Camping Stats For Your Consumption!

Meta Linden publishes the stats on the blog, and her/his office hours are Fridays 10-11 SLT. If s/he wanted to schedule camping stats in as a topic, sounds like some here might be interested in going.

S/he also has a blog where suggestions for improving the stats can be posted, but you have to be a Google member to do so:
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=696187026664513353&postID=8593177235687610472

Realy great work

Explains why "Traffic" will only get changed not removed.

Such a sizable % of the total is campers.

You need a better hobby though.

Chuckles... Am liking that comment! Specially coming from someone with over 7,400 forum posts [No offence intended!]

Hey people in the forums respond to you!

campers dont

If the green dots method gives very different results for some sims, you could check if (some of) the dots on the map might be actual green prims floating over the land - sized so they look like normal green avatar dots.

I understand that this happens



The stacked dots won't be moving (camping), but one might expect a non-camping dot to move.
But then, if I was gaming the Map dots like that, I'd run a script which made my flying dots move, come and go,....
They woldn't move in real-time on the Map of course. They would only move between map revisions, so staring at the map for a while might show (some of) the 'non-camping' dots constantly in the same place.

This probably doesn't happen... yet, anyway.



Anyhow, if the numbers don't work, I'd visit the place to check

wut would be the point of that?

in Odds and Ends they have campers up in pigs... or they used to. they move the pigs around. it's really cute. i want a giant flying pig!

The point of floating green dots is that it's cheaper than bots and attracts traffic from people who look for dots - and maybe avoid places there the dots are clustered in the way that indicated camping devices.

Jeez you lot are a devious bunch! Well it's good enough for me checking out potential sims as a rule of thumb. But yeah, I'll keep an eye out for floating green dots!

Thinks ... couldn't you just turn people off on the map? Any remaining green dots will be spoofs.

Am not sure I'll bother with the HUD. It's basically done, but all it can do is crunch figures you give it (you can't detect the number of people in a sim or the traffic figure in LSL). And once you know the figures it's pretty easy to check with a calculator. On the other hand. Having even a dumb calc HUD object out there might persuade a few people to avoid the high traffic sims which would be no bad thing.

Bingo!!

Hey another related stat for your consideration.

5,830 campers = 129,120 Online user hours per day = 3,873,600 hours in a 30 day month
A sizeable chunk of the total users online hours figure in the key metrics.

LOL!

Zomg, I didn't even think of campers' disproportionate contribution to this key stat. If campers were to disappear, LL's marketeers would be seriously screaming.

Which is really the amusing part of this information.

Somehow, LL has gotten its customers who do pay for this platform to also pay over $6K USD a day extra to the customers who don't care enough about the platform to pay LL for its use. All while LL sells the platform out from under them piece by piece to corporations and educational institutes at a nice little discount.

Phucking brilliant.

Of all the things Philip should be congratulated for, this tops the list.

OK.
Can we all now make a pact please?

NOBODY do a similar analysis for Griefers.
We don't want to know that the actual userbase of SL is only the Forum Cartel and a few lurkers.

But based on your post, we already *do* know.

Shhhhhhhhhh! Fer gawdsakes! Shhhhhhhhhhh!
- and that goes for all our alts as well.

Too late! My ears have perked!

Hi Fluf

Your traffic valuation per camper per day is about right! I made a similar calculation
a few months back when placing 2 guitarists (campers) outside my main shop. (I'm an RL accountant- eeek!) I saw the impact it had on traffic numbers the next day as well as it's cost. Its a sad way of marketing your company in order to get up the PLACES searches ladder......but there we have it!!. I also run an AV counter (does not count same AV twice) inside my shop which provides the real useful data that i require.

Regarding the campers, it's a sad fact but a large percentage are just camping farm bots that do not contribute anything to the overall SL economy in any shape or form. I'm forever banning these bots off my land, as i want to make sure that my money goes into the right hands at least......which are genuine newbies of course. At least then, there's a good chance that the money earned will be recyled back into the SL economy by purchasing essential AV products.


I'm a vendor at many malls too, i generally try to stay out of places with high number of campers and Business-in-box vendors. To be honest the high traffic malls doesn't neccessarily translate into increased sales either....below is a good example.

I rented at the Botany Bay Mall which normally has traffic of between 100 -120k, majority are campers of course! In the several weeks of renting there, i just about made a small profit. By comparision, i have rented at the Pando Square Mall (similar rental fee) since Feb 07, the traffic there is regularly around the 2k mark if not lower....does not use campers, lucky chairs or any other gizmo to falsify it's traffic. The traffic that does arrive there is pure shopping traffic. Over those months of being there, i have sold 10x rent and on a couple of occasions 15 x rent in that given month. Now that is awesome!


On that note....a little plug!
I acquired the Feminine Fetish Mall (now Lumiere Fetish Mall) about 3 weeks ago, which has been around in SL since Jan 06. I decided from the outset that i would never use any campers and try a different long term strategy. Basically by having some of the best creators there as vendors, building on it's existing reputation and by using creative ways of marketing, i think i can achieve long term success. It's all about increasing awareness around the SL grid of it being a high-end quality Mall.

IMO just placing a classified advert and using a bunch of campers is a lazy way of running any Mall. It also explains why a lot of malls don't survive longer than 6 months.
What you put in.....you'll get back out!

There's a parcel near my own with some floating prim dots, but on the map the dots are misshapen and slightly the wrong size; they aren't convincing at all, despite looking good from close up. However, I expect with some experimentation, ones could be made (probably are being made) and installed in the right way.

Now, to really mess with people's minds, I should do a stack of green dots... and run them east to west instead of north-south.

Hmm seeing it's possible to run up to 4 clients on a good machine, I suspect 20 LSL campbot clients could easily be run on a highend machine.
I'm not surprised at the figures, becasue being an Aussie on the graveyard shift, over the last 10 months I've noticed the number online sems to be nearly matching dayshift now, because campers operate 24/7, so our climb in population might just be campers.

Hmm I wonder if it would be against the TOS to set up a camper shooting range, put the pads out, wait for the bots and open fire

An additional stat that you may want to add is how to work out/estimate a *more realistic* traffic number
I have done this roughly in my head for a while just by giving the traffic figure a *major* decrease for each camper, which seemed about right for the real people around.


How to work out/estimate a more realistic traffic figure:

Have a quick look around, count the camping chairs/devices (or if you want to be *really* generous, just the ones with people/bots in them, although they could have been all full the day before ).

Multiply the number of camp chairs by 1400 (roughly the traffic created by one camper, as you pointed out) and then remove this from the About Land traffic figure (it may go negative if campers are ALL of the traffic, and they use no other traffic tricks).
This then gives you a better idea of the real traffic from people other than the campers (assuming no other traffic tricks are being used).

Or: "About Land Traffic" - (#Chairs * 1400) = Estimated traffic with campers removed.


An example: (Location picked randomly during a time of day that there are fewer people on).
Traffic = 14320
Chairs = 9 (that I saw, all full)

Best case traffic: 14320 - (9 * 1400) = 1720

Therefore real (non-camping) traffic is below this, as that figure includes people coming and looking for chairs.

Note: If somewhere uses campers to increase traffic, it is possible that they use other methods to increase traffic as well, so if the figure still looks inflated after you have done this, it probably is...

i have always wondered how of the high traffic areas the owners are running the camp bots. i was looking at a high traffic place that was for sale had about 15 campers all the camp sites were taken and all the av's had been in place for awhile, judging from the amt of money they had made some had been there for hours. so i just went on my way. i also noticed that no one was in the shops

Oh, that's bad, Ray. I dream about SL all the time, and mine are MUCH better than that.

Does it? How long does an AV have to be in a sim to count as traffic? I know its longer than you would expect, from a friend of mine who has lucky chairs, but I don't remember the actual number.

Re: owners running campbots --- I think that was really common with casino owners, who had a huge number of chairs and wanted to capture the money. However, I think now most campbots seek the chairs out on their own from lists that are available. See http://secondlifecamp.urlcloud.com/ for one site with such a list, as well as other resources for campers.

That means campers PAY to camp:



Energy costs about 0.21 USD per Kwh.

In 24 hours this is: 24 x 1457.5 x 0.21 = 7,345.80 US$



6250 - 7346 = - 1,096 USD.

That means that camping costs more on energy then you earn in Lindens. Every day campers PAY 1096 USD!

So.. what is the point of camping if it actually COSTS you money?