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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n