In the age of the Web and social networks and Google, we are all content producers. Google helps to equalize the playing field by its search engine rankings, which doesn't favor those who pay the biggest fee, but rather, popularity, SEO, and other factors. In short, big content isn't in total control anymore, and they don't like it one bit.

The interesting trend to watch is how big content treats the public, which after all are not its customers (advertisers are the customers of most big content, except for direct to consumer sales such as movies and music). What you discover is arrogance, greed, and snobbery; literally, they think all of us who blog, tweet, participate in social networks are "parasites."

Many publishers resent the criteria Google uses to pick top results, starting with the original PageRank formula that depended on how many links a page got. But crumbling ad revenue is lending their push more urgency; this is no time to show up on the third page of Google search results. And as publishers renew efforts to sell some content online, moreover, they're newly upset that Google's algorithm penalizes paid content.

"You should not have a system," one content executive said, "where those who are essentially parasites off the true producers of content benefit disproportionately."

The "true producers of content?" In other words, all of us should sit back passively and allow them to to use the internet as their personal publishing system? Is that really what they think? It seems so:

Not everyone supports the publishers' push. "It's the plaintive cry of people who have lost their monopoly trying to scrounge a little of it back," said Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair columnist and founder of Newser, which aggregates and links news from around the web. "Sometimes it's true that you'd rather get what The New York Times has to say about something rather than a host of bloggers. But more interestingly it's not always true. And it is in fact less and less true."

Cry me a river. This attitude of the "professional" being somehow more valuable than the rest of us is a symptom of a larger social issue, namely, that those who are on high (e.g. connected to money) are the only ones who should be allowed into the discussion. But times have changed, and we are not going to surrender our voice. Yes it's messy. Yes it's disruptive to the established order. Yes it's the beginning of a new era. But like you've been telling us for so many years, it's a free market. Adapt or die, but don't try to twist the rules in your favor. Get used to it.

Source: Click here


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We've compiled some stats on the area of digital advertising, which is a space largely owned by Google, but is also changing as social networks begin to expand and take hold. Added to these changes are the rise of 3d networks such as Second Life, IMVU, and others, which at present are outside of Google's realm, and perhaps not often thought of as being part of the digital advertising landscape, but nevertheless are increasingly showing some marketing value (albeit carefully thought out).

To get a sense of the size of this market, we turn to IDC, who says that web oriented advertising revenue will increase from ~$25 billion in 2007 to ~$51 billion in 2012. In addition, revenue for web based video advertising will increase from ~$5m in 2007 to nearly $4 billion by 2012. In short, this is a very lucrative area.

Now, let's compare IDC's estimates with the revenue for traditional media advertising. This includes TV, radio, and such. For broadcast media this particular area shows a small 0.6% in aggregate for q1 2008. The numbers are:

1.7% increase for TV

4.5% decrease for radio

5.2% decrease for newspaper ads

.8% upside for magazine ads

What's important here is the trend - web advertising revenue is increasing and broadcast advertising revenue is flat or decreasing.

In terms of digital advertising, there are five main areas to look at:

1. Banner ads (the grandaddy of digital advertising)

2. Search advertising (where Google reigns supreme)

3. Social networking advertising (which is where we will place Second Life for now, but of course this is primarily MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, et al)

4. Affiliate marketing (made popular by Amazon, but quickly becoming an e-Commerce phenomenon in general)

5. e-mail Marketing (spam notwithstanding)

Now the interesting thing about all these areas if that the growth in them is very healthy. Banner ads are expected to hit nearly $6b in revenue this year for example. Search advertising is expected to do even better, at approximately $11b in 2008. The newcomers, such as social networking, are expected to come in at just over $1b in 2008. So advertising on the web in aggregate is a great place to be.



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As you wander through the Second Life Fifth Birthday sims, it is apparent that machinima (videos made using SL as a platform) are quite popular in terms of being produced. How they fare in terms of being viewed is something that is yet to be determined. There are those who believe that the next wave of marketing and advertising will be done via machinima, and while that is an attractive proposition at first glance, doing video in Second Life is not as easy as you might think, so it's not necessarily a given.

However, if web video viewing trends are any indication, there are some lessons we can apply to machinima in our quest to make video a reality. First, the stats from ComScore. These are UK stats from March 2008, but they are quite interesting:

Notable findings from March 2008 include:

- 81.2 percent of the total U.K. Internet audience viewed online video.
- The combined U.K. online video viewing audience watched a total 172 million hours of video content.
- 20.5 million viewers watched nearly 1.7 billion videos on YouTube.com (47.3 videos per viewer).
- The average online video duration was 3 minutes.

This data seems to suggest that online video is quite acceptable to a large user base:




Now a couple of key points:

1. Video viewing is somewhat concentrated. This is good from an SL perspective.

2. Videos are short. Don't bother with epics. The 3 minute video rules.

3. Viewers will watch an average of nearly 1.5 videos per day, so your production schedule as to plan accordingly.

4. Inherent in this data is that videos need to be entertaining. I doubt blatant commercial videos will be very popular.


Here's an example of a video we did as a concept. It is a product advertisement, but that is secondary as the main thrust is entertainment. Note that the video clocks in a 3:17:




In summary, video produced in SL does seem to be a strong contender for ads and marketing. However, if done wrong, it could completely backfire and damage a brand. Tread carefully.



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If you've been in Second Life for a while, you may remember a time in early 2007 when the platform was being touted as the next big thing for marketing. In fact, that never really manifested, and the two biggest problem areas in Second Life are marketing branding strategic rollout and the entire area of advertising.

The current solutions vis-a-vis advertising are not particularly attractive for the marketing executive. Solutions run from the legitimate (expensive in worlds classifieds and ad board placement) to the dubious (spamming chat groups, notecard spam, artificial traffic numbers, etc.). As a result, both real world businesses and virtual SL based businesses face a challenging, and sometimes hostile environment for marketing. That's not to say that marketing and advertising in Second Life are impossible, and it has nothing to with Linden Lab; rather, there is a challenging social "chaos" in SL and a lack of nextgen marketing tools designed specifically for the platform that need to be sorted out before SL is more marketing friendly. That said, I do believe that there is a marketing future inside SL, but the winning models will come about through innovation and experimentation.

In world advertising will at some point be a big business. The Yankee Group predicts that the market for in-game ads will hit nearly $1b annually by 2012. IBM market analysis predicts global compound annual growth of 19 percent by 2010 for the video game advertising market. These numbers however, might be conservative, depending how well SL begins to integrate with the larger web and mobile networks. In any event, even these conservative estimates mean that virtual reality advertising is going to be a major business area.

So what can you do in the meantime? We recommend that you test ads selectively. Tightly measure ROI on each ad and quickly kill ads that don't work. Be aware that emerging capabilities in the platform will continuously threaten to disrupt business practices, and be prepared to experiment. Above all, avoid any strategy that can be seen as Spam. Test, experiment, and measure and remember that the goal are in-world ad campaigns today that will provide immediate and future benefits.


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