Linden Lab have offered up their "Message Of The Day" (MOTD) area on the login screen to Second life advertisers. *see here* This could pave the way for a lot of advertising appearing on login and teleport screens. Possibly to include full display adverts and banners.
Is this a good thing for SL or would it be the degradation of an important communication tool for the residents in respect of official messages? No doubt for those that wish to advertise their SL wares this may be a great development but before you start leaping up and down at this new opportunity you should be aware of something.
To advertise a 100 character advert on the login screen for 11.5 hours on one given day will set you back $4500. Yes thats right $4500!! Unless of course you want to advertise for 11.5 hours "off peak" and in that case it is $1500.
Now I don't know about you, but we (Tribe) do a fair bit of advertising in-world and out-world but $4500 for ANY advertising would be a long long way away from our spend. And I would suspect that the same applies to the vast majority of in-world businesses.
So who are LL targeting with this opportunity? There are very few businesses in SL that could possibly afford this and that is if they even wanted to. Apart from the fact that this is an unproven medium and the metrics that the lab are offering is almost zilch there is the lack of any slurl link being attached to the message and questions of sims being able to cope with the avatar load that an ad could generate.
So who? Could it be that the proposed target are RL companies.
Could we soon be seeing the likes of Coca Cola, Burger King and GM promoting their wares to us as we log in to SL.
What are your thoughts? Good Idea? Bad Idea? Check our Poll out on the right !
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