Reading Wired these days is a bit like being punched in the eyeball by a lack of self-identity. I don’t really know what that means, but if you remember what Wired used to be like, you’ll get what I mean.

This month one of the first interesting articles I’ve seen from them in a while has appeared, discussing how Second Life really isn’t working the way advertisers wanted it to. Quel surpise.

Second Life is not what the hype says it is. It is not the future, it is just the latest incarnation of the MUD games those of us who meet a certain demographic once wasted our teen years trying to work out. This reality is slowly dawning on the people putting the most money into the place. From the article:

Then there’s the question of what people do when they get there. Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn’t much *to* do. That may explain why more than 85 percent of the avatars created have been abandoned. Linden’s in-world traffic tally, which factors in both the number of visitors and time spent, shows that the big draws for those who do return are free money and kinky sex. On a random day in June, the most popular location was Money Island (where Linden dollars, the official currency, are given away gratis), with a score of 136,000. Sexy Beach, one of several regions that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000. The Sears store on IBM’s Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281; Coke’s Virtual Thirst pavilion, a mere 27. And even when corporate destinations actually draw people, the PR can be less than ideal. Last winter, CNET’s in-world correspondent was conducting a live interview with Anshe Chung, an avatar said to have earned more than $1 million on virtual real estate deals, when Chung was assaulted by flying penises in a griefer attack.

Just what you need as an advertiser - doing a PR launch where giant penises attack your in-World presence would make Janet Jackson getting her norks out family-friendly in the eyes of the demographic most advertisers are chasing.

What’s more, the underlying architecture can not scale - they’ve built the system so that it will never reach the potential that self-titled futurologists have envisaged for it:

One of the things you never see in Second Life is a genuine crowd — largely because the technology makes it impossible. In Stephenson’s Metaverse, corporations established their presence along a bustling, almost infinitely long street that residents could cruise at will. Second Life is different. Created by an underfunded startup using a physics engine that’s now years out of date, Second Life is made up of thousands of disconnected “regions” (read: processors), most of which remain invisible unless you explicitly search for them by name. Residents can reach these places only by teleporting into the void. And even the popular islands are never crowded, because each processor on Linden Lab’s servers can handle a maximum of only 70 avatars at a time; more than that and the service slows to a crawl, some avatars disappear, or the island simply vanishes. “It’s really the software’s fault,” says Andrew Meadows, Linden Lab’s senior developer. “Way back when, we used to say, ‘This is not going to scale.’”

There is of course another way forward: embrace the limitations and the spirit of what the World is all about. Advertisers aren’t keen on doing that though - you’re the one meant to be embracing them, not the other way around.

That leaves them with the other rather obvious conclusion: advertising in MUDs, like advertising in games, isn’t going to work. Save your money and find something better to do with it. Advertisers are loathe to do this however. They saw what happened to MySpace, Facebook and the rest and they’re convinced that this time they’re going to be ahead of the curve. They don’t care if it isn’t popular, as long as it looks as though they’re doing something interesting. However, if I were a shareholder, articles like this would make me nervous:

The Coke build is expansive, elaborate, and of course empty. But Coca-Cola has a plan. It’s sponsoring a contest to create a Virtual Thirst vending machine that it hopes will become ubiquitous in Second Life, just as Coke machines are everywhere in real life. Jaffe professes to be overwhelmed by the number of entries, which he characterizes as “well north of 100.”

Suddenly, another avatar materializes. “Ah, there you go,” Jaffe exclaims. “Someone’s just arrived! I think she’s from Japan.” As he speaks, Dapto starts air-typing in the weird way that Second Life avatars do, trying to chat up the new Japanese girl. She looks around, then teleports someplace else.

Want to know how expensive? If you hire Jaffe there to sort it out for you, maybe put a couple of staff on the case of looking after it you’re going to need a budget of $500,000/year. Just think about that. This is a platform where if you get 1,200 people turning up, you’re a rave success. When your Madison Avenue crew is defining a cost of reach at $416/head as reasonable value and the audience leave within seconds, you know somebody, somewhere, is grasping at straws for new ideas.

via Erick Schonfeld