Corporations leaving...good thing or bad?

Does Anshe Chung count as a corporation these days? How about Sarah Nerd and Apez, aren't they listed on the WSE?

That's just it - it takes WORK to develop and maintain interest. You can't expect a static display to keep people coming - you need to crank new stuff to keep people coming back. Events, new products - it is just as much work as in real life. SL is a continuing marketing campaign - you had better have something useful and interactive if you want to survive. That goes for pretty much any entertainment business in SL.

That article shows how lazy the press is. One article showed up a couple of weeks ago about this and since then the same article has been paraphrased and presented as a new article about a dozen times. It's like they all sit around waiting for someone to write something new and then two dozen other writers copy it. Sad.

As to the topic I think it's not really good or bad. Those corporations who got in early got tons of press about their SL ventures at a cost way below what an ad campaign would run. It was a good deal for them. I hope they keep coming in because it helps offset the "SL is for pervs" notion that's become so widespread, but I think most people come to SL for escapism, not to shop for a new Dell.

It's still a good value for a corporation as an advertisement, even if their sims only get a few visitors a day. Once the development cost is absorbed, $225 a month for an ad is dirt cheap.

History is repeating itself. Exactly the same evolution took place with the world wide web. First it was a playground for geeky university students, then the porn industry took over, then the first RL companies rushed in to buy their domain and build some basic html page, then the first scandals erupted about child porn and all the bad things, and at the end, a few years later, the situation calmed down... So look at the web now. It has grown into a serious, respected everyday tool for communication, as is the phone and tv, a tool for advertisement, education and just fun. Everyone has an email address, every company has a web address.

I expect virtual worlds to develop the same way. It is up to SL to be the leader. RL companies are important IMHO to increase popularity and of course invest money and eventually give free services for all residents through advertisement.

The most interesting part is: The country that run wild about child porn accusations appears to be the home of the most active investors in SL. At least this is my impression. Take a look at any of the many German themed sims. They are full of RL businesses. Many companies run their own island. Of course it is also about camping . Why not - we get advertisements, they give us some pocket money and nice virtual parties. I cannot see anything wrong in RL companies setting their homes in SL. It's the only way to make virtual worlds into a serious tool of communication, not a "game".

It's not laziness, so much as economics. Writers are cheap. You put anyone with a BA in English in a cubicle with a word processor and an AP feed. Reporters are expensive. Reporters have travel expenses - airfare and taxis and meals and hotels, and worst is when after all that they report the same story as five other reporters. So, in combination with declining newspaper sales, this creates a pressure to have far less reporting and far more writing. Much better for the bottom line. It is a worrying trend, and fewer real on-the-ground reporters means more stories simply slip by even though they may be important, just because nobody in the news business knows about them.

Monalisa has come the closest to the ideas and thoughts expressed by IBM president. On the subject of SL IBM is thinking big.

THose of use old enough to remember the heyday off the BBS systems.. and the rise of the Information super highway... News about this was everywhere. Doomcryers came out of the woodwork like they always do when something revolutionary happens.

IBM is looking at SL and other vitrual realms as the potential precursers of the next generation of online interaction. Bare with me.. and I'll paint a picture for you

we used to use our 300baud modems to make a call.. to go 'online' and reach out favorite BBS. We stood in awe as modem speeds took 'leaps and bounds". Trumptes sounded and Angels sang from the heavens when mere mortals were able to blaze onto the phone lines at the breath taking speed... of 9600 buad. We were stuck dumb at 19200 baud.

then this informatin superhighway thing... broad band.. and download speeds measured in megabytes... whispers in the night of gigabyte download speeds. We rushed to our old TI calculators to find out... what the heck is a gigabyte?

We remeber these things and smile.

What is the next evolution? What if your online experiance ...became SL like in nature. you are 'online' as an avatar you created... but the 'world' you are in IS.. the web.. the new Evolved web.... The Next Big Thing.

This is what IBM and others are doing here. Not so much to make money... but to study.. research and development.... THE MONEY is not here... it is in what might evolve from here. And that is what visonary thinking is all about.

Sadly there also residents here who make money off people with huge pocket books including Consulting & Developement for RL Business here in SL. Often the charges are what I would consider amazingly high personally. Like 15000 usd to develope, build a 4 sim area. Yet they don't tell them that can't just build something and get residence to show up and spend their Lindens and poof they make lots of money when they are consulting about build or developing a SL presence. Truthfully its all about getting whatever they can resources wise out and as fast as possible and leaving. These are just average residents with some skills and enough education to attract few people to buy their services from them.
That isn't Linden Labs fault. They just a provider, I assume they are hands off about most things unless there is something that will be gained in their involvement for SL.
It would horrible if LL started to do corperate hand holding and would sell whatever information to corperations who paid the highest. I am not saying it hasn't happen but it could. All your personal information in SL could be sold to highest bidder if LL wanted just profits and corperate sponsorship. Just look at what the internet has done to personal information and selling it to highest bidder. There huge data bases out there with all sort of personal information on the net about a lot of people, sometimes they are even used for criminal activity.

They should. I drink Sarah Nerd Cola all the time. It's very refreshing. Look for the purple can. But don't buy a Chung sedan. Those things are lemons.

Too true. They seem to think "Oh were huge in RL, people in SL will flock to our sims". Negative. We have our own world here.

On another note- has any one visited the playboy sim? Its not a product I would have expected from a billion dollar industry. I have not heard 1 good comment about it yet.

That's a very cynical view, FD, and more than a little uninformed. $15000 for an elaborate 3D experience is chump change. Corporations routinely spend five to six times that much just for a one or two minute animation to use as an attract loop in a trade show booth... once. The whole booth and other associated media might cost them several hundred thousand. A tv commercial may cost a million or more. Do you have any idea how much it costs to run a full page ad in just one issue of a magazine with a circulation of a few million? $15000 might seem like a huge amount to you, but in the world of advertising and media creation it's a pittance. You also assume that these new media and consulting companies are selling their clients a false bill of goods. What are they supposed to do, tell their prospective clients that SL isn't a good deal and maybe they should rethink? That's not how people get their mortgages paid and feed their kids. Quitting your day job and starting a company around a new and untested medium is incredibly high risk and quite courageous, and that they're pulling in big name clients looking to reach the SL demographic is something to be applauded no matter how you feel about corporate presence in SL. Unless you're interested enough to go check out corporate islands, their presence in SL couldn't be any less intrusive.

Ok, I want a Ham and Cheese with no mayo and extra pickles.

Never shopped there, vaguely have heard the name. Visited the sterile environs of the IBM sims. Walked into a Sear's somewhere. Tried to buy a car out of some giant corporate car vending machine, but never recieved the car. I think I have a Pontiac Solstace aquired from some corp sim, but dont think I drove it more than once since I still prefer my Dominus Shadow. One thing corporations do for SL is lend it creedence. Their existance here says to the outside world that SL isnt just a venue to enjoy cartoon based pedophelia, that there must be some substance to this place. On the surface, financially, they are not dumping as much cash into Lindenlabs pockets as the common folk who outnumber them and pay most of the bills here.
Sure, they may pay some resident artisan a shitload of cash to build their presence here, but that only helps the individual craftsman who is hired for the task. SL gets from them the same monthly island upkeep fee's and whatever profit is made during the island sales process. If they could charge the Coca-cola company 10k a month instead of the base rate they charge everybody else, then that would make a difference. The largest advantage to LL is the free press SL gets when some big gun like SONY or somebody, builds a sim here. Some of them build here for the novelty of it, some build here as some kind of experiment, and some build here for exposure. Whether or not this is lucrative for them is irrelevent to me at this point in time. They are ghosts in my peripheral vision that only effect me when their publicity causes new resident campers to lag out my landscape.

Yep, I visited it, gave the sim owner/designer some constructive feedback, and got a very snarky reply.

Nerd and Chung are SL residents who function in-world, which is different from people who come in and use the world as a contact point or advert for their RL activities, be they corporations, religions or political parties.

rotflmao

The reason those RL corporates are here, is that it is they that want to make a presence, unlike the 90's when most had to be dragged screaming into the web. Simply because they now have the vision of how the www will evolve into.

Once the chains have been broken, and the window openned wide enough to allow the flood of the www users into a 'public browseable' version of SL, what we take for granted, will be a whole new world for millions of users.

The forefather to SL was Atmosphere, it can be browsed using a standard browser with a pluggin. It allows for 3D environments much like SL that users can 'walk around' and browse using the same keyboard and mouse configurations we use in SL. The 'Worlds' (sims to you and I) are interactive and are able to be connected using TP stations that you teleport by simply walking into. Each 'World' can be hosted on a simple setup, which is just as well, because 7 years ago, dialup was king. I host 8 such worlds on my own personal website, that anyone with a browser can click the link, and enter those 3D worlds. I created an Art Gallery for a family member and a cruise liner.

When I hear people ask, how can the www and SL become one, it has already been done. Whats needed now is for SL to mature enough to become a viable proposition. In the meantime those companies with a presence will gain the greatest foothold when it all happens. Assuming LL have the capacity to develop this platform into the next generation www, they will go down in history. All the other platforms like Home etc, although not considered competition by the users of SL, primarily because they can't content build so freely, are real competition, even though they are closed environments. In comparision, SL is like a 'home website' compared to the likes of Home, which is a prefixed corporate website whereby your interaction is more controlled.

What we will all see in the next 5-10 years is a melting together of the 2D and 3D environments. It is going to happen, of that you can be sure, much like the transition from BBS to the www. Those companies that succeed in producing a 'publically' acceptable 'browser/platform combination' that enables that transition the least painless, will win the accolade. LL may go down in history for that, but my money will be pinned upon the likes of Home/Eutopia whereby the user feels less like they are in the 'Wild West'.

I hope SL doesn't mature too much. If it becomes too serious, it might lose its entertainment value, and that is what draws people onto the grid. Most of them aren't here to do business, they treat it like an adult roleplaying game and want to have fun. LL is about to subdue that aspect of SL in order to make the grid a tad cleaner and more attractive to the serious businesses. But the serious corporations need a large crowd of grid users to justify their advertising efforts, and the crowd wants sex & fun.

Winter, you posted under the headline "who the hell is American Apparel?". That made me realize that I didn't know the company name before I read about them in articles about SL. How could American Apparel possibly consider their SL presence a flop? SL users all around the world know their name by now, people who never heard of them before.

I'd call that a success; getting known is what advertizing is all about. Doesn't matter that they became famous by articles about their SL customers being shot by griefers. Every publicity is good publicity. If they ever expand to Europe or Japan, there will be people who remember their brand name.

They have but problem is they want the pewrson to be a agent out here and do all the PR etc.......

Agreed.

Both Sara Nerd and Anshe Chung started out as players and by dint of hard work created a worthwhile first life income from a Second Life platform, although I don't think Sara's business really competes with Anshe in terms of size.

I had a long discussion with a first life businessperson who really understands virtual reality worlds. I think the future of media is going to be very different from what many traditional people think, by traditional I include standard web sites, TV, and paper based.

It is still a little foggy to see ultimate winners but brand recognition advertising is one reasonable fair bet, another may come from the legal profession embracing the concept of emanate domain vis-à-vis virtual worlds.

Just a personal view of course, but finally (and for now) I think the immediate future is in the hands of both very small and very large businesses. By that I mean both the likes of IBM (who can afford to pay for 20 odd Sims for research) without any cost worries at all, and little Joe or Jane SL player who is prepared to have a punt with an SL business, but having very tight cost constraints that amount to pocket money in real life.

On that final point I believe Linden Labs need to drive down the cost of land (in terms of tier payment) to enable better (and more) content creators with much more virtual space. Perhaps this may come via third party hosting of servers. Linden Labs should focus on what they do moderately okay (software) and leave the hardware business to others. Who knows what performance uplifts may be achieved with state of the art servers and broadband pipes

Chip,
I understand people and big companies wanting to get paid and get attention.
But at what cost should we allow them to do this? Is it okay for someone to provide service that is preparing business to function in SL but not prepare them with risk too?
I am basing this on someone who isn't corperation but wanted to started business in SL and what he paid for developing the sim, yet he didn't seem to have clue what he was doing. The developer attitude was I am here to make as much money as I can, nothing more, nothing else.
I do agree spending 15k in us funds for big company isn't much as far as advertising goes.
This is high risk and only the best, most talented and well prepared will ever see a profit in SL I think all people who expect to make a profit need to know they need to be better then competion or just be here for fun of it personally. Personally we don't need many things here unless we want them because they add to our lives in SL. I have problem with business who are trying to convince me I have to buy more and more to be happy, be attractive, and all the things most media tries to shove down our throats especially in America.

Agreed. Maybe in the beginning, SL drew creators right off, but the recent surges of membership are including "Regualr People", like me, who don't have any experience in the creation programs, but may be inspired to learn, if only out of a case of necessity. For me SL will always be about entertainment first.

Well, you are pretty entertaining.

Mandy C

Yes, and sometimes I even entertain myself.......

(I agree with Chip’s last explanation of ad cost between RL and SL)

Graphic designers that work for big business in RL pull a pretty hefty fee—especially a [popular] team working on a huge campaign. Compare this to the price designers charge companies in SL with a real budget…salt peanuts!

I don’t think RL business will ever saturate SL to the point of annoyance. Let’s face it, we have this massive platform to build from our imagination, and what do most of us do? We create chairs with legs, and lights for the ceiling. We create cars that drive, and shoes for our AVs feet. Most of us don’t have the imagination to live fully in a world completely severed from RL. Even though you log on to escape reality, you still require the ability to at some point hit ‘f’ and place your feet firmly to the ground. And that is why RL business and commerce will continue to thrive.

Again, I’m not saying that big business will wipe out our virtual reality, and squelch our imagination—I firmly believe that won’t happen. Just like in real life…there are ads everywhere you look, but to the open mind, this does not detract from the true beauty of existence; there is far too much beauty out there to focus on the coke can on your desk. And let’s think outside the box for a second—the circle of life is relentless, and everything that happens runs its track. Big businesses are run by the same minds that frequent SL…they are by universal law required to frequent the same time and space as us. The very thought of them in the mind of society brings them to us. Resistance is futile.

Ok, enough existentialism.

I work freelance for a company that creates sims for Hollywood production companies that have new films opening in the box office. The price we charge them (and my hourly) may seem exorbitant to the newbie, the youth, or the average citizen…but to a RL ad campaign of that magnitude? Salt peanuts.