Linden Lab recently sent out a survey concerning advertising on Second Life’s website and what I’m assuming is the roadmap for in-world advertising as part of the client. I didn’t manage to save any of the questions verbatim, however as far as I know, a number of merchants were sent this survey as well.
It asked about things like advertising budgets, total monthly income from business, advertising on sites like XStreet SL, third parties, in-world classifieds, graphic ads and targetted ads, and has raised some very pertinent concerns relating to privacy and intrusiveness of advert content.
On website advertising:
I’ve always found the ad offerings on Xstreet to be poor. The ads are sized to a 15 year old standard that doesn’t take in to account the fact that consumer computer screens are now much larger than 640×480 or 800×600. They’re simply too small to focus on the content – the best ads i’ve seen at that size have always been for individual products only. Additionally, they don’t offer more modern animated graphics; animated gifs do not use a very wide gamut of colour and this severely impairs the quality of the ad and the perceived quality of the product being sold.
I also found the pricing for Xstreet SL’s banner advertising to be ill-proportioned to the returns. Click-throughs always were far lower than expected and once impressions ran out (typically within hours) the advertising run would be done. There is no control over the rate of exposure.
I have advertised elsewhere – specifically on SL Universe because the graphic sizes allowed are larger, different formats are allowed, and the merchant is free to choose the degree to which their advertisement is shown to their audience over a week, two week or monthly period. Additionally, SL Universe is built around an invested community and word of mouth; this seems to do far more than simply slapping up a sliver of a banner somewhere and hoping for the best.
On in-world advertising:
I currently run a small number of classified ads. They put my stores on the radar for the items people want, and that’s the bare minimum I use them for. I don’t have a budget for trying to drive huge numbers of traffic to my stores and I am dubious as to whether it would translate to sales in the first place. Every week, 8 merchants spend a ridiculous amount of money to get on the top 8 in search… this is something well outside of my reach or inclination to participate in. I have also felt the need to avoid those top 8 stores as their popularity breeds ubiquity, which I dislike.
For the moment, the majority of my classified ads are $50 -51L. There IS one that goes as high as $1001L, but that’s only to keep my business on the first page of listings in the classified tab.
As far as in-client advertising, I am very much opposed to any ads outside of search and classified listings. There’s a big reason for this – as not only a business owner but a consumer as well, I would prefer my SL experience to be as unencumbered by advertising as possible. Ads that target keywords (such as interests in a profile, chat history) or demographics (private info that is SUPPOSED to be kept private) are highly intrusive, not removable and NOT the impression of my business i wish my potential customers to have.
The new huge sidebar is already unwieldy and intrusive… adding to that mess would only make things worse.
On targeted advertising:
As I mentioned above, targeted ads were a big part of the survey. Specifically, it touched on issues such as targeting ads towards both avatar and real gender, as well as RL location and age.
Personally, I don’t feel good about this at all.
These are all items SL users agreed to give LL in confidence that they would be kept private. On top of that, as avatars in Second Life are often used for a variety of purposes, targeted advertising based on one or two factors may not at all be appropriate. Additionally, the more a given population is assaulted by unwanted advertisements, the poorer their impression of my business will be.
The ONLY area i would be comfortable with targeted advertising would be association of previously viewed and previously purchased items as long as confined to areas where this was previously already offered, such as XStreet SL.
General thoughts:
Overall, I think a big part of this is a cash grab to try to directly monetize the viewer. It also really overlooks the fact that a large number of areas within the existing system continue to be gamed and made useless by unscrupulous merchants. Adding more venues for advertisement, such as the MOTD and additional ads offered directly through the viewer will be the road towards pushing users away from business as well as the platform entirely.
I think there IS merit towards focusing on advertising, however special care needs to be taken in order to keep personal consumer details private and inaccessible to third parties.
There are also areas where SL needs fixing rather than plastering over. Consider:
– Search relevance still correlates to traffic numbers. Traffic is STILL gamed for this reason and will continue to be, regardless of whether bots and camping chairs are removed or not.
– Search relevance does not associate terms in titles and descriptions with items actually sold on the premises – as such, keyword gaming continues to be an issue.
– The biggest boon to merchants is word of mouth, be it through SL sponsored means, third party websites or from Resident to Resident communication. The new blog/forum software has pretty much removed what close community there once was on the old forums and is basically a disorganized mess very few people are willing to wade through to get the resources they need. Shutting down organized accessibility to SL as a community has been detrimental, in my opinion. Blogs aren’t an adequate replacement for forums, and forums aren’t an adequate replacement for blogs. The scrapping of the forums entirely and push towards mass use of a primarily linear format of communication has not been condusive towards community building at all.