How can an roadside billboard network function in Second Life?

some may use it but ads in and of themselves will chase me away. I buy on seeing and using, not some billboard screaming at me. But then I may be more particular. Dunno, but all I do know is billboards are a blight.

This system was in effect in 2005. I had a account along with the venue Elbow Room and quite a few others. The company in charge closed its doors and then the less labor-intensive adfarming started. I do not know if 'quick buck' adfarmers are up to investing the time and energy into building a infrastructure like this. The profit will not be as great as the adfarming so they may give up on it very soon.

This, of course, is not true.

Then why are your ads still on 16 meter plots by the road on the mainland?

You should look at our network, we don't have anything in sky spinning or shit like that.



For herzog: if you think it was directed to you, then be my guest


And as for the work with clubs: That's not outdoors advertising, that's a different venue, questions here are about outdoors. Secondly, that kind of advertising would be way too costly for the advertiser, we would need to make our prices 1,000 fold for the time it takes to close the deals, ensure that partners are honoring our contract, to cover the expense paid to clubs etc. etc. etc. If you still think it would work, do try however, but we aren't going to risk thousands of dollars and hundreds to thousands of working hours to attempt such.

No, no. I just wandered in, made an observation on behalf of the people you whined about, and wandered out again. No hospitality required, thanks

May as well walk away Max, this is just a huge billboard in itself. Im leaving it

Lias, the system that you refer to never left the prototype stage. They certainly didn't have anything commercially usable. As for infrastructure and systems, that is precisely what we have.

Quote:

Pardon me but I miss your point entirely. Could you please be more specific about what is not true and why?

As for my mainland plots, that's how I have stress tested my systems with real world use, so when I roll out an affiliate system it will actually work.

If you dig up our history, and dig out what we have, let me know if we have a single 16sqm, as far as i know we do not.

Furthermore, we do not condone farms, the most we've done anywhere is 2 parcels of 32sqm, totaling to 2 billboards. Now we usually make one 64sqm parcel.

Oh and a lot of those cuts we did were actually "leftovers" from an roadside cut, and would otherwise have been abandoned, or sold to market, which would have pretty much guaranteed an ad farm springing up.

Furthermore, we have a division which collects what ad farmers dump, what they are selling below their cost, join it up if possible, and put trees there, and price it just high enough that ad farmers don't have interest in them, but is low enough for actual land owners in the sim to collect it up. The tiny profit margin made is for our spent time and increase in the efforts. If you try to use profit as attack point that it's wrong what we do, think about it again: we've been doing it 1month 2weeks, and are at a loss of 44,431L$ and about 11k sqm of land.

Gotta love these who start bashing without actually looking up who they are bashing. Did you for example know that we used to fund A LOT of mainland public areas such as walkways?

Anyone who tells you we make areas of 16s is utterly lying to you. Check am i listed in Arbor's ban list? Ask Arbor how much i've donated adfarm pieces to them.

That's what i hate in tihs, no matter the amount of goodwill you do, there's always people bashing you as ad farmer even tho you aren't!

Why shouldn't you be confused with ad farmers when you've got a 30-40m cylindrical tower sticking up out of the ground? So you're not selling your land - big deal! You are still ruining the view for a large number of people.

There's no business viability in that, no advertiser is willing to pay for a single outdoors advert a total of approximately 1600L$ a month. That would be insanely high price to pay.

I can't talk for the "real ad farmers", but we are an advertising network & company, not extortionistas, thereforce, anything obtrusive would actually lessen our profitability, along with immense negative impact.



Because there's no sensible business plan, show me a business plan which makes viable for advertisers as well, to have say 1024sqm with total 2 or 3 ads on it, remember to include the time consumed to make the attractions
However, that being said, i will get to work and build 2-4 places like these, any suggestions of what kind of attractions?





This is Second Life forums, not anti-adfarmer forums such as Arbors. Which i happen to be member of aswell, but haven't logged in quite a while. (and lost my password lol)



We do not have a single 16sqm plot, our smallest are 32sqm with single nice billboard, firmly on the ground with advertisement area of 8x4, total height approximately 9.5-10meters, no movement, spinning, floating, only changing texture once per minute.




We actually deploy that in many locations


Also, like Ancient said, it's not a trivial task to handle the amount of load the networks cause for servers.
We have 1 minute impressions, over 1800 billboards active, that's over 1800 requests per minute or over 30 per second just to update the ads, ofc each request is to a PHP file, therefore dynamic, not static content.

The scalability is the issue actually. For some bizarre reason i achieved with Core2Duo E6300 (1.8ghz) 2Gigs DDR400 machine roughly 110 requests stable and each request served within 3seconds, but on real world usage on production server Xeon 3060 and 2Gigs DDR667 the performance didn't scale to that degree.

There's many many things you need to account for, such as for some reason rolling restarts cause a massive spike in requests, possible LSL problems and other contingencies.

The ad farmers WE ALL hate do not bother with these on most part.

I went somewhere once which was basically just an advertising centre. It was like a mall - I think they gave away freebies too but mainly but just filled with advert posters that told you about products, services or places and probably gave you landmarks too. It seemed like a really good idea.

I don't know where it was or if it's still there. In order to work, somewhere like that needs to make itself a first port-of-call for people searchers.

As for ad-towers and obelisks. I think we have to accept them on the whole. Any fool can buy a 16m plot and stack 3 x 10 metre high dayglo rotating ads on and upset just about everybody. But the towers need to be on larger plots and the ones I've seen have been quite nicely designed. I wouldn't particularly want one next to my place but then I planted a 50 metre long x 3 metre high leylandii hedge along the back of my place, the Egotherapy Centre, and some people might not like that either!

These people have not contacted me and expressed their concern, shall they do so we are able to work a solution, granted they are not griefing trolls or something negative like that. One example is people who block our billboard, contact me that the ads are blocked, demand to sell for below market bottom pricing. That's violation of TOS & Community Standards, and we do file ARs in such cases.

You can for example, IM me inworld with location, coords, parcel size, and offer a sum for the parcel, or you can IM me with the location and a solution to make it better fit the locale, or maybe i divide the parcel, give another one to arbor, and set a smaller single ad billboard there.

However, i must note that buy offers such as 3L$/sqm or 4L$/sqm are considered insultingly low. Our average buy-in is in the vicinity of 15L$/sqm, along with average of 20mins spent to find a single location. Today if we marked all parcels for sale at 10L$/sqm, probably 40% sold within 48hours, and 90% sold within 4 weeks, or in a day 100% by offering to a competiting advertising network. Our targeting is considered one of the best and most wide-spread with minimal negative brand impact (=no adfarms nearby in atleast 80% of locations).

All that being said, selling a parcel should be the very last option. A sold good parcel is at any price a loss in our books. If selling is the final option we see, we usually sell below the offered sum.

No business viability, no business plan - of course it is not viable if you have to incur the cost of tier into your business model. But if you and businesses worked together to make targeted advertising instead of spamming the landscape to get your impression minutes, it would be a different thing completely.

If you came to me, as a developer, with an affiliate board that showed ads relevant to home ownership (furniture shops, texture shops with ads showing drapes, etc.), I wouldn't mind giving up the prims to host it in exchange for a small commission, and advertisers would reach a market that might actually NEED the things that you're showing. And you wouldn't have to worry about paying tier.

I don't give a crap about SL's largest mall, yet unfortunately that crap sits on an obelisk in a sim adjacent to mine - as does your massive cylindrical column. I had to build in such a way that windows faced away from that crap.

Then you have your own answer: in-world display advertising only works if it's allowed to operate in ways unacceptable to the community--that is to say, unless it commits the Tragedy of the Commons.

If you don't like the answer, don't ask the question.

This is EXACTLY what our next system will do. . . we are already signing up beta testers.

I don't deal with people who buy small plots. I don't bother to buy up that land, because that only shifts the problem elsewhere. That land high value is only to you, vis a vis other advertisers. It is not worth that much to me, and I will improve my view myself or orient the building to ignore the spam.

Does that mean you'll get rid of the small plots?

Yes Cristalle, in many places we'll pull the signage. We believe in Zoning and have been asking LL for zoned areas, and in these areas we'll still run our networks.

It is a chicken and egg problem. You can't attact advertisers without track-record, and you can't pay affiliates without advertisers. Our solution is still under-wraps, but we believe it will be the best path for advertisers, venue owners, and the community.

At the present time, there really is no way you are likely to be accepted. Ever since the days of Lazerus "Impeach Bush" Divine, the outdoor ad industry in Second Life has been dominated by a sucession of scammers, extortionists, and griefers. The mainland landscape is littered with ugly 4x4x10 ad columns placed without any concern for the communities around them. Except possibly for a business devoted to sexual ageplay, I can't think of much that would be less likely to be welcomed by the public.

I respectfully disagree with Carl. The Internet in 1994 was filled with the same anti-ad sentiment and those that ran the first web banner ads were called whores and were ridiculed.

Now, according to the IAB, Internet advertising is a 9.6 Billion (yes with a B) year industry.

Outdoor ads done right will be an effective arena for virtual world business and part of the virtual world marketing portfolio.

yes, that has always been the parallel i've noticed, everyone claims to despise pop up ads on websites, and yet, somebody is clicking on them and buying the crap. If people really wanted them gone, they wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole, and when they ceased to generate any sales, they would vanish. Same with spam emails. Someone, somewhere, is making this viable. I just wonder if it's the clueless shoppers, or the clueless advertisers.

Of course we used it commercially. I had several copyable boards up in my venues as did many others. We would go to the website and see how much we earned from clicks each month. The advertisers would deposit money into the account on the web page to keep their ads active.

Littering the landscape is not the only way to test the viability of advertising to the public in Second Life. It is the method that makes you the most money - but not the method that is community-minded.

You can place the boards into venues and stress test them. There is absolutely no reason to place them on mainland roadside 16 meter plots to test them. That is just excuses for doing what made you the most profit - community be dammed. I have happily beta tested systems for many developers in Second Life in my venues. As many other venue owners do.

You are a adfarmer. You use mainland parcels to display ads and nothing else. You do not build public attractions and place an ad on it. You do not host events and advertise to those that come to the event. You buy land, set up billboards and charge people a fee for you to place ads in those billboards. Adfarmer. To thine ownself be true.

You got your terms and information all wrong.

Ad Farmer means exactly farming, setting up a field of ads, ie. buying a 512sqm, making it 16s and on each one is an ad (or multiple). We do not do that.

Furthermore, as said elsewhere in this thread, we made lots of public areas, but LL made it non-viable for us on the scale we were doing, so we have significantly downsized our public areas portfolio.

We also host events, and our advertisements are present there.

Also, we have billboards set in estates, see for example region "Marketing", yes, that's the region name Plus a bunch of other 3rd party estates.

Also, we have ads on our land for sale signs on mainstream real estate, SLIB Real Estate.

Lias,

Your solutions do not provide the real world traffic necessary to build and truly test this kind of system . . . there is no club or group of clubs in SL that can match the traffic we are logging now. As for the landscape, mainland has always been anything goes. Protected views and pristine sims are the domain of private estates. We are not violating TOS, we are using our land for legitimate purposes, and tens of thousands of people have taken advantage of our offers and promotions. We're working hard to adjust our ad formats and are working just as hard to move to the affiliate model. If you know of a way to simply snap your fingers and have enterprise quality software, please let me know ASAP as I could certainly use such a thing!

Getting even one venue to accept to take-in an untested, untried, and unproven piece of software would be a long process (I know, I've tried) and to replicate that thousands of times to just do tests is impossibly impractical.

No one has any problem signing up for a system that is already validated and will start paying them commissions immediately though.

We have thousands of ad terminals pulling data now, and up time over 99.9% for over six months running. That's what what we think we need at a MINIMUM before we can even THINK about offering such a system to the public.

Yes I build on my plots and offer ad and retail space so I know how much time it takes to build an attraction. I also pay staff and pay for classifieds. Your 'screw the view of everyone else - I'm making a profit' mentality is why ARBOR PROJECT GROUP exists today.

I built a lovely lagoon and waterfall with couple kisses and embraces from Bits n' Bobs around. I had a click thru ad on it. People used the parcel for their romantic times - it had good traffic and the advertisers were pleased. Very easy to build and low prim.

Search the word ADFARM in these forums and you will not see anything applauding the practice. And most adfarmers join Arbor to try to stay one step in front of the crack downs.

And your point is? Its a adfarm. Not a carnval. a horse trail, a pub or a park. Just ads destroying the landscape.

Why on earth would we care how many ads you handle and how hard it is? only YOU profit from this blight. The rest of us must suffer because you want to make some Lindens.