Just What Is The Beef With Advertising?

Banner advertising on the Second Life website has came in for some fierce criticism, some of the criticism has been constructive and some of it is plain bizarre.

The constructive criticism includes suggestions that premium or concierge members shouldn’t see the adverts once they’re logged in. This isn’t an unusual step, I can recall Livejournal implementing a feature such as this whereby paid members didn’t see the adverts. Livejournal is of course a platform where the users are the content, free or paid, but removing advertising from paid accounts seemed to be a happy compromise.

Another constructive criticism is suggesting that adverts shouldn’t appear on the dashboard and there’s some merit to this too, it’s better to keep the advertising away from areas where people want to feel secure in their dealings, even if there are no security implications.

However some of the criticism is plain odd. I usually turn off signatures on the Second Life forums, but I turned them on today and lo’ and behold some of the people complaining about banner advertising, have adverts for their products or services in their signatures, do they realise this? Do they realise they are criticising advertising whilst advertising?

Now signatures are easy to turn off, but you can get applications that will block advertising too and they aren’t too tricky to install. I’m left pondering that the issue isn’t advertising in itself, it’s the kind of advertising that’s at the heart of the matter.

Everytime I login to Second Life I see adverts, message of the day, destinations, events, they are all advertising, but they are relevant to the Second Life service and I think that may be where people feel these banner adverts on the website cross the line.

I’ve seen people saying that you generally don’t get advertised to when you login to paid services, but you do, the thing is it’s usually services of the company you’re already paying that are being advertised, not outside companies and random adverts. Companies rightly advertise their wares to their own customers, it would be foolish of them not to.

Maybe Linden Lab should have started this little venture in a different fashion, by advertising their own wares on the Second Life website, so we’d see adverts for Patterns, Versu, Blocksworld, Dio, that would make perfect sense. However they’ve gone down a different route and as I said in my previous post, I don’t have a big issue with it but I recognise that others do.

So the issue seems to be that people go to the Second Life website and see something related to a former google search. They don’t want to see this, some of them find it tacky. I can accept tacky as a criticism, but let’s not criticise advertising in general because it’s an extremely important concept and many Second Life business owners advertise inworld, on websites, in forums and on their own blogs.

Criticising advertising whilst engaging in advertising seems silly to me, but constructive criticism such as premium members being exempt, sticking the adverts in public areas away from the dashboard and the layout sucking are all valid … well maybe a bit more constructive than the layout being sucky, but you should get my drift.

Over on Inara Pey’s post on the subject, we find comments from Gwynneth Llewellyn suggesting that this sort of advertising may generate One million USD a year in revenue for Linden Lab. Whereas this is not to be sniffed at, it also suggests that we won’t get reduced tier on the back of it.

However we don’t know where Linden Lab are heading with this, the Google ads may just be a trial with another advertising idea in mind. I wonder if those complaining about advertising would be complaining if the adverts were for Second Life related products? I know some folk would because some of us did when Linden Lab tried message of the day advertising, but if banner advertising on the Second Life website was affordable, would we see the same complaints?

I can’t help but feel that it’s not advertising itself that’s the issue, it’s the kind of advertising, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it and that’s what gets results.



5 Replies to “Just What Is The Beef With Advertising?”

  1. As you and I both know, the Lab is eternally damned whichever way they turn. As such, I’m not in the least bit surprised by some of the backlash against advertising.

    Gwyn’s point is spot-on vis-a-vios the revenue potential. On a daily basis, it may not amount to much, but over the course of a year, it adds up. And while it won’t directly bring easement to tier, it at least lessens the worry over declining revenue from tier, and the potential income from the ads outstrips the annual losses from falling tier. While is a start, at least.

    As to where LL needed to start / might have started, I’m not sure I agree. I see the point you’re making – but the art of things here is revenue generation; with due respect to LL, their new products aren’t brand leaders in that regard, and in many respects, posting ads to them would likely be taken as either a) preaching to the converted – inasmuch as most SL users know about the new products to some extent; b) would actually be received with the same amount of upset, with people either (again) proclaiming LL has “given up” on SL and merely using it to promote their new wares, or that LL shouldn’t be promoting their new products but should be doing “more” for SL…

    As such, LL have started in a manner liable to draw-in some revenue from the off and which is at least familiar to people as being a staple of websites everywhere (which can be easily blocked, if required). While I agree with the view (expressed on my blog) that the resultant ads can be tacky, I can’t really blame them for just getting on with it.

    That last point brings me on to another pet peeve – but I’ll save you from having me pull out my little soapbox on your blog, and sign-off :).

    1. Linden Lab just getting on with it is in many ways refreshing, they’ve dithered over advertising in the past because they feared the backlash, but just doing it and putting it out there at least gets the advertising there, warts and all.

      Yes the idea is generating money and I wonder if they’ve seen something in the Dio model that prompted this.

      Hamlet over at New World Notes has an interesting idea, if LL could encourage Second Life customers to target their google ads at the website, that may produce happy results, but I’m not sure how they would go about doing that.

  2. Look at it this way. At least the lab is not placing billboards alongside the linden roads, on the beaches, or on gov linden land. Those things are bad enough in real lift.

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