COUNTING VIRTUAL WORLD CLICKTHROUGHS

There's been some pretty striking early results for this blog's first ad for Second Life-based virtual products-- in this case, promoting a discount by several merchants on the island of Midnight City.  The ad contains a SLURL, a link which shows you the designated location on a web-based map of Second Life, which in turn gives you the option of launching the SL client itself and teleporting instantly to it.  ("Instead of just going to another web page," I once told someone, explaining how a SLURL works, "when you click one, you dive into the Net.")

When the ad launched on Friday, the Traffic for Midnight City was 3686.  Like a 3D version of a Web visitor meter, "Traffic" is SL's metric for gauging a location's daily number of visitors, and the duration of their visit.  (Detailed technical explanation here.) 

By Sunday night, Midnight City's Traffic had jumped to 8515, an increase of nearly 5000 points.

Because no special events were held on the island during that time, the only immediate explanation for this substantial leap in visitors is the NWN ad.  (What's more, Catherine Omega, one of the vendors included in the discount, reports a sixfold increase in sales since ad launch.)

Of course, pointing all this out is implicitly self-serving ("Advertising on New World Notes works!"), so take it with a fully-disclosed grain of salt.  But these initial results should also be interesting to anyone curious about the relationship between web advertising and SL-based commerce.  Will people make the leap from one to the other?  This early sign, at least, is fairly promising.

Comments

[qarl]

another possible contributing factor was the 50% off sale.

[kjhsdfjh]

gag.

[Vonn Neumann]

Hamlet,

While I think that it is great that you can make some hard-earned by advertising (nothing wrong with that), and I recognise that you are under no obligations except maybe the TOS, are you planning on differentiating normal editorial content / reportage from paid or solicited advertising?

While it is pretty clear with the banners etc that they are likely to be paid promotion, how will we determine what is paid and unpaid content in your editorial?

Regards,

[Hamlet Au]

Fair question. Like many bloggers, I plan to occasionally acknowledge advertisers in a brief post, but when I do, will always tag such entries as "Sponsored NWN Post". For regular posts in which current advertisers happen to come up in the course of the story, I will (like regular news outlets) fully disclose that relationship.

[Garret]

Don't you have actual statistics about how many people clicked on that ad? That's a real click-through count.

[Hamlet Au]

Yeah, 66 so far. Of course, that doesn't track people who see the ad and then just log in to visit Midnight City without hitting SLURL.