This week, New York City was the white hot center for discussing the business of marketing in online worlds. I wasn’t able to attend, but I’ve been following the copious notes of Mark Wallace, who live blogged many of the sessions at 3pointD. Personal highlights after the break.
There’s no concrete ROI on promoting real world brands and products in virtual worlds. That conclusion from Steve Prentice of Gartner Research: “Working out metrics is difficult. The numbers just don’t add up.” Instead, companies should consider their presence in worlds like There and Second Life as experimental: “Put it down to R&D and you will start to understand what works and what doesn’t.”
MTV is exploding with virtual worlds. The venerable TV/lifestyle/web brand is not only launching a “Virtual Cribs” spinoff of their popular show, but a virtual “Pimp My Ride“, too. MTV offered some of the first solid numbers for their Virtual Laguna Beach, developed on the There platform:
– 600K registered users in 6 months
– 64% of registered users return multiple times, and visit an average of 1.4 times a week for just over a half hour
– Median age is 20
– 85 percent users are female
– 3 million registered users expected by the end of the year
IBM is bullish on virtual worlds. Far from considering them as a mere marketing stunt, Colin Parris, vice president of digital convergence at IBM Research, believes virtual worlds “will have a huge impact on the Web as we know it”. He outlines IBM’s three-prong initiative in that space.
Linden Lab will open source the servers to Second Life. The company open sourced the viewer code in January, and this week, Linden’s Platform and Technology Development VP Joe Miller offered the strongest confirmation yet that the company intends to do the same with the architecture colloquially known as “the Grid”, the network of thousands of servers that comprise the world of Second Life. “We’ll be open-sourcing the back end so sims [16 acre portions of land] can run anywhere on any machine whether trusted by us or not,” Miller told the VW audience. “SL cannot truly succeed as long as one company controls the Grid.”
It’s 1995 all over again. The conference attracted a capacity crowd of business executives, but judging by a scabrous report from longtime metaverse gadfly Peter Ludlow, a lot of them showed up out of sheer panic that their company was in danger of being left behind by what’s supposed to be The Next Big Thing in Web 2.0. “You can feel the poplin-filtered sweat of middle-aged anxiety. You know, that anxiety you feel when you get the vague sense that the kidz are passing you by – that you won’t catch this wave and you’ll be left bobbing offshore…” Reminds me of what happened after Netscape’s IPO.
Again, this is just a personal perusal of Mark’s extensive reporting: Go to 3pointD for much more. And if you’re willing to bring a grain of salt, check out Ludlow’s experiental, new journalism-flavored report from the scene. (“All quotes guaranteed to possibly be accurate.”)
Disclosure: My Second Life blog was a “media partner” of VW2007, i.e., I had a link to their webpage on my site for in-kind promotion on theirs.
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