Feedback on Ad Farm post

Unfortunately, he has stated that he is removing the big ads, but instead replacing them with gambling games and a small click-teleporter to his main casino location.

Of course, this also raises the question of what will constitute an "advert" on a microparcel. Do all those SLuster vendors on all those microplots count? Will Robo's gambling games count? It's going to be a rough policy to implement, seeing as how all the adfarmers are going to skirt the rules any way they think they can get away with.

I believe that license applicants should be limited to one per RL account, SL knows who's who and should not allow one individual or company to procure multiple licenses through the use of alt accounts. They are in a sense all agents of one entity and as such should only have one voice for that entity.

Thank you very much for taking the first steps toward a more livable, fun mainland experience.

Argent, I'm not sure how a) per parcel muting would or could work, and b) it doesn't address the extortion of just "being there", even when doing nothing.

As a landowner, its heartbreaking to have a 16m hole in your parcel, whether or not muted. And my suggestions are all based upon "aggregate" land ownership. If a shop keeper owns a 2048m plot and subdivides for vendor stalls, nothing would change. It is the singleton parcel of less than 512m that would be affected by "restricted use" requirements, e.g. no ban lines, fewer prims, and restricted or elimination of the ability of scripts to communicate with each other or with YOU.

While I don't know that my suggestions are "perfect", I do believe it would be "feasible" to implement in the SL engine, e.g. the server knows the both the number of meters in the parcel, and the number of total meters owned in a region. Thus, script commands like "give inventory", scanners, listens, etc. could be disabled on the type of plots that we are talking about. And, eliminating the ability to buy or sell a micro parcel takes away the economic incentive for micro parcels in the first place.

Of course, parcels larger than 512m would not be affected, and could "still" be used for extortion. No solution is perfect. But in this case, its hard to tell the difference between your garden variety obnoxious neighbor and extortion. However, it would be much less lucrative, and thus less likely (over time).

Hi Jack, long time since we have chatted, hope all is well with you.

anywho... ad farms, re the blog post

I would like to see it controlled in the aspect that ads are only allowed along the roadside, with minimum impact on the surroundings, much like billboards in the real world

no more random placed ads on 16m plots that cut into a nice area away from linden roads

the licensing process needs to be completed immediately. If people only have until October 1 to become liscensed or remove their ads.. that puts a HUGE amount of pressure on Linden Lab.

let's say, for argument's sake, that I own a large networked advertising system right now. (I don't). Let's say that the continued operation of this operation pays my tier... and let's also say that any lapse in the system could cause me to be unable to afford the tier on all the land.

You've told us that we need to be licensed by October 1, Yet the process isn't even complete for Licensing. Heck, the RULES THEMSELVES aren't even complete. So, let's assume, that at ALLS (Average Linden Lab Speed)... it takes another 2 weeks for you all to finalize the policy and process. So you make another blog post on September 18th. Let's assume for purposes of this argument, that I've had a hard day at work that day, and don't see the blog post until September 19 (Friday).

In that first 24 hours, 300 people have applied for licenses. (random guess, it could be 3, could be 3000). Of course, we must take the weekend into account.. So let's say that by Monday, Sept 22, there are now 1000 applications, which more coming in each day. Is Linden Lab going to have time to read my application, investigate my offerings already inworld, review my application, and approve my license.. in only 8 days?

Let's say that you get around to denying my application. on September 29. That gives me almost no time to dismantle what might be a massive project.. spread across 1000 sims. Nevermind that this gives me absolutely no time to sell the land, and recoup my "investment"... forcing me to either abandon the land at a loss, or carry the full load of the tier personally... without the income from my 5 year old business to pay the bill.

You need.. seriously.. to get your licensing process finalized, and in place, in a matter of DAYS... and that process is going to need to be quick. Failure to do so, is only going to hurt the legitimate advertising people, who have never been part of "the problem".

That would be _terrible_.

I am cautiously optimistic, and pleased that my distressed barking and whining has received a favorable response from the Linden gods.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE Lindens, don't back down on this. For the good of the masses, follow through. You talk tough in the blog - be ready to back it up when those adfarmers start making threats and trying to find ways around the new rules, because we all know they will try their hardest to get you to back off.

/me wags tail in hope of a brighter mainland.

Businesses in SL have a legitimate need to advertise. Consumers in SL have a legitimate need to find the goods and services they want to buy. The trick has always been to separate the legitimate from the illegitimate.

Licensing advertising networks is a great way to start. While it won't end all land extortion and related nonsense, it will make it much harder for extortionists to pretend they're in the advertising business.

We need a better way to advertise and find products and services. Search is crippled by the lack of serious browsing and filtering capabilities. I suspect this is being worked on now, since if I've thought of it, someone else must have, too.

I have a few ideas for advertising rules:

1. a) One license per RL company or live individual. If a person owns more than one company, all such companies must function under the same license.
b) Those seeking an advertising license must provide RL identification, including banking or credit card information. The account provided must be in the name of the license-seeker.
c) RL businesses seeking an advertising license must provide proof of RL business registration, including proof of ownership.
d) Members of groups functioning as advertising networks are individually responsible for the actions of the group, and subject to loss of any individual licenses if the group violates the licensing rules. All group members must meet the identification requirements in 1-b.

With this change in policy, advertising in SL has become a privilege. If you want that privilege, you must prove accountability, the same as in RL.

No, it won't stop groups of people getting together to misuse the system. It will just make it easier to identify and ban them - as actual people, not as alts. Sounds like a win to me.

2. Deceptive use of Search listings to direct people to advertising plots should be grounds for immediate and irrevocable loss of the advertising license. Let people list ad sites in Search, but only as ad sites, not as stores, events, or land for sale. Search spam eats valuable resources, not just in database time, but in user time as well.

3. No spam. Identical ads must be more than 60m apart in any direction. Some areas contain a large number of mid-sized plots, each containing a large cube advertising the same thing, again and again. This is both ugly and uninformative. The advertiser made his point with the first ad - having more in the same tiny area, which perform the same function, is just silly.

4. People have the right to peaceful enjoyment of their property. (I just stole this one from RL.) Thus, advertisers do not have the right to build advertisements that disturb the peace or make the area any uglier than local builds do already. In other words, any resident can have an ugly build through lack of taste or talent, but advertisers don't get to make it worse.

5. Advertisers do not have a special right to an unobstructed view INTO their properties. If the neighbors find it necessary to put up screens, the advertiser needs to negotiate with the neighbors.

It's obvious that this new move will not end the nonsense we've all had to put up with. Land extortion and visual griefing have many manifestations and many reasons, and can't be dealt with by a single stroke. But it gives a way to separate legitimate businesses from the other kind.

Once this is finalized, it will take a firm commitment from LL to ensure that the desired purpose is achieved. There's going to be a lot of cleaning up to do. (Actually, I think it sounds like fun. Need help?)

First, I think most people here appreciate if AdFarmers have very short time to remove their stuff or to get a license 'till Oct. 1. Those guys had to much time to harass us! License?? I like to see them disappear and newer come back again!

2nd, legitimate advertising people are not focused by this new rule I think. It's just about AdFarms like this:

Excellent!.. thank you.
My suggestion for handling real advertising would simply be to keep them confined to the roadsides, and preferrably in areas with more businesses than homes ON those roadsides. Along with previously mentioned size, content, function, and number of plot restrictions, this should go a long way towards keeping legitimate advertising out of the obvious "living areas", and help prevent it from being the eyesore it can be.

Unfortunately, rules reguarding advertising really won't do much for what is typically called an Adfarm (whose sole intent is to disrupt, devalue, and/or force high sale prices). As was already seen by a few not-so-tactful adfarmers when the first announcement of this kind was made, they will just remove the ads and use some other kind of annoyance to acheive their ends. I'll be beyond happy if/when LL can rid the mainland of this kind of extortionary cancer.

Sounds like a good measure to me Jack

Heres another one

License the use of multiple small parcels on more than one mainland sim to only Linden vetted groups.

This should allow legitimate groups vetted by yourselves the chance to carry on using them under license, but not allow extortionists to hold them causing yet more problems.
A normal owner would still be able to cut a 16sqm shape in there land if required but only in their own sim. Any people or groups with multiple small plots would be easily found out by LL just checking their land ownership.
Instant removal of all virtual assets would act as a severe deterrent to anyone wishing to bend the rules

This should make it very hard for people to be downright dishonest, and give LL an extra income from the licenses they sell

What do you think Jack any chance of putting a stop to small plot extortion at the same time as inconsiderate advertising practices?

Please say YES!

You are on a roll at the minute.

Lets stop the greedy grasper's taking from the average users of SL

Please Jack

A quick trip to the auction list seems to indicate that LL is in the business of selling 16sqm plots. Is this going to be how you dispose of the abandoned adfarm and extortion parcels? I didn't see that subject mentioned in any of your discussions. How are you going to prevent these parcles from being reseeded with replacement extortion schemes that don't qualify as "Adfarms"?

RE: What licensed advertising should be allowed to do

Firstly, it's important to prevent excessive resource use. Top priorities, should be disallowing use of particles, and local lights - both consume limited rendering resources, and the usage of them may damage content in surrounding areas.

Aside from that, limits on script time would be good too. To prevent malicious advertisers from abusing script resources.

Hmmm you should define, when an object on a parcel is an add farm and when not. If i like to create smaller addstores (256 sqm parcels) all around mainland sims is it a shop or an addfarm? And if someone bought an 256 sqm parcel for advertisment, place some freebie boxes on it and say to you, "That is a kind freebieshop, with advertisment for friends and freebieedesigners on the edge." Is this an addfarm? It is very hard to define this. If small shops are forbidden, SL startup companies have no chance to offering their content.

And yes advertisment towers are ugly, but which will be the next? Most of people in secondlife can not build really good stuff. Wait. What is really good stuff? Who will decide which is on one hand a good design and on other a bad design. E.g. i didnt like Picassos paintings, but people pay much money for that.

So ugly advert towers will gone and ugly skyboxes, self builded houses with retro look of 70s, and huge buildings in banana style will growing up.

To handle this you could share mainland in theme sims. But who have the time for control all that?

I am happy to finally see a way for genuine advertisers to operate, without being confused or associated with unethical ad farmers.

However, just a cautious mention: The characterization ”Licensee’s will be limited in number, capped to a specific number of advert locations” raises legitimate concerns. Limit in number per area/sim is a hard thing to so, and I have a hard time imagining specs that would fulfill this fairly in all situations. If you must do a limit in number within meaningful and reasonable means it’s fine, but don’t be putting a cap on how much business one can do overall on the mainland please.
It’s really more about how the advertising is placed and blends in with the environment than the actual volume. A simple community type billboard facing a hub for example could easily contain four to a dozen ads without being disrupting or ugly.

Here are suggestions for the license regulations I can think of to addressing most concerns or questions expressed here:

1. Obviously as partly mentioned in the blog post. No spinning, floating cubes, no shouting, no unsolicited chat or chat that may spam the neighboring privately owned lands, no use of particles, no unsolicited notecard or landmark givers, (unless the script checks for Llovermyland eventually, although this is best done by collision).

2. Require that billboards or advertising content be "attached" to the ground and/or a build itself attached to the ground, unless the build is a "skybox" or legitimate flying structure sitting at a min. altitude of 150m above the ground.

3. Require that the x,y or z dimensions of advertising boxes or their associated build structure be no greater than the maximum x or y length/size of the parcel it is sitting on. (megaprims shall no be used for the advertising structure or display)
(basically the billboard's height can not be higher than the maximum length of the parcel)

4. A minimum parcel size of 128 sqm should be required (256 preferred/recommended) if the “Network advertisers” does not own any other larger, adjacent and legitimately used parcel.

5. Should the advertising parcel be adjacent to LL public owned areas (such as roads or infohubs), the minimum parcel size required to post advertising should be 64sqm (128 preferred/recommended)

6. The advertising display may not “directly” face a third party privately owned land other than LL owned parcels like infohubs, parks or roads, unless authorized by the legitimate owner of that land.

NB: “directly” assumes the primary adjacent parcel while having the ad visuals facing that land with clear intent, and/or without adequate spacing between the parcel limits and the ad image. A parcel behind a road would not qualify as “directly” facing the ads; The road parcel being the adjacent one.

ALSO please define “Network advertisers” clearly in your license. Specifically what volume and ways of displaying ads qualify one for the need of a license?

Finally please leave a way for people who do not comply to set their 16sqms deemed no longer usable to a mandated maximum price. I do no feel sorry for them, but because you had no regulation to begin with and they didn’t know any better, there should be a reasonable measure benefiting all parties fairly.

Thanks Jack

I strongly support this concept as a feature, but it's simply not adequate to deal with the continued spread of the land extortion scams. The extortionists have discovered that they can operate profitably by overcharging for a huge number of parcels that disrupt legitimate uses of the land around them without bearing any content whatsoever. Owners of adjacent parcels have to choose between paying the ransom or foregoing reasonable enjoyment of their own property. Unfortunately, enough folks pay the ransom to make the whole thing monstrously profitable--quite profitable enough to keep right on carving up sims on every continent.

So while parcel-level parcel muting is a valuable feature--even when there's no advertising blight to be muted--it's unfortunately not relevant to the extortion scam as currently practiced.

But my example is about a 'Legitimate advertising person"... not about a spammer. My example is about the good-guy, whose ad network isnt' a nuisance, isn't abusive, and adds not only to the environment, but to the economy as well, by allowing real SL business to advertise.

This deadline doesn't take into account whether you are a good advertiser or not. To advertise (period) you must have a license by October 1, or have your ads all removed by then. Failure to do so, can result in LL taking your ads down, banning you for "breaking the rules"... taking your land.

To be honest, your photo doesn't show any "Legitimate ad networks. Those aren't the kinds of people I'm even talking about. Those people don't need a license.. because they can just switch to happy faces, and get around the "no ads" rule.

Those people simply do not exist.

I thought that that was a joke, originally.

I have read quite a few posts on this subject now and some of you are really missing the point completely and are actually thanking the Lindens for putting a simple discussion up on the subject of 'ad farms' or saying things like how the war on ad farms is over and we've won.
Don't get suckered in people, we've had discussions before on topics and the end result is the same. They say 'Thanks for sharing your views and opinions, it's been interesting'. Nothing actually changes though, wait and see.

Anyway, lets not focus on advertising here in this discussion....advertising has very little to do with ad farming. This topic should really be about how to stop land extortion on mainland and how to combat it in ALL the forms it can come in, of which advertising is just one.

Linden Labs is very quick to put forward the idea of officially licensing advertisers/avertisements as a solution to the problem. It should be pretty obvious that LL just wants another way to extract money from SL users in the form of another tax......advertising tax (license fees). Don't think for one second LL actually wants to clean up mainland, they've simply been looking for an angle to make money from it all. If LL wanted ad farms gone, they have the power to just do it, without of this red tape and BS.

Ad farms have almost nothing to do with advertising, you've all seen them....neon, glowing, rotating, floating, unreadable, garish, fake adverts...........usually on a 16sqm plot that just so happens to be for sale at a rediculous price beyond it's true value.

Banning or licensing advertising is NOT going to make this problem go away for ANY OF YOU........ad farmers or extortionists as they should be really known as, will just change the way they grief their neighbours, the fake ad textures will be replaced with smiley happy faces or cute loveable chipmunks. NOTHING really changes, mainland looks ugly still. The 16sqm plots will still be for sale at hugely inflated prices, but the tactics of getting you to buy them will slightly different........ a fluffy chipmunk photo / texture on the rotating floating mega prim, not an advert in sight. LL powerless to react.

Once LL launch this new advertising licensing fee, they won't give a monkeys ass about land extortion, it'll be business as usual for them, collecting payments in as many different ways as possible, premium memberships, land tiers, advertising licenses......what's next window tax or perhaps radio tax for listening to music on your land?

LL if you really want to solve the problem, forget licensing and trying to cash in on it yourselves.......just act on it, you have the power to stop land extortion, you know who the people doing it.......SO ACT !! then we will ALL thank you for it and have some restored faith in what you're saying you're trying to do to help us.

The joke, is that you don't beleive that something can exist that you personally haven't seen. There are "nice" billboards in SL. there are "reasonable" ad networks, there are whole businesses that exist with the purpose of advertising other businesses.

I presume legitimate licensed advertisers will no longer be allowed to be blocked in/screened by neighbours or other purchasers of ad blocks? For instance if you are going to limit ads to ground level... then others cannot simply tree these in?

Oh, a shill account.

As Ordinal said, those people simply do not exist. I have been all around the mainland looking at adfarms, and have yet to see an example of a "legitimate advertising person" who uses outdoor spam advertising on microplots, which is the intended focus (I hope?) of this rule.

You use words in your example, but your example is lacking in details sufficient to define what is a "legitimate advertising person". If you are referring to indoor, or even outdoor ads targeted inwardly to the plot residents and visitors, then no, the policy isn't supposed to be about them at all (again, I hope; Jack hasn't clarified my questions yet).

If you CAN give an instance or a detailed example of "legitimate advertiser" who might be hurt by this policy, please do, though.

I've simply not seen any. Please show me one. Thanks!

Where are the "nice" ad griefers? Give me the SLURLs of the 16m2s where there are really great ads that aren't aggressive rubbish. Forget billboards and all that nonsense. Where are the "reasonable" ad farms?