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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