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.
Continue reading “Just What Is The Beef With Advertising?”
