July 26th, 2007, 4 Comments »
I recently read three cutting critiques of marketing and advertising in Second Life. The first is by Rebecca Lieb (found via Adam):
Inhabitants of virtual worlds don’t have real-world needs. To get very far in Second Life, you do need money (in the form of Linden dollars) to buy goods, services, and property. No small quantity of the virtual currency is spent on goods and services related to virtual sex. Way-far-out-there virtual sex, and no small number of sex businesses (one of which recently changed hands for $50,000) often seem like the primary purpose of Second Life. As ClickZ columnist Ian Schafer told the “Los Angeles Times,” “One of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia.”
Ms. Lieb refers to an LA Times article, discussing some of the abandoned marketing projects littering the virtual world:
But the sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty. During a recent in-world visit, Best Buy Co.’s Geek Squad Island was devoid of visitors and the virtual staff that was supposed to be online.
The schedule of events on Sun Microsystems Inc.’s site was blank, and the green landscape of Dell Island was deserted. Signs posted on the window of the empty American Apparel store said it had closed up shop.
Frank Rose has written the most well-researched and, thus, incisive of these pieces for Wired, found via the Next Net. This quote from NBA Commissioner David Stern is staggering:
The site’s NBA channel, launched in February, has already garnered some 14,000 subscribers; users have posted more than 60,000 NBA videos, which have been viewed 23 million times. But over at Second Life, where an elaborate NBA island went up in May, the action has been a bit slower. “I think we’ve had 1,200 visitors,” Stern reports. “People tell us that’s very, very good. But I can’t say we have very precise expectations. We just want to be there.”
The article later suggests that such a project might have cost $500,000. So that’s, what, about $416 per visitor? Sweet. There’s so much to like in this article–Rose rightfully pokes some holes in Joseph Jaffe’s spin on empty corporate installations.
A couple of other surprising facts from Rose’s article:
- “Linden Lab’s servers can handle a maximum of only 70 avatars at a time.” I gather this refers to each island, or region inside the game.
- “A company can stage an in-world speaking event for as little as $10,000″. This is in the context of the cleverly-named Electric Sheep Company, a prominent, uh, virtual world presence builder. I think that’s a bit misleading, as you can run an event for a fraction of that cost if you do it yourself.
- “Only about 1 million [users[ had logged on in the previous 30 days (the standard measure of Internet traffic), and barely a third of that total had bothered to drop by in the previous week. Most of those who did were from Europe or Asia, leaving a little more than 100,000 Americans per week to be targeted by US marketers.”
Read more…
4 Comments »
April 5th, 2007, 2 Comments »
As regular readers know, I’m highly skeptical about companies marketing in Second Life today. It’s too early, I’m not sure they’re particularly welcome and, in most cases, I don’t see the return on investment.
That won’t always be the case, and I believe the MySpaces and FaceBooks of the future will look something like Second Life. Today, however, I would point my clients elsewhere.
Wagner James Au has written an interesting piece on GigaOm, reporting on a marketing survey (PDF). I’ll immediately disregard the survey, because they only talked to 200 avatars (which might, you know, mean 150 humans for all we know) and there’s no discussion of methodology in the document.
However, Au does go on to make some comments on marketing in Second Life, which are worth repeating:
The standard means of travel in SL is point-to-point teleportation, near-instantaneous transit from one x,y,z location to another. (Though it gets more press, Superman-esque flying is mostly used in short, localized bursts to get around obstacles.) P2P teleporting renders billboards and most other location-based advertising useless, and in any case, most SL marketers buy and develop on private virtual islands, where they can fully control the branding experience.
There’s also some really interesting discussion in the comments associated with this post, in particular this one:
There is a limit to the benficial effect of the ‘Flash Crowd’ aka the ‘green dot effect’ which is exactly that described by Larry Niven in his 1973 story of the same name - the sim gets laggy at fairly low levels and eventually the tp system stops working. Even if a company gets the Beatles to reform with Jimi Hendrix on guitar to publicise an event in sl, a vanishingly small amount of users would actually be able to attend. Companies need to go back to long, slow campaigns rather than a massive spend on shock and awe tactics. AOL Pointe in sl seems to have grasped that idea, for example.
I think most companies go into Second Life out of corporate hubris. It looks like a fun project for the employees, and it’s apparently what all the cool kids are doing. I’d love to see some more research or analyst reports on the bottom line.
2 Comments »
March 21st, 2007, 2 Comments »
A kindly, bilingual fellow named Jun volunteered to translate Get a First Life into Japanese. I’m not sure how the humour will translate, but hopefully people will at least grasp the gist. In any case, here’s Get a First Life in Japanese.
If it looks like gobbledegook, do the following:
- In Internet Explorer, click the View menu. Select Encoding, then select, then select More and choose Japanese (Auto select).
- In Firefox, click the View menu. Select Character Encoding, then choose Japanese (ISO-2022-JP).
Coincidentally, next month Second Life is apparently releasing a Japanese language client for the game.
Because my Japanese is limited to “nori”, “edamame” and “salmon maki”, I have idea how to promote the site in the Japanese web. Is there a Japanese Digg?
In unrelated news, tonight I accidentally visited www.cbc.com instead of www.cbc.ca. It’s a “Comic & Break Club” in an eastern Asian language with creepy avatars and scantily clad women.
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