Slashdot Mirror
Are Marketers Abandoning Second Life?
Vary writes "The LA Times is running a story today saying that marketers are pulling out of Second Life, primarily because — surprise, surprise — the 'more than 8 million residents' figure on the game's Web site is grossly inflated. Also, as it turns out, the virtual world's regular visitors — at most 40,000 of them online at any time — are not only disinterested in in-world marketing, but actively hostile to it, staging attacks on corporate presences such as the Reebok and American Apparel stores. The companies aren't giving up on virtual worlds altogether, though, but moving on to games like There, Gaia Online and Entropia Universe. The article also contains some commentary from a marketing executive who conducted an informal survey of the game and discovered that 'One of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia.' What company wouldn't want to be in on that action?"
One of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia
I am pretty sure if they weren't supplied for free, that would also be the case in real life.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Total Residents: 6,553,628,382
Born Today: 364,936
Died Today: 152,029
Pants Purchased: 27,021
TV Hours Watched: 82,124,102,305
I think defacing a commercial virtual presense is just as immature as a real one, even if the damage done really isn't. I know people get childish on the Internet, but that's pretty lame.
I've never quite understood the point of SL and these other listed sites. What do you do on them? Are they like some merging of ICQ/Myspace/Facebook into a 3d game (or some approximation)?
Maybe I'm just not nerd enough anymore..
I guess it has become a mystic revelation to certain marketers that there is more than gross audience numbers to the success of a marketing campaign.
And that maybe marketing sportsware or fashionware to geeks playing Second Life all day, instead of going outside and doing some sports or going to real life parties, may just not be the most cost-effective idea?
One of the prime reasons people are playing second life is because they are so damn fed up with First Life! And advertisers are a big thing that you can be fed up in the first place. Guess what, if you import to Second Life things that were what you hate in First Life already, people are going to be hostile to them?
Go back marketing soap to soccer moms, marketers. Do a favor to yourself and the rest of society.
and somewhere, a bear shits in the woods.
spotty bedroom boys who live with their parents don't have a great deal of money to spend on the pointless, tacky and oddly expensive consumer tat which our shops and advertisements are full of.
The article also contains some commentary from a marketing executive who conducted an informal survey of the game and discovered that 'One of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia.'
Yes, it makes a lot more sense to do such a survey now, rather than before you wasted a bunch of money putting your company presence on this POS "game."
I swear, if the average corporate marketing division was a person, he'd have an IQ roughly between that of a flying penis and that of the jizz on a furry's suit, both of which are common themes in Second Life.
Rob
"Also, as it turns out, the virtual world's regular visitors -- at most 40,000 of them online at any time -- are not only disinterested in in-world marketing, but actively hostile to it, "
You mean **uninterested**.
"disinterested |dis?int??restid; -tristid| adjective 1 not influenced by considerations of personal advantage : a banker is under an obligation to give disinterested advice. 2 having or feeling no interest in something : her father was so disinterested in her progress that he only visited the school once."
"USAGE A common source of confusion is the difference between disinterested and uninterested. Disinterested means 'not having a personal interest, impartial':: a juror must be disinterested in the case being tried. Uninterested means 'not interested, indifferent': | on the other hand, a juror must not be uninterested."
I wonder what their return policy is?
Near the end of the article: "Consulting firms that were set up to bring brands into Second Life are busy helping clients explore other worlds."
The best way to profit from a gold rush is to sell tools to the miners ... as Seattle discovered in 1897
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
WORST ON-LINE GAME EVER Looks like crap, plays like crap, the Linden company is run like crap. Let them go bankrupt and disappear in the nothingness from where it came.....
I myself am a User of Secondlife, and do not partake in the "Mature" aspects of the game. And I enjoy myself a lot. The truth about SL is that it's a very small, 3 Dimensional Mirror of the internet. Gambling, Pornography, and worse are in SL. But I don't believe in any greater proportion than elsewhere on the internet. There are a lot of great places to hold intelligent conversation, be silly, or be creative with the scripting language or primitive building tools. The first thing I recommend to anyone when joining SL is to stay far away from the popular "clubs" as I think that's what drives most people away and results in the VASTLY inflated user-count. One new resource that I recommend people check out with some ACTUAL INTERESTING LOCATIONS (Rather than the stupid clubs that are shoved at us constantly via spamvertisement) is the Corsa Guide at http://www.corsaguide.co.uk/ (flash warning)
...to realize that people would rather have sex than see advertising in their fantasy lives?
I have my newly purchased dick in hand. Please advise.
I already have to pay to use people's genitalia in my first life. This "Second Life" sounds like a ripoff.
I never understood Second Life. Here's my experience with it.
Being underage, I loaded up the teen edition, logged in, and got started.
Or not.
For one thing, the load times are terrible. Because pretty much all the content is user-created, it must be loaded when you enter the area. Rather than have users wait for six hours at the load screen, the world loads and renders around you. This effect looks terrible. First the mesh of an object comes in - slowly and jerkily - and then remains gray until its texture loads.
After the area has rendered around me, I try to make my way around, stuttering with lag. It turns out the best way to get around in second life is to fly. So I try it, fly high up, only to see - surprise! - more buildings slowly coming into view.
I tried to give it a chance - I really did - but after about five minutes of graphical glitches and lag, I left the game and uninstalled it. I think I'm just fine with my first life, thanks.
Finally the hype is over and we can turn our attention to more important things. Now where did I put my iPhone?
-- Cheers!
"Are Marketers Abandoning Second Life?" I don't know, does your premium for posting second life 'news' suddenly seem a little lower than before? Whatever it is, it still gets on the front page pretty frequently despite the fact that it's had nothing but ridicule from the /. community, so i'd suggest it's still doing quite well for itself.
"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." - George Orwell, 1984
Just because you get PK'd, doesn't mean they don't like you. It's one of the new challenges on the internet. It comes as a direct result of resurrection.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
I swear, if the average corporate marketing division was a person, he'd have an IQ roughly between that of a flying penis and that of the jizz on a furry's suit. As the article states [Ludlow] said most firms were more interested in the publicity they received from their ties with Second Life than in the digital world itself. "It was a way to brand themselves as being leading-edge," he said. In other words, they want cyber-credibility by association, the type that Wired deals in. Though I'm guessing that Second Life is probably considered passé at Wired itself by now. After all, it's basically a coffee-table mag for tech-hipsters, can't be seen being behind the curve now, can they?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I've been in Gaia online for a while now. Recently, it's become a haven for tweens, trolls and spammers. If that wasn't bad enough, now big companies are starting to advertise in the form of events, causing the market to become so inflated it has hardly any use, unless one gives real money. Thankfully, the gaia administrators haven't fully embraced big companies in order to keep it friendly, but it's headed that way. Those companies already left behind a trashed second life, and instead of cleaning it up, they move on to other sites to devour.
So to me the question to ask is why does the model not work, and why do people attack the brands. Perhaps because second life is supposed to free to develop it own 'economy', and people do not want established brands interfering with their enterprise. Perhaps this is yet another artifact of a world in which the conventional rules and consequences do not exist, and if a major brand wants to exist, it must truly compete, and not depend on the vagaries of regulation to make it succesful.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
When corporations invade a community's environment for the purpose of marketing, of course they aren't going to elicit a positive reaction. How could any reasonable person expect that?
Could someoone please exlain to me why "there.com" is directly linked while the other twos go over google?
I guess its optimisation, but to not count the last two or to boost them?
...it takes a lot of balls to sell genitalia on SL.
So can we stop posting stories about it already?
The fact that its few members have nothing better to do than to flood the Slashdot story queue about it, grasping for some small, twisted glimpse of relevance, indicates just that: Second Life is popular with a small group of 40,000 people who have nothing better to do with their time than to flood the Slashdot story queue.
Seriously. Small websites have more visitors a day than that.
In fact, if you want to post stories that accurately reflect its accomplishments, try headlines like: "Second Life: Publisher Creates Sexually Explicit Virtual Meeting Place for Furries and Other Fetishists."
http://gigaom.com/2007/07/12/debunking-5-business
- [S]ome reporters glance at the front page's "Online Now" stat- currently around 40-48,000 at peak times- and assume that's a more accurate tally of total active users... A better reference is posted monthly by the company's demographer on their blog, and includes an industry standard of unique monthly active users. As of June, that number was closer to 500,000.
- While it's true that "homegrown" content generates far more enthusiasm, traffic to the top real world promotional sites [in SL] are actually competitive with other forms of Internet advertising. During June, about 400,000 Residents logged in each week. In a typical seven day span that month, according to my Second Life blog's demographer, the five most popular locales generated anywhere from roughly 1200 to 10,000 visits. (The top ten earned over total 40,000 visits.) Therefore, each of the top five sites garnered a
- Much as a conflict between idealists and exploitative capitalists in the metaverse would be an exciting story, that hasn't observably happened to mass effect since 2004, when the world was vastly smaller.
- In terms of land mass, Linden Lab reports that just 18% of the world has been designated to have "Mature" content; explicit sexual activity is relegated to a subset of that percentage.
Full links and background at the GigaOM article
.Our government has funded an embassy somewhere in there. :-S
If there's any hyped game lately based on media buzz due to clueless journalists thinking a MMO where you build your stuff is "new and cool", then this is it.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
TFA seems interesting enough, but someone tell me one thing. What is this second life thing ? Is it an upgrade from the first one? Doesn't quite seem worth it to get the expansion before I figure out the original to put it that way... ;-)
Thats the way ingame marketing should be:
A Shadowrun style MMO where McDonalds pays you for a run on a Burger King restaurant to poison their soy burgers...
Now THAT would be entertaining and I wouldn't mind any McDonalds and Burger King logos/commercials in the game ('caus it should be there and isn't out of place).
gb2gaia If you get it, you'll shit bricks.
Overinflated numbers, hostile fans, just regular stupidity?
Second life is real life with anonymity. Don't you think that breeds a culture that is more interested in sexual exploits and penal attacks (I mean the flying penises, not a second sexual action) than wholesome family fun where people can buy items.
The biggest problem is Second life tries to build an economy based off of real world money. It just doesn't work, people don't want to pay money to get virtual money. On the other hand World of Warcraft has an economy based off of fake money earned from doing spending time in the game. This way advertising in WoW could work (it shouldn't be done but could be there).
So someone please explain how advertisers would even start to invest in this idea with out looking before they leaped. It's an obvious bait and switch deal (high amounts of users, low amounts of ACTIVE users).
Sony's trying to get into the Second life front with Playstation Home, then expecting people to buy all sorts of virtual wares? I can't imagine that's going to turn out good for them too. That doesn't mean the virtual world idea is horrible. The problem is the cost of the virtual world has to be floated somewhere, and consumers are NOT the place to get it in a Second Life style enviroment. SL had a good idea at one point of charging people for land, and that could work, but nickle and diming them for everything or expecting people to spend huge amounts of time designing objects doesn't make a online experience for any company.
Instead give a monthly stipend so people can do stuff with it, have a couple LARGE add ons (more room/s) and charge the advertisers pay for the servers. There needs to be a reason for people to log on other than random hookups and spending there money. That's what the mall is for, though I still can't find the random hook up store.
Not all advertisers shun SL. The Subgenius has SL advertising in their pocket:R DSET/SaucerLand_FOR_REAL.jpg
http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/eyes/stangart/CA
You cannot be both "disinterested" in something *and* "actively hostile" to it. Disinterested means you don't take a side, and have no stake in an issue. If someone expresses hostility, he's taking a side.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Around the same time political bloggers caught "Bush '08"-tag-wearing vandals defacing former senator John Edwards' Second Life headquarters with excrement and covering his photo in blackface.
What actually happened?
What does it mean?
When you buy an "island" (a server) from Linden Labs, what you get is configured to only allow *you* to create objects on it. In addition, unless you deliberately set out to make it happen, nothing in Second Life can be damaged, destroyed, defaced, or in any way modified except by the owner. Even if you do allow people to create objects, you get to set a time limit beyond which they vanish. THe only think you can effect are objects marked as being as being subject to normal physics, which has to be done deliberately, and pretty much the only "physical" objects in most places in SL are the avatars themselves.
If the people who built the Kerry site mistakenly turned on building for other people without setting a time limit, and didn't keep someone there to monitor it, then they did the equivalent of renting space in a mall, putting up posters, setting out leaflets, and walking away with the doors unlocked... and they were a lot safer doing that than they'd have been in RL.
There's no feces to smear on things. You can create a picture of them and post them on top, like a second layer of posters. There's no way to remove anything anyone put there, or break it.
So... someone came along and put up new posters, with *pictures* of feces on them. Which (if they had any sense) the Kerry people would have removed, permanently, as soon as they returned. After making sure they had some pictures to show everyone what jerks Bush supporters were.
If they'd done the same thing in RL they'd have been lucky if they didn't get everything movable stolen as well. And canned from the campaign. No, there's much less chance of anything seriously unpleasant happening to your marketing campaign in SL than in RL.
The biggest problem I've seen with people marketing in SL is simply not understanding what they're doing.
For example, objects in SL are infinitely and freely replicable by the creator. If you set up a website online, advertising your product, you typically let people download screen savers and branded games and things for free. If you're a car company, you don't charge people money for the driving game and desktop wallpaper and AOL icons... you want people to walk out with them and keep them around. At car shows you give people freebies, you don't charge money for the toy cars and tee-shirts with your logo on them.
So I went to this auto maker's island. They wanted you to pay the equivalent of a dollar to buy a "car" in SL. That's a bunch of painted boxes configured to use the "driving" code built into SL. A car, mind you, that costs them no more than the wallpaper and mini driving game you could download at their website... and cost less to create than the model cars in that driving game. No thanks, I'll save that buck for an iTunes download. So their thousands of dollars for renting that island in SL is all thrown away because they tried to recover the costs by charging the people they're advertising to for what they'd be giving away as a freebie online or at the auto show.
You see this again and again. One electronics store wanted you to buy "computers" and "iPods" from them... all of which are just boxes with photos pasted on the sides. Another company was charging money for a logo T-shirt. What this kind of product is, is basically an uploaded copy of their logo, positioned so that when you "wore" it it showed up on your chest... they didn't even bother creating a "cloth" texture, stitches, folds, or any of the baked-in lighting effects that hobbyists making levels and skins for video games are used to doing. The T-shirts they give away at trade shows cost approximately infinity times as much to reproduce.
Meanwhile, the average person selling clothes in-game with a monthly budget that *might* pay for the typical
The article also contains some commentary from a marketing executive who conducted an informal survey of the game and discovered that 'One of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia.'
I would toil away the hours, and mingle with the others, if I only had a groin.
FLR
are in 2nd Life. Those who choose to spend their time in the cardboard cut-out of 2ndL are either living with their mom or have never heard of Europe - or both. You don't need to buy a knob here.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
Quelle surprise. Marketers in the real world always and everywhere have to pay for the ability to get their message out because at bottom people are reluctant to host it and reluctant to see it. People do not like advertising.
This is exactly what you would expect if there are no consequences to acting on that dislike, unless you are a marketer whose self-esteem depends on fooling yourself that people like what you do for a living.
Bill Hicks:
By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself.
No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself.
Seriously though, if you are, do.
Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers. Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself.
Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke..." there's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend - I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking makinations. Machi... Whatever, you know what I mean.
I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart."
Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags!
In my experience, the corporate developed content is sterile, mundane, uninteresting.
Meanwhile, content generated by residents tends to be interesting, innovative, and lots of fun to experience. Drop by Luskwood sometime and you can see the raw creativity in some of the avatars there. Check out Svarga and admire the amazing natural looking landscape, produced entirely by one resident.
Real life big business just can't compete with individual expression in Second Life. I won't be the only one happy to see them gone. Perhaps Linden Labs will start to cater to us, the residents again, and implement some basic necessities like user validation to keep out the net.riffraff.
-Z (Zorin Frobozz on SL)
LAME
Yeah, and hope that the server isn't running in someone's "bargain basement" and is protected from such things as power outages, hard-drive failures and 3rd party tampering.
All the servers in SL are hosted by Linden Labs. They're all backed up in periodic checkpoints, they migrate from one physical computer to another as needed, and can be restored to any recent checkpoint if necessary. There is a separate project to create an open source sim, but it's completely independent of Linden Labs... currently only the client (the viewer application) is open course.
Second Life is one of those places that library jobs are now requiring applicants to know all about and have a presence in, just like MySpace and Facebook.
But no, it's not about fun and games--you're not that naive, are you? It's all part of the "teaching" requirement for academic librarian jobs. You see, most librarians working at colleges and universities are in this quasi-state where they're considered professors--but in order to be a professor you have to teach. What do librarians teach? Hands up? Any guesses? Anyone been to college recently and remember those "How to use a library" or "Research" courses you had to take? Bingo! Some of those things are only a single time semester--yet it's "teaching" and they won't let go of it.
So today librarians try to use Second Life and other social networking sites as a way to "teach" and connect with the new wireless iPod kid generation. The fact that nobody outside the library world seems to have even heard of this shows how stellar it's all been going; about the same as your Aunt Mae wanting to go to a rock concert with you to groove down.
And if you work in a library, God forbid you hold your hand and say this is really a bad idea--just go with the flow. At least the advertisers are wising up........
In Second Life: skins, hair, clothes, animations, weapons, sensors, shields, jewelry, gestures, flight enhancers, teleporters, wings, tails, complete avatar makeovers (including species and gender changes), ... and, I guess, genitals.
In First Life: clothes, food, shelter, cosmetics, drugs, jewelry, weapons, transportation, and entertainment (including stories and movies about people who can change their skins, hair, clothes, gender, species, etc...)
In Star Trek: clothes, food, shelter, cosmetics, drugs, jewelry, weapons, sensors, shields, teleporters, and holodeck privileges (where they can pretend to change their skins, hair, clothes, gender, species, etc...)
oh dear god I sure hope so.
They must not have seen the Star Trek TNG episode "Ship In A Bottle" (or the movie, Nemesis was it? w/ the exact same concept). Both still highly (well for the most part) enjoyable to watch though...
Being a LONG TERM Resident of Second Life I think I can shine some more light on this subject then the LA Times is able to.
Yes, it's true, the Resident Numbers shown on the Website are over-inflated, by about 7.5 million I would say, and even then I would consider it suspicious. Linden Lab began allowing FREE ACCT's over a year ago, and many of the regular Residents of course decided they wanted a FREE Alternate Acct to mess with. Since there is not active way to track these FREE ACCT's, (LL doesn't track based on IP and MAC Address) there is no real way to tell how many of these FREE ACCTs are for already established Residents and how many are for New Residents coming into the world.
Yes, it's also true, there's a large part of the Resident Community that get their kicks out of Virtual Sex. This is true with just about any Online World though, so there's no real big news here.
Yes, it's also true as well, that there is a SMALL contingent of Residents that vehemently oppose the commercialization of the Second Life world. These groups actively seek out Commercial establishments and hold regular protests. The LA TIMES is incorrect those in assuming that MOST of the Community is against these Commercial establishments. The thing is, with the Commercial establishments, they usuall BUY their OWN ISLAND, therefore, if you don't want to go there, you don't have to. Most of the Resident Community might visit these Commercial Islands once or twice, but after that they figure, "So what else is new?" It's not that they don't like the Commercialization, its just simple that there's nothing new about them. Just another store to visit, big deal, we've been to stores before, and quite frankly, a Car Dealership showing new models in SL doesn't really do it for many people. Now if say someone like Netflix or Blockbuster came to SL, and rented movies, then you would see people flocking to them. It's a matter of the right product for the Community, not that the Community doesn't want them there. On a side note to this example, there are DVD stores in Second Life that are renting DVD's. This has been brought to the attention of Linden Lab, but they feel until the MPAA actually tells them to remove the offending material, then they don't really have to do anything about the illegality of this.
Which brings us to the REAL REASON the Commercial avenues are disappearing in Second Life. It's got little to do with the "assumptions" given in the LA TIMES, it has everything to do with a very unstable World and the amount of BUGS that continue to plague the world. A day doesn't go by that I don't hear from someone that has spent a considerable amount of Linden Dollars (in-world currency) and when they went to put the product out on their property, it simply disappeared and never returned. Linden Lab of course, says they can do nothing about reimbursing the people for this major issue, yet provide no fix to this issue that has now lasted over three months. Not only that, but it was recently divulged in-world by the BUG TEAM members that BUG REPORTS that don't have REPRODUCABLE steps are ignored because, as they put it, they just don't have time to try and figure those out. Yet, the bug list still has bugs listed over 4 years ago on it. The BUG TEAM also has decided it would be a good idea to let the Community VOTE on which bugs will be fixed first. I would say if you like BUG tracking and coding, a great place to work would be at Linden Lab, since they are still waiting to be told by the Resident Community what BUGS to fix first. Of course, Linden Lab has failed to provide some venue in which to "vote" on these issues, so I guess the BUG people are just taking the summer off. Also, Linden Lab continues to add more and more enhancements to Second Life, which continues to increase the stress on the GRID. A month or so ago, Linden Lab introduced a new enhancement called WINDLIGHT to the world. It's purpose was to make the worlds SKY more realistic and "prettier". Once the enhancement was added, peopl
The first ones in to the second life market made a big splash and received a lot of press, so it was regarded as good P.R. at least, even if the actual in-game advertising didn't turn out to be all that successful. After the initial golly-isn't-this-so-cool wore off, marketers started to realize that for the amount of money spent vs the number of people reached isn't an effective use of marketing dollars.
Second Life is to online communities as the Segway is to personal transportation. Just add Peter Molyneaux to the mix and you have the perfect storm.
...would shit PRIME NUMBERS!
To notthepainter: As a game designer and a digital artist I can respect you venue of art. It is perfectly respectable in this day and age. I make 3d models with Maya and use Photoshop to texture them. Digital sculptures is what they really are. Admitting you are scared of making real life art because of the fear of mistakes is kind of sad, because mistakes to you may be genius to others, that and all artists make mistakes. Not showing them around is the trick. But it is your life.
And none of this changes the fact that Second Life is the worst example of game design ever show to the public, IMO. It is shit. Everything about it's design is shit. It blows chode, dead one's, from a dead goats ass. The Linden company is a joke. They are morons who got a hold of some cash and made the joke that is Second Life. And when they realized that what they made is shit, they went to the public to try and "fix" it. Losers. I hope they go out of business and stop being am embarrassment to the gaming world.
Let me help explain how that Second Life residents can be both disinterested and hostile at the same time.
;)
We are talking about the feelings Second Life residents feel towards different types of marketing campains, that are being used by different marketing companies in Second Life. One campain stategy, that has been discussed in the posts here thoroughly, is the big companies. These large corporations are responsable for the disinterest, because of their un-inspired presentations, and some protests by extreemests, just like in real life. The final marketing campain type, that has been greeted with so much hostility, is the low level mass marketers. These marketers do the real world equavelent of buying your neighbors house, and all of the houses at major street corners, and put up massive ugly ads for sex, and gambling, and all sorts of horrible MLM schemes. These marketing companies destroy the once wonderful views that the local land owners have worked so hard to create. In real life most municipalities have passed laws against this sort of behavior, so it does not happen. But in Second Life, the residents have no such protections. So, some have banded together to purchase the land around these horrible ad farms, and surround them with trees, or a building, to return their view, and land value!!
Whew...
Hope this helps
I'm just "this guy", you know?
Hostile
H ... o ... s ... t ... i ...l ... e/
who could possibly believe there are more than 40,000 NoLife "players" out there?
even that is a exaggeration. I've preached this since its inception, Second Life is dumb.
It truly is an animated AOL chatroom. It's full of boring people who don't get to have sex.
As they are boring people, why is everyone paying so much attention to them?
It has no plot, no purpose, no rules, no point.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Amusingly enough, the link seems to have been slashdotted. If you're gonna flood slashdot with links to your site... at least make sure the server can take the hit.
At one point, anyone who signed up for Second Life recieved a stipend of 50 $L a week (about 20 cents) and people who payed for a premium account recieved 500 $L a week (aprx. $1.86) This all changed once people started flooding the game with new avatars to collect the stipend and cash it out. After this happened, the stipends for premium users were reduced to 300/week and basic users got nothing. Linden Labs has no problem getting people to shell out real money to buy fake things. I have never done it myself, being a content creator who manages to earn plenty of lindens just selling my own stuff, obviously the people who are buying my things have to get their lindens somewhere. It is not hard to earn lindens in-game if you have any measure of talent, be you an artist, a musician or a programmer, there is someone in Second Life who will buy your stuff. My point is that the game isn't about spending your money or hookups (mostly ;-)), it is predominately about people creating interesting things, people buying them, and the creators in turn buying other people's interesting things.
Wow, sorry about the brick-like nature of that post, for some reason formatting decided not to work.
;-)), it is predominately about people creating interesting things, people buying them, and the creators in turn buying other people's interesting things.
Actual text:
At one point, anyone who signed up for Second Life recieved a stipend of 50 $L a week (about 20 cents) and people who payed for a premium account recieved 500 $L a week (aprx. $1.86)
This all changed once people started flooding the game with new avatars to collect the stipend and cash it out. After this happened, the stipends for premium users were reduced to 300/week and basic users got nothing.
Linden Labs has no problem getting people to shell out real money to buy fake things. I have never done it myself, being a content creator who manages to earn plenty of lindens just selling my own stuff, obviously the people who are buying my things have to get their lindens somewhere.
It is not hard to earn lindens in-game if you have any measure of talent, be you an artist, a musician or a programmer, there is someone in Second Life who will buy your stuff. My point is that the game isn't about spending your money or hookups (mostly
You didn't read the definition did you? The word that should have been used was 'uninterested'. The original poster was under the common misconception that the two are synonymous -- which they are not. This also means that technically, in this case, those of us that were bothered by it are not being 'spelling-nazis' but are simply showing off our superiority complexes.
Does this mean the end of spinning ad farms, and those Avs wandering the infohubs with giant attached signs, getting paid for every person who clicks?
Oooh, I hope so.
Argghhh. All this article was, was a press releases for the Millions of Us/Gia Online partnership to try and drive users to sign up for Gia off of the Millions name. What BS.
And I love the concurrent logins "dropped 2.5%" crap. Gee it's an Internet thing. Pretty much everything on the Internet has traffic drops of 2%-10% every summer. I'd like to see a follow up on this showing the the 2.5% increase come September.
Damn it, I hate crap like this.
Depends. Can you say you've had sex if "your" genitalia has been.. well, you know. Think about the market for all the geeks out there!
I certainly wouldn't want to live in some town of rich jerkoffs playing the real-estate game with scared money.
Blar.
VERY contrary tbh, film studios are having HUGE success there, and lots of viral potential.
Movies like 300 and Transformers were advertised there, with quite a big fan fare, and it has been excellent for those movies, and more is coming along. The guys who made these builds, V3 Group, is telling that especially with movie 300 there was a huge viral marketing success via freebies, same happened with Transformers.
I personally know few of these who have been working on making those events and advertising happen.
This article that marketers would be leaving SL is quite a total bullshit. Hell, i even know who does marketing on SL, and they PROFIT, not via the impressions, but DIRECT profit with the marketing material they have! That case is a music producer/publisher, with online music store.
Now, what's up with Adidas and American Apparel store? Regular griefing attacks, nothing special there, or new. It might be
disappopinting, but when i visited Adidas in-world location, it was made like they would be INVITING GRIEFERS! Of course they
are going to have them in that case. Apart from that, Adidas shoes in SL are simply the BEST BUILT shoes of ANY there, they are
simply an awesome piece of work. They ask a nominal 40L$ for the shoes, but personally, i would have been ready to pay many many
times more for them. Needless to say, i used them for quite a while, and they got some viral marketing effect from it, many were
simply stunned about those shoes.
The problem with these "failures" is, that they simply don't know "the rules", or how it works. With Adidas this was VERY apparent.
As for the resident numbers, yes they are inflated, and mostly there is only peaks of over 40,000 online at any given time,
however, these figures are constantly on the rise, and there is hudnreds and hundreds of thousands of active 'residents'. And
money moves.
And YES, i do run quite sizeable business within Second Life, am personally on every single day, and conducting business there every single day. I do also run an advertising network within Second Life, as a side-kick kind of thing. That isn't my main business there. And yes, i am helping people to succeed with their second life business journeys.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
First you say that Second Life fails because people don't want to buy fake money with real money and then you point to WoW for which people buy fake money with real money on eBay. Can you say cognitive dissonance?
In Soviet Russia, government controls corporations.
In Capitalist America, corporations control government.
The big problem is that pretty much every marketer today is stuck in the "fogey generation," completely trained and immersed in the traditional understanding of marketing that came from an industrialized model. They see SL, and other forms of online interaction no differently than they see (saw) TV, radio, newspapers and billboards - as "channels" to communicate their message, image, and brand.
With a generation of people who have grown up in a massively interconnected world, traditional marketing principles are turned on their head. A presence in SL just ain't going to cut it. Marketers are going to need to figure out how the contemporary world functions in all its interconnected complexity, and change their ways accordingly.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.
who has the time to be an unpaid beta tester, or even a paid beta tester for that matter?. as a consumer....i want what i pay for to work. I have no patience for this early stage VR thing. Maybe google will figure out a usable solution to the VR web. The whole sketchup/google earth is a start. we all know 3d environments are the inevitability. Someone wake me up when its here.
You can't sell brands? Gee, really? Let's take a look why.
Why do you buy brand stuff in the first place? I mean here, in real life. Well, there are generally 3 reasons:
1. Quality
2. Comfort
3. Looks and bragging rights
1 and 2 are simply out in 2nd life. Whether it's comfortable doesn't matter (hey, you don't have to feel it against your skin, for all you care it could be made of sandpaper instead of silk), and it lasts forever anyway, so who cares about quality?
What's left is looks. Now, since you don't have to build up sweatshops in east asia to get your designs going, anyone with a decent modeling skill can start his own business. And I'm pretty sure there are designs out there that look better than Reebok and Adidas.
So what's left is "brand awareness". The "look, I can afford it" effect. And, well, I've seen a documentary recently about some chinese girl who made a killing with her designs. I can well imagine that her stuff is the "I'm rich and I wanna show it" outfit already.
In other words: Sorry, Adidas, you're too late.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Did YOU read the definition?
1) I was really discussing the "hostile" part, that had not been explained here.
2) Let us parse this discussion from the start:
a- Original poster uses the word "disinterested"
b- Reply quotes the dictionary to "correct" the usage of the form of the word "interest". This critique used the first definition and thoroughly ignored the second definition in their own quote, as show below.
"disinterested |dis?int??restid; -tristid| adjective 1 not influenced by considerations of personal advantage : a banker is under an obligation to give disinterested advice. 2 having or feeling no interest in something : her father was so disinterested in her progress that he only visited the school once."
When a marketer creates something that is not new, I have or feel no interst in it, therefore, I am disinerested, per definition 2.
I was not going to get into this nit picky battle, but you just had to ignore my main point and whine about a comma... XD
I'm just "this guy", you know?
Except none of Wow's existant is reliant on the economy. If everything cost 1 gold in Wow, people would still work on their toons just to level them up and try end game stuff. Essentially if I suddenly found 100 billion gold on Wow and gave it to everyone Blizzard wouldn't care if it was legit.
However in Second life, the economy is the only way second Life has to make money. There's no "game" underneath it. There's nothing but the economy to Linden Labs. People do stuff with the money but the only thing keeping the company running is the economy.
Any economy, real or otherwise will be traded for real dollars, however when the game world exists only because of the economy and there's nothing that you can't get truely get elsewhere, there's a problem. Want to say Second life is amazing go ahead. But it's a graphical version of IRC or Muds. Not that it's a bad thing, just that it's not as unique as they try to make it sound.
Maybe one could take the perspective that while the grind of leveling up is the "game" in WoW, taking part in the economy is the "game" in SL?
In Soviet Russia, government controls corporations.
In Capitalist America, corporations control government.
more money in Entropia Universe = More PEDs in LOOT? Praise be to Lootius. May Lootius be kind to you.
It makes sense that a lot of advertisers are coming over to EU. SL is a pay per month plan... no one wants to pay so that they can watch darn commercials... If you pay for HBO you want movies... not commercials... Also with EU soon expanding massively in to China, there's a major market that will open up...
Marketers are moving on to places like There? Why, so they can market to the 100 active players?
hahahaha