Metanomics Fueled by Ad Extortionists and Data Scrapers

Looking over Metanomics latest sponsors (and noticing how Cisco departed when Christian Renaud departed from Cisco evidently), I saw their "primary sponsor" is now Simuality. I tried to recall where I had seen that name, and the name of their CEO, Antony van Zyl, before, and reading down into the fine print, there it was: he has started the SLIPPcat ad system in Second Life. (Dusan has a good write-up here about SLIPPCat).

Ugh, ugh, ugh. And that in turn is what is fueling two of the most notorious ad extortionist and viewjackers of Second Life, Chrischun Fassbinder (Mr. Lee's Hong Kong) and Ancient Shriner, ad-farming Masons and failed Coldwell Banker reps in SL who still continue to blight the land with big, ugly viewjacking commercial towers.

For years, Chrischun was a low-life ad extortionist, notorious for his "Mr. Lee's Hong Kong" ads with fake broken Chinese slogans, based on the character in "Snowcrash" and just as rapacious and cut-throat within SL. After putting out ugly towers, usually only advertising his own freebies or crappy Internet sites selling gimmicks, he would set the price of the little 16 m2 parcel to a $9985, which I guess he had found to be the "optimal" point at which he could get people to "buy back the view". Many did. He could afford to literally wait years for some people to do this -- sometimes innocently, not realizing they were fueling an evil empire.

I've had him all over, and in vain ever gotten him to leave. I have had him in Patagonia by the roadside for close to three years now, since the sim's birth. I continue to be puzzled how he was able to get ahold of that little piece -- for a time some of us were convinced they had some sort of script that was able to seize even snippets of Governor Linden roadside protected land, because it was such a mystery. Somehow, two or three of the extortionists seized these little parcels; one remains to this day with his land set to $8000 for a 64 m2, impervious to abuse reports, and the other is the giant ugly gleaming tower of the current ad network -- which has only gotten bigger and more blighty.

Oh, it isn't for sale anymore since the Lindens' new policy, and that's supposed to make it "better" -- in fact, it is merely a cunning malicious duck under the radar. I used to think a reasonable policy was to have ads go roadside, but lately, I've wondered about whether that is reasonable, given that they hijack the view in nice residential areas -- often cunningly claiming that the areas are "turning" commercial because there is one store there -- which is often there in the first place because the ad blight showed up and the residential owners were forced to move.

Patagonia is a beautiful, nicely landscaped atoll sim, and remains beautiful despite being blighted by two main factors -- Chrischun's ad tower, and the evil csven Concord's persistently nasty big black box, which sometimes hides scripted scraper objects it, surrounded by ban lines against me, where he never comes, never works, never sells anything, never does anything but spite me and everyone else on that sim. It takes a special kind of nastyness to do that sort of thing -- and remains as a testimonial.

But there's something else I realized about these ad towers of the two Masons -- I hadn't thought of before: not only do they hijack the view, they hijack eyeballs that other people deliver on land they tier.

So I go to the trouble of developing nice rentals and trying to zone the areas, people move in with their stores, and then these parasitical SLIPPCat-funded people hijack the customers to click on their ads. They wouldn't have those eyeballs unless WE had brought them there, so they are piggybacking off other people's hard work.

In real life, such ad boards are zoned and controlled in cities by policies created with democratic governments in many places -- and some jurisdictions simply ban them period from some or all areas.

In SL, propertarianism, the Linden's religion which privileges land ownership rights above all, trumps any community consideration.

I always have to laugh at how the communalistic hippie nonsense that the Lindens also spout is often revealed for the insincere crap it is -- because when it *really* comes time to respecting property rights -- the rights of everyone else on the sim not to have devalued property! -- the Lindens are nowhere to be found. It exposes the infantile nature of their Snowcrashian anarcho-capitalism -- absolute rights for the ugly, extortionist, and powerful, and diminished rights for others.

When it REALLY comes time to respect "the community" and the public weal, the Lindens allow these malarial mosquitoes to annoy and poison everything -- and then turn around and laugh all the way to the bank as they sell more expensive islands or open space sims, having chased everybody off the blighted mainland.

These two long-time ad extortionists Ancient and Chrischun are no longer extorting literally with price tags -- Ancient would always tell you that he never put his land for sale. But pricing isn't the only form of extortionism when you siphon off eyeballs, forcing people to move to get rid of you. And now they have injected themselves into the SL ad stream for fives years in a contract with SLIPPcat, and are engaged in an aggressive, duplicitous campaign in office hours and on the forums to whitewash their image and their act.

They pretend they are "lowering the signs" -- although in fact field analysis shows they are HIGHER in many locations. They pretend they are removing them from areas that are low return on clicks -- but they do this only under enormous pressure and campaigning -- and often ignore that same logic in obvious areas. I see even a Linden had trouble persuading them, merely as an individual personal effort (they won't use their TOS or policy to do this) to leave a PG sim where they couldn't possibly have gotten much business -- unless of course they get it by hijacking eyeballs away from my tenants' stores.

The businesses on the ad towers often aren't even in Second Life -- they are those gimmicky tacky Internet businesses you see all over to make a quick buck and ads for Code4 Software, which is Ancient Shriner's "solution provider" company which the Lindens have in their FIC list.

More and more, I think the only right thing to do to be a corporate good neighbour is for this and other companies claiming to "clean up their act" and make "attractive and effective advertising" is to REMOVE THE AD TOWERS COMPLETELY from those sims where people request them to do so. Surely it isn't worth the hatred and anger they inspire in people -- which is evident all over forums and blogs.

They are now mightily spinning that some people WANT their towers. OK, then prove that by REMOVING THEM from where they are NOT wanted. Furthermore, for those that "want" them, the right thing to do is to have a revenue-sharing device since the lion's share of owners on that sim where they hold their measly 16 m2 are the ones supplying them with traffic and eyeballs.

Really, ad-farming, ad-towering, and eyeball hijacking and parasitism on others' businesses like this is a bad practice, and unscrupulous and greedy. The Lindens have not been able to get their act together to for three years to address this, and are not likely to change. Ancient Shriner and Chrischun Fassbinder are stubborn and greedy assholes who refuse to budge -- and I can only assume that Antony van Zyl is the same way by extension if he hasn't gotten the message and acted on this blight yet.

But now that Metanomics is enriching itself and letting "the little bit of money that changes hands" in their coffers depend on the viewjacking, eyeballjacking, and blighting and devaluation of our mainland sims, I hope more people will pressure Prof. Robert Bloomfield of Cornell University to get rid of these discredited sponsors, and to force their inworld reps to clean up their acts.

For Beyers Sellers/Robert Bloomfield to have accepted this sponsor and not realized how its avatars have enriched themselves with ad extortion and viewjacking for years -- and now are engaging in even further dubious practices like scraping buzz conversations -- lets us know how much he really cares about inworld business.

When I read Dusan's interview, I have to marvel at how Beyers is not only contributing to the devaluation of mainland, but harming content-creators' businesses as well, by sustaining this cheap-ass freebie warehouse but also an insidious scheme to make "paybies".

I have had a mall in Burns for ages, long before the Freebie Warehouse came and lagged and blighted the sim. Some people might think a freebie barn next to you helps business; I had the same tenants before the freebie warehouse and had a nicer shopping experience with less lag, frankly, so it's a toss-up, even if they might report more sales.

The Freebie Warehose that Chrischun runs in Burns is a horror -- it is built with walls that you can't see out of once you fly into this supposedly open space, trapping the avatar inside to keep clicking frantically and getting more stuff.

Asked about the click-through embedded plan, where the ad is embedded *right in the freebie* (ugh), here's what van Zyl had to say in Dusan's interview:

"I asked one of the senior folks at Slippcat how in-world content creators felt about the service.

“They hate us,’ he said."

I'll say.

As Dusan points out -- I had never really grasped this awfulness before -- with this malarial new ad concept, not only will paid content-creators be competing against endless corporate-sponsored freebies and the freebies of various wealthy patrons -- or increasingly desperate poor dressmakers and furniture makers -- they will be competing against freebies *that pay*. Like those horrid "earn $$$ at home to fill out surveys" sort of awful tacky websites.

I was horrified also to discover from Dusan that these freebie ad-embedded objects will also have scanning and scraping devices that will scrape your chat for "buzzwords" and see how you are relating to the product (ugh), and stream this to the greedy ad extortionists and data scrapers.

My hair really stands on end with this stuff -- doesn't yours?

I suppose Beyers Sellers can only find this, uh, a great new "Internet technology" that "helps business" and if you complain, you are FUDded.

Dusan's response is to cry for protectionism. I know of other content creators devising guildism as a response or going out of business.

Van Zyl has a shill about all this viewable on Dusan's site that it is "all in the user's hands". It is a theory of "empowered user" -- he doesn't HAVE to click on an ugly ad tower (then uh...why are all the ugly ad towers still there?!). He doesn't have to sit paralyzed before the blue screen of TV. He can uh, decide to click.

Right! People are like rats, they head toward shiny things, they click on them. Advertising is precisely designed to play on their most atavistic, most primitive reflexes -- and succeeds. This isn't empowerment -- it's ensnarement.

Dusan rightly challenges van Zyl by pointing out that this "empowered user" is still having his data scraped and his conversations -- and may not realize the full ramifications of that -- does the notecard inside inform the user that they are now in a permanent, streaming focus group for ever, as long as that object is rezzed out in their home?!

Gwyn raises the issue that these free services like Twitter or Yahoo have always been scraping our data, and of course savvy marketers scrape them already and invade them with their own accounts and try to build "buzz". It's often lame and pathetic, but some of it gets pretty insidious. I once said something last week about how I didn't understand Coke Zero and what it was, now I have some...thing...called CokeZero something following me on Twitter.

I'm not sure protectionism will work, although if that is a policy democratically decided for a world, it should be made to work -- but we don't have democratic control over Second Life *and never will* as they will "open source" it to e-lites in the closed society of coders before that will ever happen.

But I think people can go on describing the clear line between right and wrong, between ethical and ethical business practices. Metanomics -- which never even talks about business hardly anymore! -- is now fueled by unethical business practices. Shame!

Comments

[Tabliopa Underwood]

Dumping avatars names from reports means what exactly? They're not being recorded and saved into a datatable; or they are and they're just not being displayed in reports from that table??

[Conspiracy Theorist]

@Tammy and Prok,

This is exactly why I think there should be a strict policy at Linden Lab stating that if you're an employee of LL, you do not get to have an alt in SL. There is far too many opportunities for abuse.

[Blaccard Burks]

When I look at all this sign nonsense I really have to laugh. A great deal of signs I see owned by Ancient Shriner and many others always seemed to be blocked. In all fairness to Mr. Shriner I don't see him actively cutting up land and "making signs".Maybe in the past, but there seems to be a whole business in cutting up parcels now by lots of people. The Cyrenthea Eagle signs seem to be everywhere. With the same crap adverts. The latest trend by Robo Marx and others is cutting up road side parcels and selling 16m2 to 64m2 lots. It appears to me that these sign people can't help themselves purchasing them. Ms. Eagle seems to be addicted. Erecting signs sometimes even in empty sims, sometimes making signs face signs. The Code 4 sign in Krakower in the middle of a 16m2 grid facing other signs.. Am I to believe that someone here has brains?
Somehow they think corporate business owners are going to be wowed with the techinical bullshit "metrics" that are presented to them.
The problem is this: A potential advertiser of Slippcat for example is not going to be impressed with sign work advertising your brand facing a bunch of other signs, nor are they going to be impressed with a sign 20 meters in front of someone elses virtual property.

Before anyone says anything about "what the fuck does this guy know", I was a person who contacted Coldwell Banker's SL people and asked them if they thought spamming people with signs in SL might just have a negative effect on them in RL?. You know what happened. Its also odd and amusing that the SLIPCAT website gives the Chevy Volt from GM and example. Does anyone recall here where Pontiac went with SL?

[Naoki Yifu]

VirtualWorldNews:
Code4Software Parts Ways from Simuality and Slippcat
http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/07/code4software-p.html