Allison Fass reports that the metaverse can be a “can be a weird, chancy place for real-life brands” in a story for the July 2 issue of Forbes, and notes that avatars enjoy having sex and playing pranks instead of getting warm fuzzy feelings about real life brands. What on earth are those avatars thinking of - don't they understand they are meant to be compliant RL marketing hype recipients?This article has sparked a bunch of interesting discussion... here, here, here.
People are starting to ask: what the heck is this Virtual World thing, anyway? And how on earth can anyone make any money in it?
(More...)
See: "The Web", circa 1999.
See: "Television", circa 1959.
Until someone figured out commercials, Television seemed pretty useless... how were you supposed to make money on it?
The answer was, for the most part you didn't... you provided content that people wanted to come see, and when you had enough eyeballs, selling ads became vastly profitable.
When the Web came along, though, people just looked at it and said, "Well, we can't do it the same we do TV, so what good is it?"
You're not going to get the same TV-ad-sales paradigm in SL, either, but you'll get something new. It's all at that amorphous formational stage right now. Which means that some folks will dis it for being lame... and some folks will make a whole lot of money by seeing the potential and running with it.
Will everyone make money? Of course not. There will be Googles, and there will be Worldcoms.
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