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?”

I noticed a thread on the official forum: Banner ads on SecondLife.com. I hadn’t noticed the banner ads, so I went back to some of the main pages such as the destination guide and then logged out and in and observed that there are indeed banner ads, I tried to grab a screenshot but it’s hard to make out:

Now these adverts look like Google Adsense to me, indeed I saw one down the side for Linden Lab’s Patterns. I think a move such as this is long overdue to be honest, Linden Lab should be looking to monetise their website and as it stands it’s not too intrusive, but have they actually thought this through and blocked some advertisers? Otherwise some of us will see IMVU adverts there!

Continue reading “Linden Lab Appear To Be Embracing Google Adsense”