Last week, Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world of Second Life, finally decided to act against the ugly phenomenon of advertising farms on the so called "mainland". For those who are not Second Life users: ad farms are areas in Second Life, where the virtual land is cut into extremely small parcels, which are filled with very annoying advertisement displays - the infamous rotating cubes. And - while this is called "ad farming" - most of the Second Life residents doing this are not actually planning on making any money from "advertising". They are speculating on annoying the neighbors so much, that they will decide to buy the land - which is set for sale at astronomical prices - to get rid of the ads. (picture to the right CC by Ordinal Malaprop)
Linden Lab now announced that:
Using content, particularly advertising, to deliberately and negatively affect another resident’s view so as to sell a parcel for an unreasonable price, will be deemed unacceptable and dealt with as a violation of our community standards.
Hmmm ... While the idea of setting up limits against ad farms is not bad, I wonder if these rules will help much and how effective they will be. I think it was not a very good idea, to base the judgement if an installation is considered an "ad farm" on the INTENTION of the resident setting it up. Linden Lab might be able to monitor chats inworld but I doubt, if they can read their customer's minds. Certain limits about minimum parcel sizes and maximum land prices would have been a more practical solution IMHO - and less prone to subjective interpretation.
OTOH I think its a very promising movement in principle, that the Lab finally seems to care for the mainland again: If successful, this new policy should lead to more attractive residential areas on the Linden-operated mainland. And the newly formed "Department of Public Works" will hopefully add to the attractiveness of the mainland in another way: with more realistic (and fun) infrastructure and new and interesting public buildings.
Those who know, that The Otherland Group is active in the (non-mainland) real estate business and is operating an advertisement network within Second Life might be surprised to learn that we are so happy about these new projects. Why should we care about the mainland? And why should we like a ban of advertisement? The answers to these questions are rather simple:
- Ad-farms with their horrible rotating displays are one of the main reasons advertising is so much discredited in virtual worlds in general and in Second Life specifically. Anything that reduces these eyesores (which actually isn't "advertising" at all in many cases) will make our job easier - to provide a platform for professionally done, effective outdoor marketing.
- Anything that makes Second Life more attractive for more target groups is good for our business in the long run - even for the business in the other virtual worlds we are covering because SL is still a kind of flagship product. And a reduction of the large trailer-park-like regions in Second Life and the addition of infrastructure and pubic buildings will certainly make Second Life more attractive. :)
So Linden Lab is moving in the right direction. A little more fine tuning might help even more, though.
Technorati Tags: 3d web, advertising, marketing, metaverse, second life, virtual worlds, web 3.d
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