Second Ramblings

Here’s a sort of interesting blog post from Linden Labs: New Advertising Opportunity in Second Life: MotD

My take on this is pretty simple.

4500$ for one block of ads on one day?

There is no business in SL that would be able to make a decent ROI on this.

DO THE MATH!

4500 us$ is roughly 1.15 MILLION L$, or in other words, a constant incoming cash flow of 100.000 L$ per hour during the time the ad runs. Now lets say you do have your own sim, and the sim can handle up to 40 concurrent avatars at a time before it totally lags out, and it takes the average person around ten minutes to come to your shop, decide on a product, and buy it. Let’s also say one out of five persons actually does buy something in those ten minutes.

The above numbers give us:

• 240 different persons in the sim during an hour
• 48 sales

That amounts to a minimum price of 2100L$ for whatever you sell, only to break even on the costs of the ad.

I don’t think there’s any shop in SL that could generate that kind of sales with any kind of mass market merchandise.

Don’t get me wrong, I actually think that some kind of paid advertizing in the viewer is a good idea… but:

• the MotD is the wrong place, the start screen before you put in your password would be a better place… and that screen is HTML, it could actually have way more than one silly line of text.
• The price is way too high for any in-world business; The ones that make enough sales to afford that price don’t even need advertizing… and any RL business can get better advertizing for the same money in other places.

Disclaimer: I am not a MBA, so I used common sense instead to arrive at those numbers.

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