Is the expense of advertising in SL worth it?

I was reading this article on bloomberg about TV vs. Web Rates for advertising.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204&sid=atKGiQOMco.Y

It says that for a prime time advertisement on Fox it costs between $20 and $40 per 1,000 viewers. An advertisement on the internet site Hulu (a website that offers commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies) will cost you around $60 per 1,000 viewers. The point is that internet advertising is becoming more expensive than traditional forms of media.

Now looking at some of the top classifieds advertisers in SL I see some of them spending well over $1,000 per advertisement. In order for that expense to be competitive with network television or Hulu the advertiser would need something like 16,000 views of their advertisement.

I have never run a business successful enough in SL to warrant spending $1,000 on an advertisement so I don't know for sure if that expense could be justified or not. I am skeptical though about the success of classified advertisements in Second Life. Sure many thousands may see that one line listing but how many actually click on the ad and see the full content?

If you're a classifieds advertiser in SL do you feel that your expenditure is worth it?

It depends, finding the right words for your advert is arguably more important than the cost. We don't have enough information on our classifieds to work out if they are worthwhile, we guess which keywords bring the clicks.

The few times I've used Classifieds to advertise for clubs, I haven't been happy with the results. I didn't waste but a few hundred L$ on the ads; but they were enough to get me in the first window of my search terms, and I got less than one click-through a day on each of them.

I use to spend about 2-3000 a week on ads,and yes they were worth it. (rental properties)

i have elaborate system of calculating cost per TP/Map/Profile (as a total) for the 30 adverts i run....some do better than others....niche sectors & keywords are generally good, you get more bang for buck....also low cost foreign translated adverts are pretty good value.

Overall the effectiveness of Classifieds for low-to-medium cost ads have reduced since the inception of ALL Search system....when comparing historical records.

Have no clue how adverts from 100k upwards perform....i would hope they get lots of TP's.



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I have read in these forums that the ones paying the unrealistic sums are taking advantage of an exploit, one that Linden Lab knows about, but about which they have done nothing. They are not actually paying unrealistic sums, they are paying quite a bit less, if anything.

... which is why I always try to convince my translation-job clients to not only have their normal documents translated by my agency, but also have their classifieds translated. A typical classified ad will invoke translation costs of typically well under 500 L$. So if you have them for e.g. German, French, Spanish and Portuguese you have under 2000 L$ cost but get exposure to a significantly larger group. You can run those classifieds at the minimum weekly cost and have them pay for themselves in no time.

oh i agree...i was doing foreign adverts at the back-end of 2007. I had one particular shop which i created 3 adverts....English (2000 L), German (150 L) & Spanish (think 200 L) over a period of a few months. The German & Spanish received far more TP's than the English one....eventually I ditched the 2000 L advert.....waste of money!