It seems my laptop has blown up at a pretty opportune time. Urgh.

Seriously, JohnLight, it's already been noted that economic flows in Casinos in SL were basically the same L$ being shovelled back and forth (overall in the casino's favor) excessively. Their removal has only removed a false flow of money in the economy.

It also has to be noted that the new Search engine is still not the defacto method of searching in SL for the average OnRez or standard non-RC client. Of course, the fact that traffic has been reduced in importance with the new web-based Search Engine will definitely be a concern, and inevitably impact on the reasons to keep running campchairs.

IMHO, camp chairs are from an ethical point of view hard to justify - the average camper wastes more on bandwidth and power than he or she obtains in payouts in many cases. The gaming of traffic that was camp-chairing was a significant cause of the death of certain initiatives and subsidies offered by Linden Labs on the basis of high traffic being a function of actual community interest rather than merely snapping at dollars. Few very-old-school residents will mourn the demise of this method of traffic cheating.

I predict that the demise of traffic as a key factor in Search will probably lead to camp chairs becoming obsolete, but that will not necessarily be a negative factor. if Residents opt to continue funding other less lag-inducing methods of providing newbie start-up L$, it will be harder to accuse them of having mercenary motives anymore.

Heavy users of camp chairs on their part will have to start thinking harder about exactly what their build or business stands for. Granted, the SL Websearch engine is as vulnerable as early-era search engines for blindly swallowing a description full of every possible keyword, but this will probably change as LL examines and decides on measures to punish such gaming, which is easier to detect and rein in compared to the subjective figure that Traffic has always been.

This will probably weed out those who come into SL only for the money. No matter - it's not like that tends to come with ethics, sadly.

The free lunch is over - if you want the money, work for it.