Unfortunately, traffic and traffic ranking does play a huge role in OpenSim. Sims that don't have high traffic numbers are on the verge of being invisible. Nobody is willing to flip through pages on sim lists that far back. People want quick and easy results.
This is why ca. 90% of all freebie shopping traffic went to Darkhearts when they still published their numbers. They managed to kickstart it with a whole lot of advertising plus a whole lot of exclusive, brand-new content largely on the same quality of the newest, hottest stuff on SL. And people piled onto that sim to get that content, and more people piled onto that sim because there were so many people on that sim, and because it was constantly in the top 10.
I guess, just like the R. Lion sim, it still gets lots of traffic in the shape of people who find stuff from there on other sims, can't pick it up because it's no-transfer and then go pick it up at the source.
If you haven't got anything new and exciting to offer, but you still don't want your sim to slip out of the top 10 and into obscurity which is largely the same unless your sim is a big name, you have to fabricate traffic.
The most "convincing" way is to tell some of your friends to park their avatars on your sim and keep them logged in 24/7. Then you can claim it's all regular user traffic.
If you don't know enough people who are willing to leave a computer with a viewer running all day and all night, you have to make your own traffic by creating simple alts and parking them on your sim as bots with no other apparent purpose.
Why? Because nobody will come visit your sim otherwise.
Especially not total OpenSim newbies. They don't know OSW-the-website. But they keep seeing the OSW beacons all over the place. And they take them for nifty Hypergrid teleporters. If you click on the touchscreen of a beacon, it lists the 10 most active sims. It's largely only these 10 sims that get any exposure through the beacons because especially newbies can't be arsed to go find the scroll buttons, let alone use them. And they want to go where people are because where people are has to be a cool place, right?
The popularity ranking is for luring those who already know the website, but who don't know it well enough to know that the popularity ranking is bogus and largely fabricated. They're likely to believe that popular = cool. And they, too, can't be arsed to flip through dozens of pages with sims if the first one or two pages promise to offer the hottest shit in OpenSim.
But seriously, even those of you who know all these dirty tricks, and who can see behind them: How far do you ever go through OpenSim's sim listings? When was the last time you've visited a sim that has been listed for a year or longer, that's at #700 or lower on the popularity ranking, that you weren't invited to, and that isn't yours?
See? Traffic generates traffic. And fake traffic is way too good at generating actual traffic.
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