A Second Life advertising backlash?
There’s been a lot of news recently about corporations and other groups with ulterior motives advertising in Second Life. For instance, Toyota now has a presence in Second Life, as does John Edwards’ presidential campaign. On the surface of things, this appears to be good news for Second Life and its creators at Linden Lab. After all, they are getting lots of free publicity over it (the media loves stories about virtual worlds), and it shows that corporations are taking it more seriously. But I think there’s a serious risk of a backlash over all of these outside groups using Second Life to their own ends. After all, how useful is advertising in-game if all of the users are scared off, and the advertisers are just left advertising to each other?
People are naturally distrustful of advertising. They don’t like being exploited, and advertising frequently exploits. Second Life’s media attention recently has been almost entirely focused on organizations using, nay, exploiting, Second Life for their own purposes. Are users and gamers looking at these media stories and honestly thinking to themselves, “Hey, I want to go play a game where I get advertised to!” It doesn’t so much matter that the advertising is only in a small minority of locations, and that you could easily spend years enjoying the game without ever stepping foot into an advertiser’s zone. All that matters is the perception.
Second Life used to be cool because it was an virtual world that was entirely created by users. It still is, for the most part. But it’s changing. It’s increasingly being built by corporations and conglomerates, who are only looking out for their own interests. It’s the difference between, say, Facebook and cocacola.com. People go to Facebook because it’s a user community. People by and large don’t go to cocacola.com because it’s just a big web advertisement. As Second Life shifts further and further away from a peer-created virtual world to a corporation-created virtual world, how many new users is Linden Lab really going to be able to recruit?
