It is known, to a lot of people, that pay-to-vote contests are now very frowned upon. “Why?”, you may ask, well the answer is simple: it is a gamble, and the “prize” money that’s “given away” is not so. Last night I left a huge pay-to-vote pageant company, after many weeks of contemplation, but before I go into my history with them, here are the basics of how places like this work:
- First, you may see lots of advertisements or receive random group invites or notecards asking you to join their free contest, where lots of linden prizes will be given away.
- If your interest is piqued, you enter, and soon your photo is on a voting board somewhere on the sim. It says how much is paid, and how many votes that equates to.
- For some contests, there are “boosting events”, basically paying a set amount to get a boost in votes (example: pay a min of $500L for 50 votes, if the contest is a $25L per vote thing…the money is matched, giving you double the amount of votes than normally, that is why $500L will get you 50 votes instead of 25)
- You or your friends (in most most cases just you) pay the lindens to get votes, over a span of time, building up the prize pool.
- Some places, not all, will give you an added incentive to getting votes for the finale….top three who go into the finale are given extra points (3 for the #1, 2 for #2, and 1 for #3), and they also receive their questions for the Q&A portion ahead of time, greatly giving them an advantage over the remaining 7 in the top 10.
- With this added incentive, during the boosts, the more competitive contestants will pay higher amounts of money, in order to get more votes. Nowadays, with everyone wanting to be a pageant winner, to be a model in SL, these contestants are paying higher amounts of money than before, more than what the first place prize is, and now, in most cases, if they reach the finale, they will not break even, or make a profit.
While not all of these facts apply to all contests (hence why I said “some”), this is what goes on. No one should have to pay to win back something. And no contestant should be excluded from a finale because someone else has more money  or more friends than they do. Contests should be about talent, pure talent, and I am ashamed that I had stooped so low with my spending on something that I might not get back. It is down right outrageous that these contestants are pulling out money from their behinds just to get ahead. This is not fair at all. Last night I placed as runner up in one of these pageant finales. I knew it was my last night as a contracted model for the company. I knew for weeks that I wanted to leave as soon as this pageant was done. I do not know what the scores were, but perhaps if the winner didn’t have the extra points for having the most votes and most lindens, perhaps I would have won instead.
I am not writing this post out of anger because I only won second place. In fact, I am happy that I didn’t win, because I no longer want to associate myself with that place. It’s a place that claims to be the hottest fashion place in SL, that they give away all these lindens, but in fact, most people, especially in the real SL fashion industry, don’t give a damn about them. I don’t want to associate myself with a place that has “models” and shows, but has no originality, no organization. They do everything you’re not supposed to in modeling (armpit and animated poses, among other things), the judges are the vendors who have shops in the sim (not necessarily knowledgeable of what makes a good model), and the CEO even admits to having a modeling career of 2 days (so, who is she to tell people what is what?). If you have red hair, forget it, this same CEO doesn’t allow models to wear red hair, because she just does not like it. She also spams her group as well as other modeling groups like crazy, and apparently she randomly sends out notecards and group invites to members of the outside modeling groups. These are all things that I have experienced or observed at my time at this place, and the more educated I became about SL modeling, the more and more I disliked being associated with it. Why didn’t I leave sooner? Well, I wanted to not completely waste my lindens, I wanted to just finish what I had started. I had been told before, that if I wanted to truly make it in modeling, the first step was to leave that place. Several top models had started there, and with the advancement of their careers, they had left and had become much bigger successes.
The point is, why gamble your money away? No one last night, not one of the contestants, broke even. Had I won, I would have made a decent profit, but even the 50K I won, didn’t make up for the $57K I had placed down. $57,000L to be in a finale? really? Well, it wasn’t all at once. I had entered this contest at the end of August, but you’ll be surprised to hear how others made it to the finale…One contestant, the person who finished in 3rd place, had entered the contest at the very last minute. She didn’t want to be in the newly started version of this contest, so on the very last night of voting, she dropped to her voting board, $100,000L. She jumped from #19 to #3 in one night. She received her question ahead of time, and 1 extra point awarded to her. What did she “win” in return? Only $25,000L. The person who won, had dropped over $113,000L…insane! The top prize is $1000,000L. She didn’t profit either. The madness certainly has to stop. Where are these women getting this money from? I am not rich in SL or RL, and I have only spent an obscene amount of money like this once, because I had the opportunity to. But my mind is boggled at how these people can do this, and they do it for the several pageants this company has running at a time. Some of the contestants join all the contests, or a number of them. Let’s say, one joins 4 pageants. She wants to get ahead. She drops 100K on them each, 400K total…that’s $1545 US Dollars! Unbelievable! On a virtual world pageant? When she might not even win all of that back?
No one earns anything with these kind of contests. The best way to win is to join a truly free contest, one that is only judged, not by votes because you are popular, or because you have a ton of money to spare. The real free contests have prizes that are awarded to you, at no cost to you. These are more valuable, for obvious reasons, and they genuinely challenge you to rise to the occasion, to be the best you can be. Now that’s an honor, to win a contest like that. Besides, asking your friends to vote for you, especially when each vote might be more than a few lindens (i’ve seen contests with more than a min of 25L to vote…), is one of the quickest ways to lose friends, unless they like spending their money on you for things like this.
With all that said, I leave one key piece of advice: Think wisely, think about if spending money on a contest is worth it. Isn’t that considered a scam? Screw your head on straight, and don’t pay and pray to win it back. It certainly doesn’t “pay” to vote.
-Zo
Tags: Contests, Modeling, Second Life, SL
Zoey Neutron
Z Style 