Virtual Education

Ars Techica has an article up today on advertising in new media:

Report: ad-supported content will soon dominate digital media

While the article highlights Internet services like Hulu (an awesome high quality service) that are making a successful run with embedded advertising, how long will it be before we start seeing a more focused effort to bring advertising into MMO’s and virtual worlds?

There.com took a shot at this way back in 2003 with Nike tennis shoes and other branded virtual items for their virtual world. The Sims Online had McDonald’s objects for a bit as well. Ads have already been appearing in single player games for years. For the most part (outside of sports games), these ads are not ‘in your face’. With Hulu, there are only a few (usually 3 – 4) ads per TV episode, and some are commercial free with sponsorship. You have to believe that virtual worlds are drawing some interest from marketing firms with their increasing number of both subscriptions and free accounts.

I can imagine how a service like Second Life could integrate ads into their client by having “Search by Google”, complete with ads to the side of your search results. Some entertainment titles like the upcoming Spore will have social networks supporting their user base, and extending the experience of the Spore Universe beyond the game. Embedding ads into the pages of the social network would enable advertising without disrupting the walled garden of the game universe itself.

I guess it’s all a matter of degree as to how residents and players will accept this sort of thing in their virtual worlds. And the benefit from these ads will have to be noticeable to the average user. If Linden Lab could fund better grid stability and make up for all the free accounts with a little ad integration, would that be such a bad thing? I don’t think it’s a matter of ‘if’ we will see ads in our virtual worlds, but rather ‘when’. Let’s hope that the virtual world developers do their research and poll the users before they start saturating our virtual environments with advertisements. This could end up being a positive thing, given the expense of keeping these virtual worlds operating long term.