PAW PAW - When Watt Juneau wanted to open a bowling alley inspired by "The Big Lebowski", he contacted Vryl Valkyrie from 3D Concepts to help build it. What he didn't foresee is that the cost of the project would more than triple because of the existence of puesdo-adfarms-16 sqm plots that continue to dot the mainland.

Partly because Juneau wanted to give something back to the mainland, and partly because that's where he owned land that wasn't in use, they decided to place the bowling alley in Paw Paw at a place everyone could access it to hang out.

"The place was infested with adfarms!" Valkyrie recalls. Juneau gave Valkyrie full creative freedom and said "money is no object". The majority of the money spent on the Paw Paw bowling alley was spent buying out the small 16sqm plots that literally littered the land at the build location, some plots actually sitting in the middle of Juneau's land.

"He spent more on half a sim than he would have on a whole sim," Valkyrie said. The total land Valkyrie bought was 15,000 square meters. 

Juneau's previous partner had sold some of the land in small pieces after a falling out last year. The resulting ad farm dotted the land as far as the viewer could see.

"My first reaction was 'He wants me to build a bowling alley in this place?! Oh my god!" Vakyrie said.

"I spent weeks just contacting people who owned these small plots and buying them out. I set a limit, no more than L$5k per plot. Some people were really nice, they sold it to me. Some even donated the land when they heard what we were doing. Some refused to even respond to IMs, and those plots are still here," Valkyrie said.

Valkyrie compares the trend of residents abandoning mainland to move to islands in SL to white flight in the real world, where people move from inner cities to the suburbs. "There's nothing wrong with that, but we needed to rehabilitate the mainland if we really want to keep people in Second Life," she said.

Despite Linden Lab's ban that tried to address the problem of adfarming, people have found a way to get around the Terms of Service regarding small plots, which disallows ads on small plots for sale. Some ad farmers set the land to "no sale" while building a 16sqm tower covered with ads, rotating textures, and even rotating towers to attract attention, perhaps in hopes that neighbors will contact them to buy the plots in order to rid their view of the ads and reduce lag when the scripts are gone. Another tactic is to  have two or more small plots near each other, some set to no sale with ads on it and others set to sell, with of course no ads on them.