SL Travel Agency Seeks Paid Contributors
This is a cool idea: SL resident Spin Martin (aka media-maker Eric Rice) is starting a Second Life travel agency, tpTravel, and is seeking people to contribute content to its blog, for which they’ll be paid US$10 per (approved) post. VTOR linked the news, which came from the SLProfiles site.
We’ve created a new company called tpTravel, and it’s exactly what it sounds like… a travel agency within Second Life for Second Life, headquartered on the sim of Slackstreet. We are looking for well traveled residents to take snapshots, write descriptive posts, and create landmarks, SLurls, and machinima tours for posting on the blog that supports tpTravel.
As always, my question is: Will anyone actually use this? Could be. Especially if it were linked to a third-party portal to SL, it could be a great resource for new residents.
The other question it raises is paying for blog content. This is something I’ve been considering for 3pointD for a while now, though I’m not sure whether I have the budget for it at the moment. I’d love to hear from people with opinions on this. Is $10 a reasonable amount to pay for a post’s worth of content on a blog like tpTravel’s or 3pointD? How else could a blog like this (or like Spin’s) recruit authors? Ideas? And if you are interested in contributing to 3pointD, I’d love to hear from you. No guarantees that this kind of thing is going to start anytime soon, but I’d like to start talking to people, at any rate.
Feeds
Ten dollars! When I can pick up a copy of the NY Times for a buck!
No, it’s the contributors who get paid for posting to the blog. Reading the blog is, presumably, free. (As is reading most of the NYT on the Web.) No word yet on what it will cost to use the service.
I find this all hugely annoying. A number of groups struggle in Second Life to already do this function, trying to create lists and meta-lists in subjects like “gallerys” or “museums” or “parks” and do this all for free, and inworld. They are already engaged in efforts to get people to come to their parcels *for which they pay tier*. The ‘travel” effort they engage in as part of an overall strategy to try to build communities, create ties and meaning among people. By *paying* for this function, it becomes displaced from its moorings and becames more blatant commerce.
Along comes a well-funded and well-connected fellow who offers to pay the whopping fee of $10 (!) which is about $1500 L (the average amount an avatar spends on avatar-related and other content in SL during 4-hour log-ins, according to one Linden), for writing up a travel brochure — and inevitably it will reflect the kinds of locations *he* likes best.
Well, that sounds great, gosh, money-making opportunities in SL? Who could be opposed? But what will happen is that Spin’s little list of special 44 friends from slprofiles.com will jump on it and file stories for all their stores or favorite clubs or venues, depending on what “travel” he can supply. Most “travel” in SL is really a function of commerce — and has to be! because of heavy tier costs!
So then the already well-trod paths of Second Life to leading content-makers’ stores, which are already grabbed at the trailhead with the newbie stream, and through Linden-arranged media opportunities, now have *another* huge funding (in world terms) source to essentially “get in with the FIC”. The FIC now has the budget to pay you to blaze trails for them.
And naturally avatars aren’t going to want to struggle inworld with notecards and avatar-to-avatar contact when they can just click and slurl from Spin’s spinning of slurls.
In a free market, you can’t do anything to stop this — nor should you. It’s just one more sad thing about the way in which big business comes in and steps on indigenous efforts, that are fragile, and slower-moving, and cannot compete.
Despite Spin Martin’s big budget for taking over SL commerce/newbie/media streams, others will continue more slowly or cheaply and do it their way, too. One thing non-paying list and SLURL-providers have going for them is that while you can pay your SLProfile.com pals to do your travel brochure, you can’t force avatars to come to your location — unless of course Spin is going to pay for camp chairs, too.
The great thing about the free market is that if this is Teh Suxx0r as much as you think it will be, Prok, then it will sink of its own weight. To me, it sounds much like any other real-world travel magazine: it will be pulled in its own direction and there will be a certain amount of value in that, but it will never be able to take in everything, and there will be plenty of room for competitors or parallel services to exist and even thrive.
Mark, it’s not an SL Travel Agency. What it is, is an SL *PR* Agency. Call it by its right name, at least. The ‘travel’ will be organizing things like Midnight City or American Apparel. So it’s a high-flying well-funded PR flak being able to buy his way into the “Europe On $5 a Day” or the Zagat. There’s no excellence, no criteria, just whoever is eager to get paid, and who he finds to pay. Sure, it’s an example of the free market. That’s why you can’t do anything about it, nor should you. You’re right that if it looks like a crappy commercial glitzy thing in which Spin paid his friends, people will say, “Oh, that’s a crappy commercial glitzy thing in which Spin paid his friends”. Pretty cheap sub-contractors, these friends! Still, it’s fine to point out the crassness of it, and point out that it’s not organized by any real sort of community-mindedness. I don’t see how you accept it as a “travel genre”.
You’re also not responding to my comment about how this steps on voluntary and non-profit resident efforts like Gallery Walk. Well, I suppose Spin to be cool will buy out Gallery Walk the way big Internet sites buy out smaller ones. I guess it’s to be expected in our world. It harms its diversity and compelling quality, however, when it’s just a Shanghai to somebody’s PR budget.
“No, it’s the contributors who get paid for posting to the blog. Reading the blog is, presumably, free. (As is reading most of the NYT on the Web.) No word yet on what it will cost to use the service.”
I’m well aware of that. My point is for $1 I can ready the many excellent sections of the NYT, including the travel section, where I can read travelogues by quite a few writers. $10 per post seems ridiculous, unless you can make that back in advertising.
“You’re also not responding to my comment about how this steps on voluntary and non-profit resident efforts like Gallery Walk. Well, I suppose Spin to be cool will buy out Gallery Walk the way big Internet sites buy out smaller ones. I guess it’s to be expected in our world. It harms its diversity and compelling quality, however, when it’s just a Shanghai to somebody’s PR budget.”
Don’t we have room for both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, NPR and Clear Channel, PBS and Fox?
sorry, blliius, I think I misunderstood you. Are you saying $10 is too much to pay for a post? Depending on how often you take on a paid-for post, you could easily make that back in advertising, if the blog even half caught on.
Prok, I wasn’t saying that tpTravel is an example of the free market. I was saying that if tpTravel is as bad as you say, and if the market works as it should, then it will simply fade into obscurity. Nothing to worry about.
Mark, you aren’t hearing me: it’s not about good or bad. It’s about people buying their way into marketshare in this fledgling society, not sustaining the world, but stepping on it, buying it out. There were all kinds of groups and individuals trying to make interesting sites, trying to pool tier, collect money, get people in for events, etc. And many of these groups or individuals got the dwellopers’ awards to sustain them, and also had dwell. There are a great many builds around SL (now less than there were) made by creative and thuoghtful people who just did this out of love, then compiled notecards or landmark generators or help events to try to get people interested. It’s hard and thankless work. I know, I’m one of them. Everybody talks a good game about these wonderful sites of SL, but they cost tier, and people don’t want to pay the steep price of tier.
So along comes Spin Martin who simply buys it out. $10 US is a big sum for this world, it’s way overpriced for what it is. Goddamn, Mark, the HERALD pays $1000 or $2.88 US per article even of 1,000 words. Have you no shame acting like this is some QUESTION you need to ask in such an arch way?
Of course the price of content will go up in SL as more people demand it, more professionals make it, and more companies need a way to get into the highways and byways of this very atomized and niched market. And these kind of travel guids can do this.
I’m thinking of all the work of slhandbook.com which you’ve ignored here despite it’s very promising beginning because the guy making it, Clubside Granville, is new, and isn’t in your circle of podcasters and hipsters. There’s a lot like that these days, and people spend their own money, without having ad budgets from big companies or without being cool Internet dudes, they are just trying to serve the community.
It isn’t a travel guide, it’s a shopper, but a shopper for the Fifth Avenue or Rodeo Drive of SL.
bllius, from the way you’ve couched your question, I have no doubt you feel that “Wikipedia is good, Britannica is bad; NPR is good, Clear Channel is bad; PBS is good, Fox — evil FOX HSSSSSS is bad.” Well, ok, so? They are extremes as examples. There’s lot more inbetween. And nobody said “We” couldnt’ have “room” for them.
I was talking about diversity, and you are making a caricatuer of somebody blocking one extreme from another. How did you pull a commment ostensible for stepping on the NPR’s of the world from a comment saying that big was stamping out small and diverse???
Only two points I’d to make:
1. It’s amazing how a lot of things have already been determined from just a help wanted ad being posted.
2. People can get paid anywhere from $5 to $200 USD per blog post.
:-)
I shoulda clarfied #2…. industry wide. Or sometimes it’s a flat rate… the 100s of blogs and blogwriters of WeblogsInc I think are paid flat rate, but I could be mistaken.
. It’s amazing how a lot of things have already been determined from just a help wanted ad being posted.
1. Yes, and it’s absoutely fine, and absolutely right, to make those determinations and discuss them, in a world where we often find we have little control, because others control it for us : )
2. So what if people are paid $200 industry-wide? They’re paid $150-500 USD for a newspaper article (in the old-fashioned print media). But the Herald pays $3.00 USD per article, and I think the Metaverse Messenger probably doesn’t pay any differently. So anyone coming in and paying a lot more is displacing a fragile market. It’s more than fine to point out the impact of these changes.
Btw, I was being sarcastic about #1. I’ve said nothing about the service other than needing people to write, and black helicopters are in formation.
Thanks for re-affirming that the rates for being a paid to do this writing thing are so diverse. I was concered that the pay might be too low, esp since its intended audience is both RL and SL. I could be crushed by someone paying $500 USD!
:-)
Black helicopters do need to get into formation to protect our world, yes.
No, your “low rate” is in fact already there times what the Herald pays, for Christ’s sake.
Right, it might be three times the Herald, and considering the rate for people blogging spans a much larger spectrum, we’re all at the very low, low end. Thanks for helping reaffirm that. :-)
Thanks for the good words, everyone! See ya all soon.
Most people blog for free. Who is paying for the budget of your SL Travel Agency, Spin? Are you paying this out of your own pocket? Is some client like Microsoft giving you this money? Are there ads that are being sold in the Travel Agency’s publications or links on their websites that will help fund this project.
Walker didn’t ask those kind of probing investigatory journalistic questions, I’m not sure why, possibly because he’s still at the stage where a lot of the articles are like “oh, wow, neat, new technology, and look, wow, MORE new technology, ooh shiny!”
But youth wants to know. Own pocket? or Ad budget? I’d just like to know who is buying their way into the highways and byways of our Second Life, and into our hearts and minds. Seriously.
Most people who blog for free do so in hopes of selling ads on their sites. People who blog for sites other than their own get paid by the post or with free products, but not many bloggers will write for free for someone else. Just my two cents.
“We’ve created a new company called tpTravel, and it’s exactly what it sounds like… a travel agency within Second Life for Second Life,”
Are travel agents of a by-gone era? You Betcha! So where does that leave the humble travel agent? In today’s era of online travel sites it is easy to determine availability and prices at locations and, thus, fore-go the help of a travel agent.
In my opinion…. electronic ticketing over the Internet is easy, with the use of a major credit card. You can purchase tickets, hotels, car rentals and more, at just about any online booking site. The trick is to find your lowest cost and fast, without wasting your time and money.