Yesterday the Concierge list was disrupted once again with fights as somebody began spreading the rumour about the Lindens removing traffic. I don't think they are actually doing that now, but I did forget to put it on my "What Next?" list -- they will do it, if they feel enough pressure, or if they are simply feeling destructive enough toward the inworld economy.
The usual suspects lined up to denounce traffic and call furiously for it to be removed. They cited the usual arguments:
o bots, which are being used as traffic infusers and which steal resources and aggravate everybody
o they don't need traffic, they have word-of-mouth sales
o people who need traffic for sales are losers; other people should realize traffic doesn't give them sales
o people who hate bots are necessarily driven to use them to compete with others who do, so they want traffic to be removed, so they don't have to do this
o if you need to watch your traffic, get a script to follow not only footfalls but hotspots, length of stay, etc. and get more useful metrics
Most of the people screeching about the removal of traffic are people with clubs or malls reluctantly using bots in order to keep up with other people who happily use bots. The remainder of haters are usually a certain brand of geek who wants bots used for science, but not commerce. That's where there is so much anger and hatred tied up into it -- people don't see the solution is to remove the bots, they want the traffic that the bots are generating to be removed instead.
I cite the usual arguments *for* traffic based on my vast experience of what works for people who rent my land for stores:
o search/places plus ordering by traffic is the single greatest engine of sales in SL, bar none
o people with word-of-mouth sales don't understand this and will never understand it; new people can't get WOM and they need other means to get started, sometimes for a year
o bots should be regulated by charging for any account using them, and labelling such accounts -- that will decimate them overnight
o once you get past the few gamed positions on highly-used search words, you see a merited traffic ordering, and that is used for sales, sales, sales -- this is definitely what shoppers use
o I personally do not use bots, campers, or any gimmicks of any nature, and in fact I benefit from placement by *other* means the Lindens have tweaked in "search all," and have lower placement in "search places".
This debate will never get anywhere, and is at a standstill as usual, but unfortunately, some new voices are weighing in on it now. Simone Stern, who is someone who has no need of traffic whatsoever, as she is a top brand in SL, is now denouncing traffic. Before, I noticed she didn't really comment; now she is.
Simone has always been a friend, and a former tenant, who I know for a fact didn't use traffic gimmicks because I don't allow them. She did for a time, like many of us, use camping on her main store, but not for long -- it was a needless expense and she had sales anyway. Somehow, we got into a wrangle about this as she claims it was merely an experiment by a manager for a day, but I recollect it differently as longer. No matter. Simone has traffic in the 2000s, which is in fact all you need to get sales paying rent/tier. And she has sales at outlets all over SL, and people buy on SLboutique.com of course. And she gets her sales by having mammoth word of mouth from a huge customer base, and from her coverage in RL media. God bless her, she deserves every inch of coverage she gets -- and then some. Her work for the Electric Sheep and other providers has also put her into high visibility -- and she deserves it. Now we just need her to realize that not everyone can use those formulas of high visibility, for which there is only a few slots available.
That's what I just plain don't get about people in SL. If something doesn't work for you, and you don't need it, why begrudge it to someone else? Why the hatred and viciousness? You are not objectively harmed by traffic if you don't need traffic. So if someone else gets it and uses it to make sales, what the hell skin is it off yours?!
Classifieds cannot deliver sales for everyone; getting on the first page is too expensive. Bots are expensive, too, and hated. So is camping, even more draining. That means search/places sorted by traffic is the best bet for every store that is NOT a Simone Stern store.
Geeks making gadgets who either could care less about sales or who have customers from Xstreet.com or word of mouth simply don't get traffic, either. They hate it the way geeks on Web 1.0 hated page hits -- they *loathed* page hits because it could be "gamed" and -- I would submit -- they loathed the democratic "vote with your feet" feel to it that it had which didn't then depend on geeks making complex algorithms. I still think page counters, which are scorned as "so very 1990s" are a great thing -- for a website that isn't in the top 100 on Alexa or Google or whatever. Yeah, we all realize these are gamed by link farmers and paid clickers. So what? Nobody is being paid to click on *my* little site, and in my little world of several dozen other such sites, it matters when I get real clicks, which I do, and in my little amount of traffic, it matters merely by comparison to my little circle, which also has little traffic, that's all.
Traffic is even more important as it is a public counter that, despite being "gamed," is deadly accurate as to popularity. Everybody knows that if you have 30,000 traffic on your site, unless you are a free sex or free Lindens location, you likely have bots or campers. So everybody can tell, also, that if Reuters has 124 or some other big company has 237, they are flops. People aren't coming. The sites aren't being used. And *that* is one of the reasons the Lindens want to get rid of it -- so big enterprises can keep their embarassments to themselves. That's exactly why it has to stay -- for the public's right to know what is happening in the economy.