Feedback on Ad Farm Post - Part 2

And how do you think all those malls ever survived long enough to pay the first monthly tier in the first place ? Do you suppose the owners all just sat there and waited on the off chance that you might wander past ?

You need to look up "UCE". A mall owner sending out notecards, IM's or whatever means of communication to somebody that did not ASK for the information to other businesses is, no matter how you look at it, SPAMMING, the act of sending an UCE.

If somebody sends an UCE to me, I would absolutely never place my business in their mall and would immediately AR the sender. That's what happens and that's just me.

Of course, some mall owner sending spam may get a small percentage of responses from the magnitude of messages sent, but it can be expected that the majority of the recipients do not want the spam and will definitely report it.

And yes, you may have to just sit around and wait, I have knitting stools if you want!

LOL !! That is totally and utterly absurd. The REAL world is full of people sending business cards, business invitations, etc. If people don't like them....they throw them in the bin......they don't call in the police !

LOL....how do you supposed BMW took over Rover without someone sending a letter or notice of some sort ??? Huh ? Or was Interpol called in to fine BMW for ' Unsolicited Commerce'

If it's against the TOS for one business to contact another.......then it's a farce beyond anything Lewis Carol could ever have written.

Well, this isn't the real world, dear.

Well..that is certainly true. A world where one can pay £4 real money merely for a latex outfit ought to be called The Emperor's New Clothes........not Second Life.

In a world where 90% of the inhabitants are daily being ripped off with extortionate prices by 'law abiding' shop owners.....it doesn't surprise me in the least that ad farms spring up to join the general fleecing of the stupid and gullible for every penny they have.

First of all, whatever the hell is going on here, it's totally irrelevant to the advertising policy under discussion in this thread. Unless this affects what can and can't be done with land, Jack and Concierge have no reason to be interested, and any complaints should be taken up with Governance, where all the other ARs are handled.

Second, the whole discussion of whatever the hell is going on here is hopelessly muddled at this point. The poster (or posters? are there two, or does Taff == Agnetha? and are they talking about the same thing??) may want to post a question like this in the Resident Answers forum to see if anybody can tease out what precisely triggered the AR(s?). But in this thread, and as currently described, this is just not going to lead to any productive result.

I'm not sure it is unrelated Qie, I think it's linked to this from the blog entry:

"No unsolicited dispensing of IMs, notecards, landmarks or content."

I'm assuming Jack was talking about objects there but avatars doing the same would surely have to be covered too.

Of course the issue is related.................OK so most rational people agree that ad farms are a pain in the ass. Other than removing them....what's the debate ? But then one moves on to the alternatives......and Taff and I have raised the genuine concern that more often than not there aren't any !

Anyone who seriously thinks that a new commercial sim is going to gain sufficient interest simply by creating an advert in 'Classifieds' is living in Cloud Cuckoo land.

Put youself in the position of someone who is paying 113,000 Lindens a month to start a new site. Clearly one needs revenue coming in....and fast. Sure, any true entrepreneur will have 'fall back' reserves.....and nobody expects a site to be an instant hit and pay off all the tier immediately. But...time is of the essence.

So what DO you do ??? If all means of directly contacting or marketing to potential businesses are either useless or against TOS.......perhaps one of you would be so good as to enlighten me !

And its no good business owners simply saying that they look around at what sites are on offer. No......they go to established sites.........I'll bet none of which would currently even exist without some form of direct marketing having been employed at the start.

It's related, but it isn't part of it. This is about ads on land and not about anything else. The unsolicited stuff was about objects on the land giving them as people pass by.

In have hit the nail right on the head. And frankly it's a nail in the coffin of SL. For if advertising on SL is to be sooo restrictive.....then SL can kiss it's ass goodbye.

Phil................why do people place ads on land ??? I mean.....a piece of land costs more than an advert in Classifieds. Doesn't that tell you something ?

This is all about ads on land, and nothing to do with sending out advertising notices and IMs etc.

HAHAHA I laugh when I seen on sim where I have a parcell, the ad farm parcell become Governor Linden maintenance parcell. But some people are crazy about price for selling their land....
Good job

QFT... this isnt something new, that type of spam has always been arable.

This is a fine question for Resident Answers. In fact, a similar question gets posted there about once a week. But the answer won't be to use display ads (given the current state of display advertising, there would be few better way to keep businesses *away* from a new mall). Suggestions will include holding events, advertising in in-world publications, and contacting bloggers of related content. They'll also include personal messages to actual friends, and (possibly) notices to groups owned by the mall owners (that's risky because every notice sent to a group will cause some part of the members to leave).

FWIW, *individually* addressed IMs to business owners--the equivalent of "cold calling"--might also work, and really shouldn't be ARable, IMHO, if that's what happened here.

But I still don't understand what is being asked of Jack in all of this, and how the ad farming policy should change because of it. If an AR already happened, then it wasn't due to this policy, which won't take effect for another two weeks. The proposed adfarm policy clause about "No unsolicited dispensing of IMs, notecards, landmarks or content" from display advertising parcels was surely not the basis of action for an existing AR. If something legitimate was misconstrued as spam (already an offense), then the AR can be appealed.

If someone feels that Governance's working definition of spam is over-broad, then I seriously suggest starting a thread in some other forum to garner support for that position because no revision of the adfarming policy would help.

\

Honestly Qie I suspect people are bored with getting no LL input about the Ads, Im suspecting we may hear nothing and just have to wait till 10/01. Many questions have been unanswered, office hours missed. This adds to my feeling that we will be given nothing till 10/01.

"The proposed adfarm policy clause about "No unsolicited dispensing of IMs, notecards, landmarks or content" from display advertising parcels was surely not the basis of action for an existing AR.

Yes it was. Businesses are being abuse reported ( and 'warned' ) already......merely for contacting another business !

It would appear that simply asking another business 'can I do business with you' is now against the TOS.

Hell in a handbasket........anyone ?

Look....here is the reality :-

LL rent out servers at X amount, because that is what it costs to buy, rent, etc a server.

That then determines the entire SL economy....for everything is driven ( not by all those enrepreneurs ) but by the need to ward off being booted out for not paying the tier.

That is the environment in which LL expect people to 'do business'....an environment in which they provide the most useless tools possible for the task.......yet are quite happy to charge the earth for the sheer honour of 'owning' part of this farce. They seriously expect people to start up new commercial sims..............and somehow their amazingly USELESS Classifieds system will attract people. LOL !!!!!!

It's small wonder people set up ad farms. They exist SOLELY because LL are totally incompetent at providing any truly effective advertising mechanism...........having now defined virtually all common real world mechanisms as against the TOS !

God knows why its taken 66 pages of replies for someone to figure that.

Ad farms would not exist if anyone at LL had a clue about business.

No... It wasn't based on the adfarm policy. You can believe us or not - Qie nailed it right on the head. This has been discussed in Resident Answers several times. It is considered SPAM to randomly notecard business owners to ask them to rent in a mall. When I get these types of things, I just ignore and delete them. Others AR them, and that is within their rights. It has been this way for a very long time. Please take this discussion to the RA forum if you don't believe what people tell you here, and you will have more people tell you the same thing. And for goodness sake, find some other way to market your mall other than spamming the hell out of business owners. Most of us are sick and tired of it.

" It is considered SPAM to randomly notecard business owners to ask them to rent in a mall. When I get these types of things, I just ignore and delete them. Others AR them, and that is within their rights "

Lol ! If I get a message aimed at me as a customer totally at random.........telling me I can lose 15 stone in a week using Factor X pills....THAT is spam.

If I am a business owner............and I specifically contact another very specific and targetted business owner to....er...DO BUSINESS.............if that is spam then the sooner SL goes down the plug the better for the sanity of those of us who know what business actually is !

Just a quick point here, this IS the real world, or at least that is what LL want it to be, they are pushing SL as a business platform to real world companies.

QUOTE
The Second Life Grid™ platform enables your organization to create a public or secure private space using the leading 3D online virtual world technology behind Second Life®.

One would assume in that case a company would be able to advertise the fact that they are in world. with targeted advertising, such as notecards to existing customers, but that would actually be against the TOS.

This was not meant to be off topic to this forum, I can see the abuse team reading the new rules, or tightening of rules on ad farms, and applying it to other situations, so the two are in fact linked by human nature.

Just for everyone on the eminent domain and price cap bandwagon!! I sometimes pay an avg of $L200 lindens and more per 16 sqm plot to sell to my advertising clients. Then some plots are sat on for a year or more, so tier is paid. If i sit on one 16 for say 6 months my cost may be $L280 or more. Is it fair to even draw a price cap of even $L10 per sqm and force people to sell at a loss. Im sure this may cause a great deal of problems for LL that they dont want to deal with. Now you can flame or say what ever you want about how its too bad for me it is. But, its the cost of doing business. So honestly if you bought a 32sqm plot from someone at 600 after they owned it for 6 months they may have made next to nothing. So does it seem that easy now to make a bundle off adplots. As with big plots. If you sit on one 512 for a month, you lost over $L400. Since some dealers are lucky to make that on a plot its a very cut throat business too. Both sides have their dilemas. But to sit and believe small or large plot dealers are pulling millions out is far from true.
The only 1 making money then is LL of course, they always get their cut.

Robo

I'm no fan of price caps, but I am heartened by this post. The infamous ROBO himself is showing us that yes! it is possible to starve adfarmers out of existence! Everybody! All together now! DON'T BUY THEIR CRAPPY EXTORTIONATE AD PARCELS! KILL THE VERMIN!!!

<This was a public service announcement sponsored by the Committee for the Preservation and Improvement of SL>

Well if you are not making much money from your endeavours, then could you explain why exactly you are doing it? It obviously isn't worth the time or effort.

I assume you are just doing it to annoy everyone, and ultimately make people leave SL because they have had enough.

But what has changed to make the parcel worth any more than what it cost originally? It's not like there's a shortage of them.

The only market value of a microparcel is as a threat. LL seems to believe that market forces will make problem microparcels obsolete when all threats have been removed. Unfortunately, the current rules don't go far enough to achieve that purpose, so microparcels will still sell at inflated prices for their negative potential, when their actual positive value is negligible.

And it's not like this is news to anybody, least of all someone who used banlines to aggravate neighbors into paying a ransom to get rid of them.

What's passing strange is that folks whose whole business depends on people wishing they'd go away are surprised and offended when people wish they'd go away.