Welfare Island vs. Reuters/Acura – Free Swag!
by Pixeleen Mistral on 23/09/07 at 5:40 pm
Impoverished residents ignore luxury vehicles, throng Welfare Island
Bob Dylan sends a message to the concierge at the Linden RL embassy
by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk
The contrasts could not be more striking between the Reuters’ virtual news corporate cathedral/Acura car dealership and the third most popular place in SL – Welfare Island.
Reuters recently combined news with virtual car sales on their island – possibly believing a reporter/car salesman would be more popular than a generic reporter. But the Acura promotion seems to be bloated belly up dead in the water – noobies are enticed to sign up for SL and visit Reuters’ island to pick up a virtual RDX, but traffic on the island is miniscule, and I have yet to see an RDX anywhere in SL other than at Reuters. Still, Reuters has deep pockets, and if this does not work out, perhaps the next move will be to include lawyers in the mix – a reporter/car salesmen/lawyer is sure to be a crowd pleaser. Reuters could use that – Welfare Island has over 100 times more traffic.
Welfare Island is simply packed with citizens churning compute cycles and high end 3D graphics cards to turn electricity into L$s. After the ice caps melt and the polar bears go extinct, maybe someone will calculate the energy burn rate for campers on Welfare Island making L$2 in 7 minutes – or L$3 in 10 minutes – depending on where they camp. Those in a hurry opt for the 7 minute payoff and earn the equivalent of 6.3 cents an hour. The smart money rolls with the 10 minute payout – and nets 6.6 cents per hour.
But camping is passe – Welfare Island really exists to entice Second Life citizens into signing up for virtual and real life junk mail. A smarmy voiceover endlessly informs Welfare Island visitors that they can’t get out of the ghetto by camping – filling out surveys on web pages is the ticket.
And what a great ticket it is. After accepting one of the most amazing TOS agreements ever at the WelfareIsland.com web site, the impoverished avatar is free to complete a seemingly endless series of web forms – with a possible L$ payout at the end.
“I’m not building a game, I’m building a new country” – Philip Linden in Wired magazine
I opted to be surveyed on whether Hillary Clinton should be president. Of course, there were also a number of fabulous offers to sign up for – free samples of tampons, diapers, trial issues of Readers Digest – I must have spent 20 minutes opting in for free swag. One small problem – the forms want an RL address – and I’m strictly a fictional character who lives inside Second Life. What to do?
Simple. I gave my address as the Linden Lab offices in San Francisco and decided to take advantage of the Linden Lab concierge service. Where I come from a concierge that won’t hold a few packages is called out of work. I’m sure they won’t mind at the Lab – this is the sort of thing that any business would do for a loyal customer.
But as I thought more, I realized that this is even better than asking the hotel’s concierge to hold your things for a bit – Second Life is a country. The Linden Lab offices are my country’s embassy to RL. Surely my country’s embassy will to help out a citizen with a few packages – especially if this helps all of our commercial prospects.
Bob Dylan enlisted to contact the Lab
But how to get word to the Lindens? Packages should start arriving next week. Luckily, I happened to run into a helpful web site that let me enlist Bob Dylan to tell my story – I don’t think anyone will mind that Bob insisted on running his own advertisement at the end of my message.
Here is what Bob says:
Bob Dylan sends my memo to Linden Lab – for free
Secure in the knowledge that Bob Dylan himself had e-mailed my message to Torley Linden, Mia Linden, and Unverified Linden, I returned to the Herald offices to think about Second Life’s virtual government .
Advertizing is how we can get something for nothing, and the Lindens are really taking care of us that way. Just look at Reuters/Acura, the other SL corporate advertislands, and Welfare Island. This must be where the metaverse is headed – free signups for SL make perfect sense – as long as you want an ad-dominated world. I suppose there are few people wondering how hidden subsidies distort the economy and lead to perverse incentives like camping – but they just don’t know how to play the game. Don’t worry about the government
So as I watch the marketing gurus sort out how to best monetize the virtual world platform, I feel good knowing the Lab and Welfare Island are helping as I sell my preferences and tastes to the highest bidder – for pennies. Aristotle/Integrity “trust” fits in nicely here. Just put my RL junk mail in a box somewhere guys – I’ll stop by and pick it up at at some point.
Artemis Fate
Sep 23rd, 2007
Let’s hope the Corporate advertising doesn’t figure out that you can pay people absurdly low wages to advertise for you in Second Life, or we’ll have a popular places list full of corporate sims. I think their marketing guys never would have imagined that anyone would be stupid enough to clog their computer’s resources by idling in one place non-stop for literally pennies equivelancy in Lindens. Weird to think that I could scour my couch, and likely find what amounts to 3 days nonstop camping, in change.
I wonder how much money that guy makes from the survey companies by suckering newbies into doing them, probably a ton.
Greefin Oh
Sep 23rd, 2007
It’s a sad state between those willing to shell out their hard *cough* earned money in exchange for those nifty Linden Buckeroos. And those trying to figure out ways around getting their Bling Blings without paying a cent. At least those are the people I run into often. I tried it once to see if the pay out was good. It wasn’t. All I received in the end was an email box full of Diaper Spam, that even Gmail couldn’t fight it’s way out of. I wish I had thought of using Linden Lab’s address before hand. What a great idea!
The only thing that sickens me about Welfare Island is how they glorify the entire Welfare System, as if it’s the only way to go. I’m surprised Al Sharpton hasn’t jumped on this case, considering the ethnic urban undertones of sounds that you hear there…. it’s more insulting than Hippie Pay’s sim.
Tizzers Foxchase
Sep 23rd, 2007
I laughed. I cried. Oh Pixeleen this is too classic.
Nacon
Sep 23rd, 2007
All of the sudden, you cared about the camping chairs and free Linden$ bullshit?
Alrighty, let’s see what you have found out about it.
“But camping is passe”
Good girl… right you are, but…
“Welfare Island really exists to entice Second Life citizens into signing up for virtual and real life junk mail.”
No kidding. Who would thunk that?
“One small problem – the forms want an RL address – and I’m strictly a fictional character who lives inside Second Life. What to do? Simple. I gave my address as the Linden Lab offices in San Francisco and decided to take advantage of the Linden Lab concierge service.”
Wow, nice, then LL can report you in for the mailing service abuse… again, who would thunk that?
……is that’s everything you can find?
Now clearly you’re an idiot missing out the bigger picture behind the welfare project. They are paid by “mass production” companies to research what kind of idiot would want what-what and how-so.
They already know so many idiots don’t care what the surveys is about and gives them one steady straight answer to all of the questions to get their easy quick lindens. They would have noticed that and canceled the whole god-damn-fucking-pointless-ass surveys… but they haven’t yet. So why keep going and waste more money on this non-sense?
Of course, they don’t care about survey answers…. They are just using the term “survey” in legal term to protect themselves from being accused for wrongly operation purpose.
THEY WANT YOUR ACCOUNT NAMES! What’s good will that do? So they can spam you with more pointless crap than you get in email. Invites you to more pointless advertising product groups. Throw more offline IM message to your account whenever you log on, knocking off your friends IM messages from the server. Shove up many many more ugly & pointless T-shirts up in your avatar’s ass.
It’s all about able to advertise in the big marketing ground… the mass of SL users.
Don’t believe it? Well here’s to thinking… long ago when we first had emails… I did too think that no one gonna abuse, rape our lovely email inbox with spamming junks when retarded AOL made screen-names easy to be targeted for email addresses. Among with other similar service. (yahoo, hotmail, etc. etc.) Not forget to mention that website creating a web-ring network, sharing your email addresses to another site for advertising.
This is just before a new version wave of spamming junk coming your way from RL productions… in SL. Sharing with other companies your SL names.
Pixeleen, quit failing at life.
Susan Tsuki
Sep 24th, 2007
/me fills out a change of address form
Plot Tracer
Sep 25th, 2007
Dalrinian Bing has written an excellent article on the Gift Economy in SL. http://slleftunity.blogspot.com/ IMHO it is strang that people can still make money when teeshirts can be made to your own specifications using freeware like The Gimp. Also, there are many among us who are willing to give away what we make- so much so, there are hundreds of freebie shops – the latest addition will be the SLLU freebie shop coming inworld soon. Incidently- Dalrinian is also an organiser of the massive inworld IBM strike. Why have the Herald so deftly avoided this huge rl and sl worldwide action?
Charles Chucklestein
Sep 25th, 2007
I think Welfare Island is PURE GENIUS! Whoever built that island must have a degree in psychology or be a marketing prodigy b/c they’re doing what all the so-called experts can’t do …
Win the Second Life Popularity Contest.
Who cares how they get it done or what they offer? Second Life is so revolutionary that no one really knows what will work and what will fail. Any time a little guy takes down the corporate giants…I stand up and cheer. We all know that these suits are doing everything they can to copy what some dude probably created in his basement. That’s the beauty of SL people…embrace it would, ya!
My suggestion to Corporate America…Track down the owner of Welfare Island and pay him a lot of money to build you something that will, at the very least, be original.
Give the kid credit and accept defeat proudly.
Just think…the millions of dollars these companies wasted could have paid off ten-fold if they just hired the right guy for the job.
Keep up the good work Welfare Island. Give my regards to Uncle Sands!
Nacon
Sep 26th, 2007
“Give the kid credit and accept defeat proudly.
Just think…the millions of dollars these companies wasted could have paid off ten-fold if they just hired the right guy for the job.”
….It’s camping chairs. It’s not that hard. Plus you’d lose more money that way. They want to do cheap advertising.
Roberto Renaldo
Sep 26th, 2007
Actually, these huge companies are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars each to companies like Electric Sheep Company only to declare is a massive failure later. Fortune 500 companies are no longer interested in SL to market their new products because their is just no results. Sure, they get a nice designed island, but in the end, there is no traffic. When you give camping and other types of unique incentives, its absolutely normal in the advertising medium. Look at banks and automobile makers. They all incentivise their users. Its just another form of marketing that the likes of Welfare Island and Hippie Pay have figured out.
Charles Chucklestein
Sep 26th, 2007
“….It’s camping chairs. It’s not that hard. Plus you’d lose more money that way. They want to do cheap advertising.”
From what I can tell, you need more than camping chairs to succeed in SL. If you’re losing more money that way, then how can you stay in business for very long? If money is going out…it obviously needs to be coming in from somewhere.
I’m on Welfare Island all the time and it’s a lot more than camping. If you ever visited the island you would see that what they do is call Incentive Marketing. You get Lindens for completing offers from advertisers. Last time I checked, that marketing model was being used by every bank, credit card, automobile and just about every other type of business throughout the world.
Cheap Advertising? Tell that to the companies who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, not Linden, for a presence in SL and that failed.