management.

No nonsense, clear, and final. Gonna be a good thing!

Thank you, Linden Labs, for finally doing something about ad farming. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on 16sm and 32sm parcels to keep a****les from ruining the value of the mainland sims I've already purchased. We work really hard to make our sims attractive, but these jerks--and they know who they are--come along and ruin our work and devalue our investments. We've even tried working with them--offering to let them place their ads on our parcels for free if they would only keep their billboards from obstructing views--but they won't because they know d**n well they can charge us hundreds--or even thousands--of Linden bucks to buy them out.

/me looks, wide-eyed and slack jawed.

Wow. Jes wow. This is huuuuuuuge.

I'mn curious as to what it takes to be licensed, even though I'm not particularly interested in being so. That's a policy as big as the bank and casino one -- and one that is gonna make a big ol' difference on the mainland.

Not sure what it'll do to those who *aren't* using ads but are still land griefing, but if I were them, I'd definitely see the writing on the wall right about now.

Mari

Yeah, because we clearly don't have that *now.*

:-/

Good move jack..thanks!
You guys are listening, thinking, and acting.

Still there will be thorny issues, and edge cases, as you acknowledge.

I would not like to see existing ad farms just licensed out for "officially licensed" ads (providing Google like revenue for Linden Lab) If land is reclaimed, some thought should be given to rejoining it into larger parcel... and maybe auctioning it, maybe considering neighbors, instead of just turning it over for advertising again. Officially sanctioned ad farms might be even harder to remove than existing ones.

Some have called for larger minimum parcel sizes..but that open ups more problems with land management, as others have pointed out.

Some have said there should be standard signs designed by lindens for allowed signs. But that limits creative freedom and goes against "build your world" Yes, there should be some limits against abusive signs (if that can be defined) but there needs to be some leeway for artistic expression too.

Also, it should be the right for land owners to shield their view from ads, without being subject to penalty, or destruction of builds, by Lindens responding to tickets submitted by the ad farm/extortionists. Apparently, this has happened in some cases.

My recommendation would be triple the lost property value per region caused by ad blight... paid monthly to neighbours within 256m draw distance of the ad.

Plus 75% of all abandoned land tier in proximity of an ad farm paid directly to our service provider.

But that's just what I'd do.

*APPLAUDS*

A decent move in the right direction, though I can't for the life of me think of a sensible reason why has taken LL so many years to act on this problem.

The same sort of restrictions are needed for any land griefer who uses hacked up parcels to screw up access, drive down land prices or force extortion-rate sales of tiny parcels to get rid of them. The "hiden hole" abusers are a good case in point, where an otherwise lovely and reasonably priced sim has one or more 16 M2 parcels cut out of the middle, often concealed by a few one-prim bushes or other stuff, so it isn't readily apparent until you try to place your house on the lot that some SOB owns a tiny piece in the middle of your land, and won't sell it for less than extortion rates.

I don't mind a well-crafted ad sign that is designed to blend with its environment - like some of the billboards or store signs in Bay City. They can even have light sources, within reason. But no ad parcel should be spewing particles or having lights that are clearly there not to make the sign more readable, but to force attention to their presence and reduce the value of all the land around the parcel.

Too high? 60 meter rotating sign that fills a 256 m plot with flashes of porn.

We had a massive rotating sign that was about 60 ms high on a 256 parcel. It was on the border of 4 sims that sloped downhill so that it dominated the view. When the sign first went up, the parcel was for sale for some huge amount.

I ARd it and the plot went down in price. Many people ARd it and they took it off the market. When a neighbor approached them to buy it (he had not ARd it), they claimed that LL wouldn't let them sell it..hard to believe.

So people just put very tall pine trees around it and continued to go about their creative contributions to SL.

Now after this announcement the rotating ad is finely gone but the 256 parcel is now for sale for $L46080!!!

Here is the slurl if any of you want to buy this plot. It is a nice area but I think the price is a bit high.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Marmalade/248/6/61/


Thank you LL for stopping this griefing...its been horrible for many residents.

Desmond for Governor! Oh, wait, he already is that.

Still, I like the way you think

Kitty, something to keep in mind: If you buy the small parcel at the exorbitant price, then you are funding further cutting in other sims.

Yes some kind of parcell are really ugly by these kind of sign.

First, thanks for listening and responding to residents, and for taking this necessary step in running the Mainland as a business. It's important, and appreciated.

While formulating the details of the licensing arrangements, some suggestions: Make the licenses revocable for any or no reason, and of finite duration not to exceed one year. If I were LL, I'd auction them off among qualified bidders on a per-sim basis, but that's optional. In any case, I'd be very careful that the qualifications not include barriers to entry that are irrelevant to the needs; e.g., it's not all that important that the advertising network be able to provide its own statistics or have massive liability insurance, but it is important that they will permit third-party (preferably Linden) scripts to collect any data LL decides it wants.

In fact, I strongly recommend that the advertising parcels and the prims be owned by LL, not by the licensees, and that only standard-issue, open-source scripts be allowed.

There are many more details of the licensing and enforcement to be worked through, and I may have more suggestions, but I do want to raise one important caution:

Do not fall victim to a belief that solving the advertising problem, combined with market forces, will in any way curtail the spread of microparcel extortion schemes. It will not. That problem continues to devour the Mainland, and urgently needs treatment to preserve the value of this Linden Lab business.

There are many options for addressing that problem, and many of us are eager to work with you to help design the most effective and least disruptive solution. But today we welcome this good news, and are grateful for this important and responsible step forward.

got to see adfarms dissapear first befor i`ll believe it...

Jack

I would just like to say thank you.

This is a great start and I am sure it will result in more effective Advertising in the future to, with far fewer adverts lumped together people will actually notice the few licensed ones more.

Legitimate Advertisers should be able to operate far more effectively without upsetting their neighbors

I think for a 16sqm parcel 4m wide by around 5m high to allow for a support pole would be a good size for adverts, they should be ground based only and designed to look in keeping with the surrounding area (by this I mean in a modern area a modern type billboard design, futuristic designs in sci fi areas and old wooden board style adverts in more old fashioned areas then they would actually become a pleasure to look at
I know this final request is possibly a little impractical for a lot of current mainland but I am aiming it more for the zoned sims of the future.

where 32sqm plots are used for advertising I would like to see adboards no larger than 8m wide with 8m in height and this should be the maximum size so we don't get people 64sqm or more to place mega prims on them etc.





But this still leaves me worrying about the mess the mainland is in due to the cutting that has continued to occur many 16sqm plots are still being ransomed at huge markups by a few unscrupulous users, who can still cause virtual environmental damage using terrain editing and placing ban lines.

These need to be stamped out to restore the mainland effectively otherwise many sims will still be left with a patchwork of plots.

But one last time THANK YOU Jack and all Lindens involved in this new policy announcement.

Thank you for taking this important step. Although it seems that there still are some specifics to work out, this move will solve many mainland issues and help to beautify and take back many lost areas on the mainland.


I share the concern that others have mentioned about abuse with the regulated system but I am sure you have considered this and will take strong steps to stop it.

Here is a thought or suggestion that I just had...

When I imagine a controlled, regulated advertising system, I envision uniformed, tastefully done ad boards, not too tall and completely void of lights, movement, sound and note card/landmark spam placed along the roadside at the center of a sim. Not the full length but sparsely placed. What about adding an attractive feature, like an information center and making the default landing point near these areas. This would reward any businesses that choose to buy land by this happening area by providing some walk-in traffic, thus protecting the land prices. It would also encourage business owners to pursue advertisements in these controlled locations. Maybe make this almost like a sim square. Something that is attractive to own land by. It is important though, that the number of advertisements be very limited.


We saw some of this manifest itself in some of the Bay City sims where prices/interest was higher near the main street of the sim.

I have never really believed in the effectiveness of mainland ad lots. The areas were really viewed like a plague but if the area was pleasantly done, laid out well and had some character, I could see where it could benefit a business to advertise there.

Can I say again, many thanks, many thanks and many thanks for respecting our feedback and taking a serious approach to this problem?
Thank you
Brodie


I forgot to mention that this move will dramatically remove the demand for 16m lots. If there is no demand for the 16m lots then the ad lot splitters are less likely to buy land at market prices and split into 16m lots for profit.

Good news.

Number of licenses should equal the number of licensees the LL staff are able to oversee without distress. Starting with fewer then raising the number if it's easy to deal with is, I think, a good way to do it.

No matter how small or how large the minimum parcel size, people will use them to take advantage of the larger parcels nearby.

Not to be a pessimist or anything, but it seems unlikely to me that this approach will actually work. You're forbidding one very specific thing that these bad actors are doing, but since what you're banning isn't actually central to their goal, they'll just change their strategy enough to escape your ban. It's like forbidding, I don't know, only bright-orange explosives on airplanes; the bad guys will use blue explosives instead.

If, as you say, some of the worst of the problem is people putting up tiny ugly plots in order to sell them to nearby residents for high prices just to get rid of the ugliness, how is banning certain forms of advertising going to help with that? Sure today those tiny ugly plots usually / always contain advertising, but once you ban that they'll just have ugly "abstract art" instead. Or porn, in Mature sims. Or political slogans. Or really anything else unpleasant that the tiniest excuse can be made for.

Won't they?

The same comment applies, to some extent, to things like proposals to ban 16x16 parcels; although there since they'd have to use 16x32s instead they'd at least only be able to afford half as many. On the other hand this hurts people who have good uses for 16x16s. (Maybe they could be banned only if they aren't contiguous with other parcel(s) owned by the same owner or something?)

The thing we really want to ban is putting up ugly things just to get people to buy the land from you for an exorbitant price. We could can that, but the amount of subjective judgement required to enforce that is troublesome.

He said profoundly.

UNfortunately, that is precisely why this solution is only going to be partially successful. Basically, what will happen is that all the adfarmers will either now sell out to the land extortionists, or will become such themselves.

As such, it cannot be a comprehensive plan to repair the mainland without addressing the other side of the problem.

Still waiting on the other shoe to fall....

Still many questions and details, but thank you for a clear, unambiguous statement of intent!

Sounds like a good start Jack. A few comments on some of the comments - restricting the division size of parcels is a bad idea exactly for reasons outlined - some people need to be able to have micro parcels for rentals, media placements etc, however restricting selling any parcel below a certian size is a great idea. This would not only help reduce the ad farms, but also the extortionists that buy a plot, take a 16m cut or a few of them out, dump the rest and set the price of these middle of the plot cuts at outrageous prices (some thinly disguised as selling these plots for 'extra prims').

Some things I would like to see as far as enforcement:

No ad plots allowed on beach areas, or in the middle of a large body of water.

Offer people that currently own these ad plots for LL to purchase back any of these ad plots - if you don't there will be a huge dumping of this land and then speculators will just raise the prices again and again. Take the parcels that people sell back to LL and then either use them for parkland, or allow adjoining landowners to purchase them by submitting a ticket request - yeah, that's a lot of tickets probably, but hey, cleaning up the mainland is a worthy cause!

More responsible dividing of Linden land that goes to auction - it is the auctioning off of odd sized parcels that don't fit the tier schedule that often results in the bits being chopped off and going to ad or extortion cuts. Sometimes it's unavoidable due to the size of the land, but in such cases why not cut the parcel down to a standard size and plant trees on the leftover areas, make a small park, or something to actually improve the mainland look.

For future sims that have roadways, make even cuts so that the land by defualt can be parceled into standard sized plots (divisible by 512m). Granted this will mean a bit more Linden owned land in order to make some roadways, but you can have DPW create rez areas on the side of the roads where this extra land will be taken (or boat rez areas on the protected waterways) - we need more rez areas anyhow to promote the use of roadways, waterways etc.

Require than any ads that are allowed be phantom so that they do not interfere with driving, flying, boating etc

Keep up the good work that concierge team has been doing in getting small abandoned parcels sold back to adjoining land owners!!