Is Dwell an Effective Business Tool?

I casually made the statement that dwell is a fun game for people that want to pay more than they earn for the prestige of winning; but it's useless as a business tool. That may not be true though, so I'm asking as simply as possible. Feel free to comment, but please at least vote so I can feel important.

Oh did I type that out loud?

I understand that odd person under theoretical business model dealing with highly specific product and incredibly small customer base can of course find a way to salvage any number by manipulating it into an effective proposal and that business people make money, not apologies, blah blah blah

Please post that stuff to the Land and Economy forum and talk seriously here about what you've seen and experienced in Second Life. Your candor and restraint will both be very much appreciated.

My experience is that many of the 'popular' places are merely those who pay people to sit there like vegetables for hours on end in camping chairs, with no regard to providing a quality or interactive experience - they just want to be seen as popular.

I had a traffic of 120 recently which gave me the princely sum of L$15 for it. Effort went into earning it, and everyone who came did so because they wanted to, not because they would become rich for sitting there.

Camping chairs and dance pads have ruined any benefit that traffic levels might have indicated. Personally I think they do more damage than benefit.

"Pay for popularity" has ruined Sims Online and it's doing it here too.

The solution? I'm not sure that killing it entirely is a good one. It's part of the game that if you do not touch your PC for 30 minutes you are automatically logged out - so it would be helpful if LL started policing areas where camping chairs were in use, and bust people who are cheating by overriding that timeout. That would be a good start.

Lewis

Dunno I use it as a gauge of how many people dropped by waterworks

It would only truly be an accurate and useful way of determining how popular your land or business was if Dwell was not a relative figure in comparison to other land and businesses. Since in comparison to a place that has hundreds of camping chairs and pays people to sit all day doing nothing, my small "for the helluvit" Japanese Sanctuary is never gonna be comparable, and the amoung of dwell i get is dependant on how muc the huge builds get...it isn't really a accurate view of how many people visited my place and enjoyed it. It is only an accurate view of how my build compares to the other builds...which is really a different thing entirely and highly skewed by things like camping.

I use simple visitor counters set at the TP area of my land to get a real idea of exactly who and how many people visited my build. That seems more useful to me anyway.

Dwell has never been of any concern to me in designing my builds or my businesses. I rely entirely on sales to support my business, not dwell from camping...and I get sales by trying to make good products people want to own rather than by being at the top of a Find tool search.

So...I see why some people use dwell to draw people to up their popularity based on sheer number of zombies rather than product value...but it isn't for me or my business model. I myself avoid any place that has camping or casinos. Not my sorta place or people as a general rule. *shrug* I guess in that way it does help me decide where NOT to spend my time and money.

There were no middle choices; it was either "effective" or "useless." So I choose Effective simply because technically it does bring income. But it would have to be up to the business owner to combine it with other strategies to make it truly effective for them.

Killing it would kill the game for many Second Life users. But, killing it would free up a LOT of system resources to allow the grid to operate more smoothly. I'm torn on this point although I can think of several useful numbers, such as number of times people clicked the teleport button on a FIND or classified window over the past thirty days, that might be accumulated and reported if those system resources were made available.


It's true that getting money for nothing is good for the bottom line. Generally though, it's been my observation that people pay much more to attract and retain the dwellers than they can ever hope to make from dwell. It's the score, not the money, that's important. Come to think of it, a good chunk of resources would be freed if dwell payments didn't have to be calculated and distributed every single day. The gamers would still have their game and even the greatest dwell lords would only be giving upa few dollars a day. Do you think people would be willing to give up the payments for a smoother running world? Hmm

Dwell is supposed to reward people who create builds that are attractive to customers of Linden Labs, to encourage them to keep paying.

The problem is that it rewards people who create builds that are attractive to people who are effectively low-paid employees of Linden Labs - basic users with limited discretionary spending who get paid 20c a week as "extras".

It should be changed so that paying customers are worth more dwell. Premium accounts and basics who rent land (say, officers in groups with land) or who buy Lindens should shed at least 10x the dwell of basics.

(I'm not saying this because I want more dwell, by the way. Most of the people who hang out on my land are basics... I'm saying it because I want people to have more incentive to make builds that are simply fun to hang out in)

Truth be told, dwell/traffic doesn't pay anything worth the trouble... With Dev incentives gone it is costing people more than it's worth to get high #'s of dwell, and how they are paying for it, I have no idea... but the only thing I think dwell is good for now is to bring in attention to a shop or mall.

True, there's no way that the payments can match the expense people put into it. Classifieds work the same way. There are a number of people who will just pour money into being on page one whether they earn that much from their inworld businesses or not. That's their game and it works well for them. At the same time, it makes dwell and classifieds both useless for their intended purposes.

I won't argue that we should deny people their game though just because they make a couple of tools ineffective for the bulk of the population. I will argue that the processing cycles our common asset system devotes to the dwell calculations and payments could be better used to serve larger segments of the population. If LL want a million users on this single holy grid, they're gonna have to start considering broader distributions of the systems limited resources.

What a fantastic idea. That actually removes the reasoning for people to put camping chairs out, and makes it even more economically viable to do so.

I've always thought that dwell should be divided by the amount of land that you are using too - a fantastic build on 2500 sq m will never get the dwell of a crap build on a whole island simply because of the time it might take someone to explore the island and decide it's crap.

A casino offering camping chairs and *ingo will always attract more people, even though half the time they may be waiting or just zombies, as opposed to something where there is much more to be done.

It's always struck me as odd how when everything seems to be so 'economy based', such a flawed model is used to measure 'quality'. What Sims Online does would be a much better model.

In TSO, each property has a choice of which category to put itself in from about 12 options - or 'no category'. In this way, all the top malls and clubs can compete with each other, yet the 'little people' like me who have smaller properties can compete amongst others with similar properties instead of trying to pit ourselves against island-wide casinos. If people wanted to split their land into several different categories (such as a club, a mall and a casino), then they simply split their land into three parcels and let each piece of land generate its own traffic.

One thing I think most people can agree on ... is that the current method of calculating popularity is horribly gamed beyond any stretch of useability.

Lewis

I doubt that anyone at LL will prop the idea that dwell has been successful in achieving it's intended goals. But it has become a fun game for a sizeable, active set of our population. So it does serve a purpose though not nearly as important as it's original purpose.

This is a nice idea, but would greatly increase the burden on the asset system as it would have to check our status as it it went through the calucation sequences every day. I still maintain that eliminating the payments is the best option for our world.

I use it to measure how effective my advertising is working. It does not always equate to sales though. Sometimes my traffic for the day is under 1000 and I have sales through the roof, other days its over 2000 and I got the same sales.

Though my point for advertising is for growth and to drive people to my shop, not just immediate sales, so yes, I find it the only tool to measure this right now.

Why? You can do this on the front end... when you sign in for the day, it calculates whether you're "high dwell" or "low dwell", and when you're in an area long enough to start shedding dwell it can record "1 point" or "10 points" depending on whether you qualified as "high dwell" when you logged in.
I'm going to have to write up "a tale of two dolphins", which should explain why I think dwell payments make economic sense both for Linden Labs and for the Linden Economy.

Three points:

First, why do you seem to keep forgetting that the majority of "businesses" in Second Life are mere con jobs? If you'd ever just get that, Khamon, and view the world as a giant pyramid, Nigeriam spam scheme, it would start to make more sense.

Second, dwell (and the resulting dance pads and money chairs) effectively prove that people are content to use IRC and AIM to communicate, but they prefer to feel futuristic and on the cutting edge by making the software 500% more ineffecient with a 3D interface. If I'm going to sit in some place and chat with someone, I don't need to have that action emulated. Kthxbuymybook!

Third, it's an effective business tool for Linden Lab, because it brings businesses (see first point) into Second Life that appeal to a clientel (see second point) that want to feel like they're a part of the future. So, yes, it is an effective business tool, just not the way most people think of it.

Edit: Okay, four points... Dwell shouldn't be an ordeal to process, because -- say it with me now -- SECOND LIFE IS A MASSIVE PARALLEL PROCESSING SUPERCOMPUTER! If they're accumulating all these results on some ten year old P2-500mhz machine under Cory's desk, and not distributing the calculations of dwell-per-sim per sim, then Linden Lab is even more b0rk3d than I imagine.

On second thought, they probably are, which means they probably are...

Are you referring to LL conning us into believing we're using a gold product when it's actually an experimental beta? Or are you talking about resident operated businesses?

I see this a lot with wireless products. Look at our shiney wireless computer lab we da bo55 coooool please ignore the fact that units are constantly dropping offline, permanently closing their printer connections, and communicating very very very slowly. HEY now your man can browse da web on his cell phone awhaw yeah please ignore the fact that the typeface is point 0.03.

Kindof the point, that system resources are better spent on things that vastly more residents than the ones that play the dwell game.

There's a difference? I thought "Linden Lab" was some kind of long-standing, FIC organization that. Are you telling me I'm wrong?

Like what?

I check in with the vendors at the Phoenix Spa Resort frequently to see how their sales are going (both in weeks without as many events, and in weeks where we have had large events). From their responses as well as a hard analysis of my own data I would say that sales have increased for me and also for other vendors at the spa when we have had big events and higher traffic.

This may be more effective for us because we have never resorted to moneyballs or dance pads or camping chairs to get dwell, so people are actually present when they are at our venue. This has meant that we've never been on popular places, though we have more often than not been on the DI list. The people who are there are there because they want to be and are awake (and thus more likely to shop) the whole time.

So, Dwell CAN be effective, if the people dwelling aren't unconscious.

Like "number of times people clicked the teleport button on a FIND or classified window over the past thirty days, that might be accumulated and reported if those system resources were made available." You're going to die having never read an entire thread at once in these forums aren't you.

I'll rephrase this, LL limit the number of prims we can use in a sim because they all have to occupy memory at once, including textures, and there's obviously a limited amount of RAM available in each machine. There are also limits to what the system as a whole can accomplish in terms of data accumulation, calculation and reporting. The constant recording and calculating of dwell, along with the daily updating (paying) of account records, is a drain on our world's resources that we might, generally, rather use for something more productive for more people.

I only have a few suggestions. But I wonder if anybody even cares enough to think about it.

Persephone, it's good to know that you are able to use traffic numbers as confirmation that hosting events increases sales in your area. I still have to wonder though if it's necessary to calculate every bit of dwell for every single avatar on every tiny plot of land twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.

Of course that might be a tiny little minute drain on the overall system. Perhaps I should ask in the hotline.

i find it's an effective tool but as with any measurement, the numbers aren't everything. you have to see how the numbers were generated.

a 1000 dwell with absolutely no camping chairs, events, or dance poles is not the same as 1000 dwell with all of the above plus tringo and 10 rotating alts.

i find its more useful at measuring ones own improvements in generating traffic and figuring into the lives of second lifers then as an objective way to measure the popularity or relevance of independant locations.

thank you for sharing your industry secrets

This should say...vastly benefit more residents...Thank You Suez.

I posed a question in the hotline to see if any Linden wanted to participate in the discussion.

I tend to agree with Jauani completely here. As a personal metric - it’s most useful. Using that data, I can tell (for example), that Mondays are historically non-busy days for us, and Fridays aren't what you'd think they'd be.

I wish there was an LSL function call to pull the numbers so I could track them long term in a nifty graph.

However - using dwell as a comparative tool against other folks is completely useless, IMHO. Not only that, but the inherent competition in attempting to achieve higher numbers than the next guy inevitably devolves into gaming of the system.

I wonder what the wora'uld would be like if we could toggle the dwell calculation in our land settings.

Interesting indeed. Especially if it were 'Off' by default