The Death of Second Life Hype

What's always fun with advertising articles is that they never seem to realize that people outside of their 'market' come across their articles now and then. In Second Life Losing Lock on Virtual-Site Marketing, this fact is quite telling - but in it is also a hint of respite for the non-advertising community. And it's rather funny, too.

...As any 14-year-old will tell you, the true measure of a pop star's popularity is how many friends he has on MySpace. And as far as friends goes, megastar rapper 50 Cent's got plenty of 'em -- more than 908,000. But even 50 knows he's going to have to harness more than just a well-organized MySpace contingent to top the 1.14 million copies he sold of his last album, "The Massacre," in 2005...

14 year olds run the world. OK... at least the author recognizes that 50 Cent has to do better than having 908,000 people who link to him on MySpace.com. But here's the fun quote:

...And one place the marketplace is no longer rushing is Second Life, despite a huge wave of hype to the contrary less than a year ago. At its peak, marketers were tripping over themselves to get their brands into the video-game-esque virtual world, where users can create real-life versions of themselves to live out their virtual fantasies, all the while interacting with real-life brands....

Create real-life versions of themselves to live out virtual fantasies? While interacting with real-life brands? Forgive me if I missed something here, but I don't think anyone logging in thinks, "Cool! I can interact with real-life brands!". Woohoo. Like I don't get enough on television, on the radio and on the internet. If I could interact with most brands it would be to tell them to... be quiet.

So maybe the hypefest is over. The announcements have slimmed down, and corporations -smart ones, anyway - are not as eager to jump. Maybe it's that the companies that did jump spent between $30,000 to $100,000 - even more - for a Second Life presence which simply sits there.