What does traffic do for a land owner?

I haven't played in a long time. When I came back, I noticed tons of places were advertising camping / camping chairs. What exactly does all the traffic do for a land owner besides getting them high on popular list? I never knew how that works.

That's pretty much it.

That's it. It's the current incarnation of the old "dwell" concept, except with no direct payout. Under much scrutiny at the moment. Some of us hope it will die completely this time, while others think popularity still has some relevance.

That is all it does. But there is the ideal that if you see green dots at a location you will take a look.
But in ancient history land owners use to get paid for high rankings. That is no longer the case, but people who never received these bonus, saw other people doing it and copied not knowing why. It is obsolute and a waste of sim resources and lindens.

The Lindens have stated that they're going to get rid of traffic counts sometime soon, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I guess they're working on a spiffy new search engine. Traffic counts are abused; shop/casino owners have gamed the system so that their places look more popular, and therefore could be considered more desirable.

*shrug* it's a lame system and i stopped fighting it a while back. My traffic is my traffic and I really don't care what my numbers are, as long as my bottom line stays stable.

When it's not being gamed, it certainly has relevance. I feel in any reincarnation/adjustment to the system, it should perhaps remain as a tool for land/parcel owners to indeed gauge what kind of real visitation a place may be receiving, but no longer be an externally viewable rating (ie. in search listings).

But isn't it true that search results are ordered by traffic as well?

I would say if you are selling robot porcupines and someone does a search for such a useful device, he would sooner go check out the store with a traffic of 10 than a store with a traffic of 0.

Well, ideally, I'd like to see tier fees assessed as a linear function of traffic: traffic is what consumes the resources.

Agreed. I like to use it to see how many people ahve buzzed my home. We also use it at clubs I help with. As long as you don't game the system, this helps you deciede if what you're doing appeals to the masses. Of course, if you game it just to get the traffic, you cut off this avenue of statistics as you just poluted it yourself. Seeing high numbers because you're gamming the system doesn't make you "popular", it usually means you're not paying attention to what your customers want. *coughsLLcoughs*

@White: while I agree in "theory" with you, I have to disagree in practice. I actually will ~avoid~ high traffic areas. By "high" I mean places over 20k traffic. Those are the places that usually are gaming the system, or just lag bad from all teh traffic.

When searching for things, I usually start at the bottom of the list. Those are usually new shops with new ideas, and freash new breaths of air into the SL Community. THOSE are the place that I find the neatest things. The old-timers, mired in their traffic can become blinded by stagnating in their security.

~Jessy

Rumor has it that traffic will still be recorded on a parcel as it is now and the land owner will still be able to see that number, what is *supposed* to change is how results appear in search. The new system is reported to be based on relevance, but who knows what that actually means.... In theory, a system that actually worked would take a search term like Jewelry and rank results based on how many people who searched for Jewelry actually teleported to the location in question and how long they stayed there once they had arrived.

I like this idea! It WOULD be useful to know what my general traffic is, even if it's not public knowledge.

As it stands, traffic just encourages the mass mindset of humanity; "if it's popular, it must be good" which isn't necessarily the case. Think of all the small designers out there who might have fabulous products but can't generate the traffic of the big houses. They're losing out, and might be forced out of business because they can't afford the rent, and we're losing out by not seeing them listed equally with the big boys.

Isn't this traffic as it is now?

its all rubbish *lol*,

Since LL reduced stipend to virtual pityfull amounts and alts gaming camping new people stand NO chance other than just camping.

Land searches are based on this information even though you get mals that have 30 people dancing on pads and NOBODY in the mal..... but the mal makes no money because there are no buyers ...

I can only hope that people will ACTUALLY play SL rather that pretending its just a job

I expect it will be a little more Bayesian (or "googlesque" perhaps) in that the relevance metric will be weighted inversely to the frequency of occurrence of the search terms that match. In other words, if "jewelry" matches 90% of searches, it won't count much, but if only 0.001% match "onyx", such matches will top the list.

Nope.

Traffic only shows as people on the land per time. Not what brought them there. So a jewlery store that has massive campers is a good advert for camping, but not for jewlery.

~Jessy

Right to the few above.... Non-weighted in search results also is what I shoulda mentioned regarding what would remain of the traffic statistic. It simply will no longer matter externally.

How to determine what shows up at the top of searches I imagine would be best served based on relevance of search terms used... The only gaming to that system is who has the best keywords (perhaps most) in relevance to show up when someone searches for something. Maybe toss in a little bit of randomness to boot (handled by the "search engine", so the same people/places don't show up at the very top every time if a simple single keyword search is done so no one person/place has a specific advantage.

Agreed, and I didn't think about handling relevance in that manner. Hmmm could work well also. The more people teleport to a place, the more relevance it has. Could get gamed though, so possibly not a sole factor in deciding relevance, but could certainly augment the relevance "factor".

I think anything will end up being gamed to a certain degree. I've racked my brain and can't come up with any way to make "relevance" work other than tie teleports and time to keywords. A web search engine can take keyword incidences on a page and use that in their algorithm but that won't work in SL where item names can be changed to anything the owner wants and so many items are in vendors where they wouldn't register.

Maybe there could be a "random" check box in the search window... if checked, it will pull all the correct keywords searched, but put them in random order..

Just wondering... am I the only one that, after punching something in SEARCH, scrolls ALLLLL the way to the bottom and then works my way up since most of the top results are there due to a bigger expenditure on the ad or camping chairs -- making relevance really moot any way?

Just curious.

There are numerous reasons to avoid the top of the list, and I suspect most who've been in-world more than a few weeks have figured that out. It's kinda surprising that merchants find traffic worth gaming, since they can only hope to attract the least sophisticated of residents. Or, wait... *duh*!

Is not all about traffic anyway, try to think about classifield where you can pay 50L and be top of the list adding spaces before the name. Why alphabetic order?
That is a waste of money to pay more than 50L for a classifield, and who is losing? LL is losing lots of lindens because of that...
Hope they will get rid of traffic very soon and fix classifields as well.

Nop, you're not. The best search engine that i can think of is the brain

"What does traffic do for a land owner?"

lag and lag every one around

er,, on the subject of traffic ... can anybody tell me if ..A. does traffic reset itself ..and B. if it does how often