Location: Sucking Money Out of The System

I’d reported, some time ago and much after the fact, that Linden Lab® had changed the traffic “metrics” in Second Life®.  Now popular places are part of a “Showcase” voted upon by residents. Mere presence of camping-zombies and bots will not help a location bring in active avatars. None of the old camping spots show up in Showcase’s top listings.  As a result, camping rates have fallen off sharply. The old “Free Spirit” group at HippiePay once gave out 2L every 5 minutes.  Now avatars try to crowd in anywhere that offers 2/15.

Pappy Enoch, who covers the freeloader-and-layabout (dead) beat for “In a Strange Land,” went around to check on the status of camping these days.  He was in a grim mood when he came back.  He handed me a faded “fotygraph” of the good old days of camping and began his lament.  As he put it, “them was sum times, Wiggly. I camped on mah tractur a-cuttin’ grass (n’ smokin’ sum) wif them-thar Hippies at Woodstock I-land.  I luved chasin’ wimmin, like that-thar purty gal in knotty britches in my fotygraph. Yu cood scoop in 100L in a night, ol’ son’!”

Pappy got all misty-eyed at this point, so I translated the rest of his report, below, from the original hillbilly:

Land owners are trying a series of strategies to get visitors to their locales to spend money.  Zyngo games are popular draws, as are Sploder balls. For those new to Second Life, those are virtual versions of Bingo and a type of “office pool” that disburses money randomly after avatars have put in a certain amount.  Treasure-hunts, cheap or free items, and lucky chairs of all sorts still abound.  Pappy spotted a large group of avatars at one spot, crowded around a cluster of lucky chairs, hoping the chairs’ letters might match the first one in their names.

Pappy just shook his head and walked off.  These avatars did not talk or interact in any way. They were just there, desperate for a few Linden Dollars and the chance to be the first to sit down.

A system that permits avatars to do other things while camping, and not using pose-balls or camping chairs, comes from Anywhere Camping. In theory, the avatar can earn as much as 10 Linden Dollars every 15 minutes.  The trick involves completing marketing surveys, though the bonus is the ability to leave a camping sim and earn money anywhere in the metaverse.

It’s clever, but will it prove a sustainable business model?  Without visitors paying something back to sim-owners, it cannot last. Yet time will tell, and Pappy, who does not want to do anything productive, will be on the scene to tell you.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

In reading Au’s book The Making of Second Life, I found an interesting note about visitors to sites on the “Flat Web” vs. visitors in SL.  Click-throughs w/o payments run about 1% for Web sites.  Au’s source estimated that in SL click-throughs for corporate sites run between .8 and 2% (avatars visiting a location, looking around, moving on).

I think the classical camping system is doomed. The spots that used camping to draw traffic have (or will soon) reduced their capacities massively or further cut their rates. Its not only the popular places that are a “victim” of those changes but the new search in general.
While in the old search traffic was the key metric that defined the placement of your place, it was pushed into the background with the new one. The new killer feature for search placements are the picks in the profile. The more people have your place in their picks the further up you will be seen in the search. This results in people buying those picks from avatars. Traffic is still a parameter but only in third or fourth place. LL is more copying google now and everybody who knows about google bombs will grin mischiviously already.
Filling out those surveys could indeed be interesting since most require you to enter a valid email address and advertisers are very keen on getting their hands on those and if they pay a few RL cent (compared to around 15€ through classical chanels ... that number is from 2003 to be honest) for those .... only the better. I think it could work if it get past the critical mass. Pay per Click programmes have exsisted in the nineties already to finance ISP costs (somebody still know those adbars?) and they vanished again because nobody clicked. But a programme that is just tageted at those adresses could succeed since it actively gets people to do something.
I have had a look at those survey lists and for now if you are living out of the US you won´t get pretty much out of it. The only offers for europeans (especially germany in my case) involve software downloads which are polluted with spyware and that is surely not my kind of bag.

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