1. There was a bug in the system, one I reported numerous times. Friends you’d made back in 2004 who had long since already delivered a bonus to you *kept* delivering the bonus at odd times in the following years, which should never have happened.

2. People gamed the system, harvesting “friends” in various ways or for various capers, not through actual general help or from knowing from real life. I’m not so sure that a website that informs people of new names whose owner manages to snag bunches of calling cards then through that every week isn’t a form of gaming (I’d like to understand that better). So like every other bonus thing the Lindens have offered that got exploited, they had to retire it because it drained money from them.

@Valiant – totally agree (although the referral system is based on people who DO pay, but your larger point is correct). I don’t actually think this particular way of generating word of mouth and referrals is particularly effective. Maybe some kind of API system embedded in social media widgets or something, who knows. Plus, I’m not sure it should just be cash – some kind of status thing would be nice too.

We need badges like in Metaplace! Um, OK, maybe not. But surely they should overhaul the whole mess.

And P.S. I don’t think it should just be on an account basis, there should be some kind of larger enterprise referral thing as well.

One of them, I’ve probably been paid for 10 times now.

I still get a small trickle of referral bonuses, always associated with accounts with join dates before july 23rd 2008. Sometimes people hang out as basic for a while before deciding to upgrade to premium.

Also, it is possible that manually typing your referrer’s name into your sign up form, may still work, while the urls don’t. I haven’t tested that. Postcards (slurls) and secondlife.com urls with u= referral codes no longer work. The “refer a friend form” doesn’t work either, since all that does is send out emails with links to secondlife.com using your u= referral code.

Therefore, information on this page https://secure-web12.secondlife.com/account/referral.php?lang=en is false. It leads SL customers to go believe they will receive 2000L if they follow the instructions. They won’t.

Description April L$Sources May L$MTD
Referral Bonus 0 852500 0 654500

A program like this must be tied to a subscription or up-front revenue model to work. It’s not a good fit for the current “Free access” model, Linden Lab seems content to offer and is used by the majority of users. The Lab also seems content with the current rate of word-of-mouth-driven adoption. It obviously suits their growth goals and requires no further stimulation.

For the Lab, not sharing revenue they don’t have to makes perfect “bottom-line” sense. Unfortunately, in the long term, not offering ways for people to share in their success and share the excitement of that success with others will backfire. I believe the future of e-business and social networking will increasingly be one where customers are rewarded for helping build and grow brands. Companies that fail to acknowledge and reward the people who help them be successful will not survive this growing wave of grass-roots marketing and referral-driven sales for long.