How can an roadside billboard network function in Second Life?

I dunno; it's funny how people adopt their SL "world view" and sense of in-game scruples.

Full disclosure: A year or so ago, I wrote an elaborate, massively scalable networked advertising and vending system, with all kinds of geeky bells and whistles (never actually used) to associate specific ad impressions with specific sales, etc. It was used by a little cooperative of advertisers for a while; they'd rez a billboard or two on their parcels, showing the ads from all the cooperative members; one even hired newbies to wander around busy spots wearing networked "sandwich board" attachments. And it was geeky fun watching all that data flowing into the servers. It almost felt like a real business tool. (The whole cooperative later folded after a key member left SL.)

I delivered the thing full perms, so for all I know, some of it may live on in some current ad network, but actually I'd guess that a lot of scripters have built something like this and just don't talk about it. As large-scale scripting goes, it's pretty simple--no hairy pseudo-physics, nor really many LSL functions at all besides comms and basic bookkeeping. And it hooks-in to RL programming that most everybody knows from their "day jobs."

Now, I was fairly new when I built this; I could imagine a different trajectory than the one my SL has taken. Imagine if, once completed, I didn't have a dozen new things competing for my SL interests ("ooo, *shiny*"; imagine instead that I'd gone around buying microparcels, so enamored of the "commercial data" that I could convince myself I was doing business on some grand scale, and a little blinded to the blight I might create in the process.

With a certain sequence of events and only a slight twist of mindset, I could *be* one of these guys.

And if I'd done it long enough, I might well have a lot of affect tied up in it. I could even feel that those who opposed my efforts were some kind of Luddites, who just didn't gr0k in-world business.

And if I'd acquired a sim or two of tier spread all over the Mainland in otherwise useless microparcels--for some of which I may have overpaid ad-cutters--I'd have some extra emotional baggage associated with the endeavor.

If I'd followed the possible-worlds trajectory of adrunning, I bet I'd be a real bitch to deal with on this subject.

But in that scenario, I'd nonetheless be contributing to destruction of the Mainland and exploiting the other landowners in every sim where my ads appeared. I would hope that somebody would get me to see that. But I'm pretty stubborn, so to get through to me, it might well take the Moral Equivalent Of War.

Didn't someone famous say: "Be the change you want to see in people?" I forget who.

Very good post Qie. I think even THEY may get it now.

Well, probably that would not happen, though, the "twist of mindset", and that is the point.

On my own part, in another life I have been professionally involved for many years in data-mining to a degree that would boggle the mind of anyone who was not also involved in that field. Data collection and analysis within SL would be childishly simple, relative to that. But I left that field partly due to the potential for exploitation* and have no intention of returning to it.

The point being that it is not the ability that is the concern, more the basic opinion of whether other people are there to be exploited or not, and that is something which does not really change much over time I have found, and a lax attitude there is also something that the advertising business - where the attention of viewers is the raw material to be sold to customers - will always require.

(At least for "honest" advertising businesses, as honest as they get. Dishonest ones will make up statistics about avatar views based on who is facing a billboard at what time or whatever, generate some graphs and use them to sell their services.)




* also because, frankly, it _is_ a bit dull

Also empathetic and thought provoking. Thank you.

Realistically, it takes a very large logical jump to go from "I advertise businesses in SL" to "I buy tiny parcels all over the grid to increase impressions at the direct expense of everyone around me."

Targeted ads (ie. shown in clubs) tend to have a much better impression and action rate than billboards. Billboards on smaller parcels are nothing more than mass marketing -- the same kind that gives us spam. Put out enough ads, and even if your impression rate is very low on a percentage basis, you'll still be solvent.


Difference is, spam tactics are a very large social bad. The low action rate is tied directly to the number of people hating what's being put out there.

So that's like saying in a former life, you could have been a spammer. I think all of us could have been.


Bottom line: spam tactics aren't good for just about anyone on the receiving end. It's why I'm a big advocate of increased client controls, like the ability to ignore rendering parcels or static objects by certain authors. I think of it as my personal spam assassin for my Second Life.

My apologies if someone has already said this (it is long thread)

In nearly four years here, I have never once had anyone tell me that they found using a billboard advertising campaign to be good for their business.

Anyone out there had good sales from it? Care to tell us about it?

Afterall, the ad-board owners are saying it works. They are making money out of it. I would like to hear from the users who are happy with the system.

Like most people (it seems) I also hate to see huge adverts spoiling the landscape and wouldn't dream of clicking on one. Never seen one for a business I have actually heard of either.

So who are the users of this system? Are they successful? Are the billboards really bringing in customers?

That's what I've been waiting for - waiting for the business owners who advertise on these things to come into this thread and tell us how successful they've been because of it. Are they ashamed to be associated with these ad hucksters, or are they not so successful after all?

..crickets and treefrogs chirping... otherwise, silence...

I have heard of a few of these businesses - there's a fairly large and successful pet business that I can think of off the top of my head that I will NEVER patronize because I've seen them advertising on these billboards. I think they were pretty big before I ever saw their ads pop up on billboards, though.

If anyone's curious which business I'm talking about, see the link in my sig.

An ad company, (that shall remain nameless but has a sign at Jinseok(164,64) and lots others exactly the same) is using a temp prim rezzer that uses 18 prims to show a permanent presence when they only entitled to 7 prims. Right-click and Inspect. An easy way to know when a temp prim rezzer is at work is that the items in the Inspect list disappear, in a minute or so, until you re-inspect it.

Is that nawti ??? If you owned property on a sim with one of these signs, would you be annoyed that they're doing this. Would you think they're stealing IPS resources from you ???

Would all their signs be removed by LL if someone complained ???

EDIT: ooo! they got a 24 prim one on a 7 prim parcel at Bandicoot (177/187) wow! talk about greedy =(

Alas, Jeogeot: 'twas a nice continent, once. Now there's nowhere to swing a dead neko without hitting an ad tower or stumbling upon a restricted-access extortion plot.

Anyway, yeah, that particular ad-runner has been AR'd a lot for those installations, and has said publicly that there is a new, non-temp-rezzing version that will replace the old ones. On my home sim, there's a different version (maybe the new one?) that's not exactly a picnic, either: I had to move my build up past 3300m to get above where the emitted particle stream sputters out. And the installation here has big green "bulbs" that are apparently larger than 4m in diameter, so it has to encroach on the Linden pathway in order not to encroach on the neighbors where an AR would surely get it removed.

I'm far from an apologist for adrunners, but it's not surprising that they have to go to such extreme lengths to get a click, given that there are all the other adrunner towers competing for pixels. And yet they're somehow surprised and offended that people who want to build normal structures find it problematic to have 40, 60, even 80m tall full-bright prims dominating the landscape from 1/4096 of the sim.

it's all about the search engine not cluttered skylines when it comes to advertising..
people look to the search when they want to shop or go to clubs or most anything in sl..they look to the skyline for a view..wreck that view to people that paid for their little spot in this world to call their own and make them feel like they moved into the midded of a field full of oil rigs and chances are they won't be doing anything but looking at oil rigs not adds.
it's just a visual view of yahoo bots and owners of them trying to justify making a dollar.

you can call it what you like but when it covers the sunsets or sunrises it's just clutter to the people that paid for a home..this is why i live on a private island..because of the cluttered lands of mainland..

if they would lower them down at least to a height that showed some common curtisy to the people in their neighborhood they may not get such the bad response..but a lot that i have seen use the in your face element and tr to steal everywhere you look..

put them at a level on the ground that i don't have to look up to see them like smart advertisers do..not skyscrapers and spinning signs floating right out the windows of bedrooms..

you want respect it works both ways..

Agreed. Clubs would welcome the added income of a ad system theycan just rez and make impression money from (something we briefly had in 2005). The ad farmers would have to split some profits with club owners but then this way adfarmers would not have tier to pay.