I’ve tried to refer friends to Second Life, but its been a while since I thought about how doing so might generate a few Lindens to buy some new shoes or whatever. But to one Second Life Resident, the quiet disabling of the refer-a-friend fee is cause for protest, saying that “the Linden Lab software responsible for tracking friend referrals stopped working one year ago, today. As far as I know, Linden Lab has not publicly addressed the issue.”
For Adz, the issue is about more than the Lab making a policy change and not communicating it. It’s about the disabling of a platform feature that helped to defray costs for his SLNameWatch service - a program that tracks what avatar names are being selected by new users, and that allows you to target a preferred last name if you’re registering a new account:
“I’m slightly in the hole, here, going by cash alone. Before the refer-a-friend system stopped working a year ago, I received dozens of calling cards per week (You can see a blurred out picture of a volume of calling cards in my inventory, here) Occasionally, these accounts would upgrade to premium. The bonuses associated with the upgrade went a long way to offset costs and were a great motivation for me to invest more into the site.
Then, it stopped. LL launched a new registration portal, and my best guess is that the developers neglected to include the referal id handler. This affects referral urls, slurls with referral ids, and postcards.”
Adz encourages Residents to vote on the JIRA on the issue and to give WorkingOnIt Linden a kick in the behind.
Yep. It happens. Linden Lab changes to rules. All the time.
What I find (for lack of a better word) ironic, is that this issue is one that probably affected 0.001% of businesses. In fact, it seems like it can be traced to affecting only one company.
Who can worry about the referral system that stopped working over a year ago, when currently there’s a bug to turn permissioned objects into full perm: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-4444
something like this.. this issue affects everyone. Who can worry about a referral program if the main laws of the inworld SL universe can be currently walked around.
What’s weird about this rue change is that Linden Lab still advertises the refer a friend bonus (which amounts to L$2000, a little less than US$8.00.)
Doubledown - Um, concern about one doesn’t exclude a high level of concern about the other. I guess I’m able to multi-task anxiety.
A properly constructed Affiliate / Refer-a-friend program can be one of the most powerful viral marketing tools a company can use to build web traffic and grow its customer base. I own a number of web properties that generate significant revenues, through a carefully chosen set of affiliate programs.
A program like this must be tied to a subscription or up-front revenue model to work. It’s not a good fit for the current “Free access” model, Linden Lab seems content to offer and is used by the majority of users. The Lab also seems content with the current rate of word-of-mouth-driven adoption. It obviously suits their growth goals and requires no further stimulation.
For the Lab, not sharing revenue they don’t have to makes perfect “bottom-line” sense. Unfortunately, in the long term, not offering ways for people to share in their success and share the excitement of that success with others will backfire. I believe the future of e-business and social networking will increasingly be one where customers are rewarded for helping build and grow brands. Companies that fail to acknowledge and reward the people who help them be successful will not survive this growing wave of grass-roots marketing and referral-driven sales for long.
@Dusan , I get what ya mean :O)
Curious: Then why does the LD_sources_and_sinks.xls for May 2009 show theses figures?
Description April L$Sources May L$MTD
Referral Bonus 0 852500 0 654500
@JeanRicard I have two explanations for why there is nonzero number in that report.
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.
I still get referral payments at random for the same people from 2005/2006. Just every now and again, I get yet-another-referral bonus.
One of them, I’ve probably been paid for 10 times now.
HAHA Tateru - well, see, when they break something I guess they break it all kinds of ways.
@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.
I think there are two reasons the Lindens retired or suspended this program:
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.
linden’s charging P500 for overnight wifi access, no way anybody’s going to be an idiot! so they are blocking all wifi connections! grrr.