SL Advertising Beta has ended, it officially ends on May 31st, but if you go to http://advertise.secondlife.com/ you’ll see the following message:
“Thank you for your interest in the Second Life Advertising Beta program. Based on our evaluation of the SL Advertising Beta during the last six months, we have decided to discontinue the program on May 31, 2011.
Thanks to all of the Merchants who have helped us test this display advertising beta and for all of your helpful feedback. Your participation and insights will help us drive our ongoing efforts to help you promote your products and services to Second Life shoppers. We look forward to partnering with you on future promotional endeavors.”
Part of the problem as far as I’m concerned is that Linden Lab didn’t promote this very well.
However there are other issues here, Tateru Nino reports that Sea Linden has left, whilst also reporting that she will no longer be providing us with news of Linden’s who have departed, I have mixed feelings on this and feel it was a useful service but there is most definitely a privacy issue. However the reason I raise Sea Linden’s departure here is because Sea was at user group meetings, which were cancelled a month or so ago, which discussed issues like SL Advertising Beta. I also liked Sea, she was very very helpful so it’s a shame she’s no longer at the Lab.
However it comes back to Linden Lab not advertising their own wares well, I’ve raised this issue before but why on earth wasn’t there a banner advert for SL Advertising Beta in the forums? Ok people might not have appreciated that all over the forums, but it should have been in the Merchant forums at the very least. The advertising user group meetings I went to were poorly attended, some people told me they didn’t know when they were happening and some were put off by voice, which is fair enough. However what are Linden Lab scared of when it comes to advertising their own initiatives? I’ve never known a company like this, how many people even knew that SL Advertising Beta even existed?
Linden Lab need to promote their wares to the world, it has long been a criticism of them, but they seem afraid to use their own website, they should be making use of their forums and website to tell us what they’re doing and then keep telling us!
I would imagine the reason that SL Advertising Beta is being wound down is because there hasn’t been enough interest, part of the reason was because you could not buy an advert in Linden Dollars, that was always going to hamper it, Linden Lab should have worked out a way of using our account US Dollar balances with GlamAdapt to pay for those adverts, that would have generated more interest but I suspect the bigger problem is largely because people didn’t even realise it existed.
The Lab had a security error on the marketplace for months (see closed JIRA at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-3722) and I never got an answer that made sense to me about whether or not G-rates ads that supported adult regions would be supported. [I run a dark roleplay estate that has Adult land settings; would have been pointless to take an ad that no one would ever see.]
This project showed great promise, but …like so many of the Labs ventures, wasn’t executed well. Maybe they will try again with a different syndicate next year.
Agreed, there was potential with this model but I still can’t quite understand why LL didn’t use it themselves, you know having a banner advert on their own forums which would have demonstrated how this worked.
Very good point about maturity ratings, that really should have been answered.