Filed under: News and developments by Digado

In between talks at the Orange Island Geekend I left for Clever Zebra Island, hosting a what looked to be interesting event on Advertising. Companies have been searching for a good advertisement/banner system in Second Life for a while now. Second Life works a lot like a blog in the way content created by developers (the users of Second Life) can be monetized with advertisements. However, up to now no ’system’ has prevailed yet.

The Second Life Company i3D thinks to change all of this with their new ‘Silverstream’ service. Silverstream is an advertisement network that bares a close resemblance to Google’s AdSense Network.The Silverstream network is available in a HUD (Heads up Display, something that becomes part of the Second Life interface) and billboard form. Both display ‘personalized’ advertisements based on the location you are at at the time the advertisement displays, and information from your profile which is publicly available trough the world.secondlife pages. (Example: My avatar Roy Cassini). Or as i3D describe themselves over on their website:

1. Content metadata: Tags, descriptive keyword searches, and other aggregated data from the location of the person or Billboard.
   
2. Personalization: The integration of active feedback, content and ads, filtered over time to accommodate the personal preferences of the user.
3. Virtual localization: The use of sensor data collected dynamically on the consumer’s location and surrounding virtual environment to enable the instantaneous delivery of relevant content from one moment to the next.

On the question whether this isn’t a breach of privacy, not only tracking your profile, but also your location - i3D responded it had no intention of storing the data. I think they will have to to prevent fraud, but more on this later. First, the good side of Silverstream.

Contextual Ads, SLexchange and Pay per Click

I found three things which made me think the Silverstream system might have a better chance than its predecessors:

1. The ‘metadata’ which became accessible trough Second Life (LSL) scripts only recently.
2. i3D told us about a deal they had closed with SLexchange, meaning it could ‘flood’ its network with adds from the moment they release it.
3. It uses an intelligent ‘pay per click’ system.

This last feature is pretty interesting. The billboard can be set to link to a location, hand out a landmark (bookmark) to a specific location, a textfile or even a demo of a product. You only pay for each of these transactions as an advertiser. Each action is priced differently, and the revenue is split but the Silverstream network operator (i3D) and the owner of the Billboard (usually the owner of the land the billboard is located in).

Furthermore, I think this might be a nice way to stimulate good, attractive content in Second Life even more. There is no real dynamic ad system in place at the moment apart from rent boxes, which cost you money even if they don’t make any (so they are ‘risky’), and are obviously high maintenance. Silverstream has the potential to smoothen this process of monetizing your Second Life content with a decent system but…

Privacy, Fraud and Lag

During the meeting many questions on privacy where raised. The speaker replied it had no use for the data of ‘who clicked on what from where’. Now if this where to be true - I really wonder how they intend on keeping their system clean. Without tracking this it is quite open to fraud - something that seems to be the weak spot of these sort of systems anyhow. Google uses a very strict policy on their AdSense users. Several people I know had their accounts banned for ’suspicious banner behavior’ (at least 2 of which didn’t intentionally try to scam the system).

With the extensive amount of data being run, and the complexity of the required scripts to make accurate matches, these billboards sound sluggish, and laggy. How this will effect their use in sims remains to be seen, or how they respond to multiple avatars in the vicinity. These three reasons leave me pretty unconvinced this system will really make much of an impact, at least in the state it is.

Silverstream is currently in between Alpha and Beta, and allows video, textures, and perhaps in the future simple text messages ‘in a non-obtrusive’ manner. i3D revealed it’s also looking into using these kind of ‘link systems’ for other uses, such as orientation and guidance trough SL (Think a more non-commercial ‘related places in SL‘). This seems to me the more interesting feature and way to go, but only time will tell.

Posted on: January 25, 2008 | Share on: