Does LL want our business?

You know, there are times when one has to ask exactly what they’re all smoking up in the Executive Suite at Battery Street, or what precisely is going into the coffee break brownies.

Two recent announcement from LL have me scratching my head. The first is that they are now offering some for of “advanced” Classified advertising system that allows, quote :allows the purchase of targeted display ads on Linden Lab web properties such as the Marketplace

Operated by GlamAdapt, this system requires and up-front payment in USD to have an advert or media stream appear on SL Marketplace web pages. What the payment might be, is somewhat unclear. The cost is broken down in terms of CPM – the cost of ad impressions per month, and so range from $9.00 to L$90 a month.  Now does a click count when someone hits the advert (as is the standard) or simply when someone opens the page and the advert is displayed (which is the implication here). The former is fine, but the latter? It’s also unclear whether sale tax is applicable on the fees – I’d be surprised if not – as you need to sign-up in order to get a breakdown of costs per advert time – and frankly, I’m not prepared to do so.

The second is and e-mail to residents advising us that as from the 13th December, in-world classifieds are to be limited to 256 characters in order To maximize relevancy, new characters limits will help you choose only the most relevant descriptive keywords.

I have a three-word response to this claim from Nelson Linden: bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

As Ciaran Laval (damn you man, for posting ahead of me! 🙂 ) states, 256 characters is an idiotically tiny amount when trying to write a cohesive advert. Far from discouraging keyword gaming, it’s liable to encourage it, as people forego ad writing and try to jockey keywords in their favour.

And that is a further rub: those of us that have always played by the rules with regards to Profile classified are the ones that have borne the brunt of LL’s misplaced “war on keywords” over the last 12 months – and this isn’t going to help.

The biggest insult over both of these moves is that it really does come across as a royal slap in the face for merchants. Office Hours meeting, blog post replies, the Commerce Round Table, forum discussion posts, the JIRA – all are awash with issues and complaints – 90%+ perfectly valid about the manner in which SL search has been repeatedly bugger up by Linden Lab.

And their solution is to a) make people pay for the privilege of having *some* hope of decent in-yer-face advertising, and b) further cripple people’s ability to usefully advertise using the in-world tools.

Now, to be sure, the GlamAdapt thing *might* be aimed at external advertisers (and if so, are LL hoping to suddenly find themselves with the likes of Amazon, Nike, etc. advertising on their Markeplace – and indeed, even *cough* IMVU, who are particularly aggressive in their web marketing!?), but posting it for current merchants while continuing to even the impression they actually don’t care about search, and that 12 months down the line a fix is still “coming”. While the change to classifieds just appears to be about a change for the sake of it, with absolutely no regard (again) for the existing damage to search or anything else.

This is the kind of behaviour that, as I discussed earlier, tends to leave people with a distinct impression that LL is the enemy within.