Feedback on Ad Farm post

That depends, actually. If you consider a user abandoning SL as being equivalent to their avatar "dying", then what the avatar "needs" is whatever keeps the user in SL. (Of course, it's not equivalent in human rights terms to "dying" - there is no right to have an SL avatar - but it is equivalent in economic terms; the economy loses that person and all the resources/work/redistribution they could have provided)

This is why any talk about -isms in Second Life tends to break down. Capitalism in Second Life only exists in terms of real businesses (including LL) trading back and forth across the SL world, and Communism doesn't really exist at all. SL is just too different from the real world for any of these standard principles to apply.

By self-advertising I hope you mean advertising things that you are involved in - for example if I have a shop on a 512m plot I often advertise rentals on other sims that are in a different group to the land that the shop is on. These rental vendors are networked, although they are always inside the shop and are technically advertising the rentals - networked advertising ?.

Every time you pay them off, they cut more 16 m2 parcels and put ads on those new lots. You didn't solve any problems - you just shifted the problems somewhere else and made it someone else's problem to deal with.

Thanks for helping the adfarmers ruin more sims!

It is funny to hear such “logic“ from the guy who owns about 50 sims. You should mind your business.

The poker chip argument has gone in circles how many times? And you want to flog that dead horse.... again??????????????


There was no such thing as a responsible SL bank at the time. And if LL had not taken the action it had done at the time even more people would have lost greater sums of money to the con artists <ahem> 'banks'. Even if LL seized the assets of the banker avatars they would have been unable to reimburse the depositors as the bankers were cashing out their money as fast as it was coming in. Yes, maybe LL should have pursued the players behind the banker avatars through the courts to recover the money on behalf of the defrauded residents.


VAT was only a matter of time. Yeah, it's a bitch but death and taxes are the only certainties in life. SL needs another casino like it needs a hole in the head. And most definitely needs robust business regulation to keep amoral bottom-feeders such as yourself in line.


ORLY??? Sorry bud, party's over. Pool's closed, etc, etc. Deal with it. Now move along or get pushed out.

Argent, I know what I am about to say does not really add anything to the discussion, but I agree with your words bit by bit. SL IS the world imagined by children of the 1960's like me . And it is the quintessential utopian world! It is true: SL is a representation of communism as it should have been!

Sandor

Yes, absolutely! If I had to decide I'd announced it on september, 30 at 11:55PM so you had NO TIME AT ALL to re-think your strategies.

You're not the victim, you're the cause of all this!

I don't think so. Ad farmers don't buy large plots .

True every time any body buys one of the adplots, it generates money for the parasites and enables their business to grow.

This results in more destruction and shifts the problem away to a new area.

However it is important to remember that causing disturbance and frustration was the adfarmers intent all along so Tory and all residents like her, just responded to the pressure applied upon them.

They are not the problem here they are the victims, along with the many others that had to sell up cheaply or abandon land and move away.

These very people feeding the beast as many refer to it probably actually helped get to this point, by allowing the situation to deteriorate to the point it has, forcing the Lindens to step in and attempt to sort it.



You were very lucky if they trully accepted low ball offers for the plots, most of these extortionists don't deal and stick to prices for plots that even make the tier seem low.

Any body reading this that feels under pressure to purchase any of these type plots, please hold on for the time being as LL have stated they are attempting to sort this problem out.

Don't become a victim unnecessarily!

Borrowing someone else's posts, or forgot to change out of an alt?

At any rate, ya, the SL of today *isn't* the same one that it was in 2003 -- or even 2006 when I joined. Many things once allowed are now disallowed. This is but one of them. Lfe will go on without ad farms and land extortion, just as it's gone on without casinos, banks, and sexual ageplayers.

Mari

500 times a little bit is something serious ..

What you gonna do after 1 October anyway ? A political career ?

LOL

Good one )

Adfarmers do buy big plots though ask someone called MARX or another called HALLARD and one called FOOTMAN they all buy nice sized plots suitable for a shop or home and cut it up into their little 16's dump most of the area at cost and hold on to a few extortion plots as a little nest egg for later.

One Adfarmer with surname Heart may even have gone legit, and she did buy parcels in bay city!

Donut Holes

Yes, when I was forced to sell my house plot most of the land was resold around market price. The edge that bordered a linden road was turned into microplots that were sky high though.

Jack

I was reading some of the articles on the blog and came accross this at number 23
it is part of an article on massively . com




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is already some confusion about what forms of advertising are and are not addressed by this policy as evinced by the number of concerned queries we received from users in the hours following the announcement. That confusion will certainly lead to an increased workload of junk abuse-reports come October if it is not made very clear.

An additional concern for false reports would involve recognizing who is and who isn't a licensed advertiser. A licensed advertiser might be falsely reported many times, while an unlicensed advertiser may make attempts to mimic one who is licensed. Relying on end-users to send in abuse reports would seem to be opening a torrent of extra work on an already maxed-out governance team.

Still, the move is apparently widely welcomed and seen as a positive change, as near as we are able to determine. The only question remaining is whether the policy will actually be seriously enforced, or whether it will be largely ineffective, like the weak enforcement of the ban on gambling or banking.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I would like to make a suggestion regarding the content of this article when licenses are handed out it would be benifical to post a list of all those licensed.
This should prevent confusion as people could look up on the list to ensure the advertiser is licensed before putting in an unecessary abuse report.


Oh and please this time properly enforce it.

Perhaps. We shall see.

Minding my business? Why, I do!

I am sure you would just love nothing more than to be left alone to scam and extort residents in your perfect little anarcho-capitalist Disneyland. Well, those days are numbered, mate. Enjoy the next few weeks; they will go by fast.

Zero is a number. A good one in this case.

Yes, they are residents as well, and they have the same PRIVILEGES as the rest of us (no one has any "rights" in SL, except LL), but they ALSO have the same RESPONSIBILITIES as the rest of us to operate within the rules. That's the difference. Adfarmers are NOT operating within the rules, and are thus shirking their responsibilities. Yeah, they paid for the land. So did we. According to the ToS, we have the privilege to live our Second Life free from scams and harassment (no, really! that's what it says). Leave when someone harasses me? What a novel concept. Many people HAVE left already; no longer paying tier or even bothering to log in. As for asking an adfarmer to "change a few things", that little ditty has been nothing more than a silent refrain.



Don't forget the pyramid scheme con artists, and the Ponzi scheme operators *cough* "banks". Yes, I hope they continue on this trend; excluding people who are solely here to grief, rip off, scam, extort, rob, harass, et cetera ad nauseum, is PERFECTLY OK by me, and likely, everyone else, too. Well, except for those who get busted for the crimes.



Why? When the ones being implemented are effective? Yeah, sure, SL needs ads. You have Classifieds and Search. If you want more, make or join an affiliate network. Put up signs over your store. Advertise on SLX. Still plenty of legit advertising available, not to mention that ALL of those individually work an order of magnitude better than ALL adfarmer ad networks combined.



That's called "irony". You wouldn't use it. Who would? Why not?

Paying for the land doesn't give one the privilege of harassing, extorting, and spamming the neighbors.



All views ARE accepted here; I don't see anyone censoring posts. However, so is discussion and debate on the merits and fallacies of said views.

Can't. "Big Brother" says we have to be nice and give you all until the 1st of October to pack up and leave town before we can ride you out on a rail.

3 weeks, 1 day, and counting. *checks to make sure we have plenty of rope and rails on hand*

Bzzt! WRONG! Thank you for playing, though!

Ever head of Pachinko? You play Pachinko with STEEL BALLS. Pachinko parlors are regulated and licensed in Japan. Why? Because you pay MONEY for the steel balls, and to avoid true "gambling" (which is illegal in Japan, btw), you have to cash in your balls for tokens or prizes and then go to a local "prize reclamation center" to convert the prizes back into cash. The parlors themselves are not allowed to pay out cash for the steel balls.



Nice revisionist history there. The fact of the matter is that more than one bank had severe issues with losing money, runs, and liquidity shortages. Ginko alone accounted for approximately US$750,000 in deposits.. more than almost all the other "banks" combined. So, no, while Linden Lab's policy may have caused some people to lose money (if they were truly a "bank", they would have had enough liquid funds on-hand to cover the majority of their depositors' accounts; that's a RL requirement in BANKING REGULATION, btw), the amount of money residents saved from not giving it to the Ponzis more than made up for and justified the policy. Again, the scammers just could not be trusted to operate fairly, and ruined it for everyone else. Sounds familiar, no?



Correction: Destruction of PONZI SCHEMES. Casinos they had no choice. Same with VAT. As for flooding the market with land, you're right about that. However, they recognized the problem with that and have stopped putting out ANY new land for months now. Whether that contributed to the fall of the value of mainland more than adfarming and extortion is debatable. I would argue that, if the demand had been there, they would still be justified in flooding the land market. The problem is that adfarming and extortion practices killed a significant portion of the market, as people totally quit SL.

No, what was a sign of total incompetence at LL was not nipping this thing in the bud more than two years ago, certainly no later than when the "Impeach Bush" guy roamed free.

As for taking it to the court room, I sincerely HOPE they do. I so want to hear a judge say "CASE DISMISSED WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE". It makes me smile when another idiot gets smacked down righteously for abusing the court system. I just hope LL has the presence of mind to file a countersuit for damages in loss of market value, attorney's fees, etc against the scammer.

As opposed to "illogic" from the guy who owns well over 300 microparcels, ALL priced at L$9900, regardless of size or location? Wow! How creative and logical is that?

He does mind his own business, and well, too!

You should be so lucky to have a legitimate business owning FIFTY SIMS. Last time I checked, 11876sqm is less than 20% of ONE sim.

Let me first say, as someone who has been victimized by microparcel extortion, and is also a legitimate microparcel advertiser, that it is great that Linden Labs is finally taking our complaints and concerns into consideration. This kind of extortion has gone on far too long.

I am a full sim tier mainland owner (that's 195$ USD a month to anyone who doesn't know). I own land in numerous sims on literally every continent in SL. The majority of my land holds my ground level, roadside (or off road) Shops, Malls, free gardens and free live music venues. All of my businesses are my own original items, not reseller crap. Besides that I have a few homes that my SL wife and I use, and a small numer of roadside, microparcel lots, (less than 6) which I recently started using to advertise my businesses.

Now I see a lot of people complaining here that "no one actually uses them", but I have to tell you otherwise from experience that legitimate billboards, when placed at roadside, do actually have a positive effect on sales. They work folks, sorry to say. I put them up, sales increased. I took them down after several weeks to test it and sales dropped back down within a week to previous levels. It was a no brainer, I put them back up and sales went back up. People DO click on them.

Here is what I do differently to keep my ads small, community friendly, and esthetically pleasing to the eye.
A No rotation scripts!
B Roadside parcels only, Billboards are made of natural textures and are low to the ground (no towering 30M high billboards)
C My ads give FREEBIES! as well as landmarks, and ONLY when touched. So if you click on my billboards you get a free Tshirt or piece of jewelry...nice.
D Nothing over 20M high, usually under 10M. Full bright textures ONLY on the ad faces. No glow and no sounds. (although some have falling cherry blossom or butterfly particle emitters... awwww, who doesn't like those?)
E I work WITH my neighbors. I field all complaints and always work to find a solution that pleases everyone, even if that means me moving to another area. There is no good business generated by bad blood. ALWAYS be willing to trade or move to another area if there is neighborhood resistance. I use my lots for legitimate advertising, not to extort money out of anyone. I'll sell a lot to any legitmate adjacent land owner for 1$L rather than try to turn it over for a profit, and I rarely pay more than 500$L for a roadside ad lot.

Now, on the other side of this issue. A few of my roadside businesses have been plagued by predatory microparcel owners who, like someone else said, sell larger lots laced with these hidden 16M lots that they suddenly want 10,000$L to 20,000$L for the second you inquire about them. People with last names like FOOTMAN and TWINE (I saw them mentioned earlier). Beligerant individuals who refuse all trade offers, even for better and larger parcels, because all they REALLY want is a huge extortion pay off. When you don't pay, they take the for sale sign off and turn off public access too. So in my shop I have big tall red pillars. After complaints, Lindens come and turn on access again and the whole things starts anew. The price goes up 5K and the game starts over. I am looking forward to THAT ending once and for all.

The other thing that will need to be addressed (and this affects me directly) will be how to reclaim the ad farm land. I have a big one next to me in Chiron that is laced with "Anti-Ad" parcels that were bought up by a couple of alts with the last name QUESTI. These lots have access turned off, OR set to BUY PASS. About a dozen of them, all laced into the ad farm with deep pits and trap areas where you fall through prims and can't escape. No ads on these lots, but some of them do have blank prims blocking other ads. Then there are "Group owned Ad protester lots" these usually have a flower on them, but when you try to contact the group to see if you can buy and reclaim the parcel to your shop, no one ever gets back to you. I would really like to have the chance to buy up these parcels and rejoin them to my larger one and rid the sim of this ad farm once and for all, but it takes time, money and a lot of hard work. I do find though that legitimate banner owners are almost always willing to move for a trade. Only extortionists dig in like ticks.

Now, whenever the licensing process begins I want to get one. I will happily conform to any and all standards and regulations the Lindens set for this.

LL's requesting the closing of all unlicensed banks would not have caused any residents to lose money from responsible banks. A responsible bank would have issued refunds on all of their depositors accounts.

You have a warped way of looking at things and your messages are a poor attempt at trying to convince others to see things in your same warped vision. This is exactly how con artists and scammers work.

1 Ad per sim per company or avatar, that simple. LL could even sell the basic adboard to advertisers to keep track of who or what company is distributing the ads. Biased policies over policing, too much time too much Venture capital wasted. Do your main job LL and build the customer base, improve the software isnt that what your investors pay you for!

THIS JUST IN!!!!!!!!
Whats up with these guys listed as IBM employees(IBM and LL work closley on projects here) in there profiles building adboards HMMMM. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Xigola/128/128/98 . Wake up people LL sees the $$$ signs, maybe they are doing one thing right for their investors afterall! Remeber who their true allegiance is with VC.

Mr Termagant

I hope you have read this.

Is this man being unreasonable?

Is he a communist?

Probably in your warped opinion.





Shimada

I still think the ads should be no higher than 8m maximum, 20m is just unnecessary, however it seems you have a very well thought out and sensible business plan here.
Your adverts will always get clicks, because of the freebies

The freebies are an inspired move, especially if your freebies are unique items made by you, people will probably seek out your adverts, just to get them if they like them.

I haven't seen any of your adverts, but you sound responsible and have a clear understanding of good will and its power in the marketplace