IN CONTEXT

The real world keeps looking for ways to intrude into Second Life, through various routes-- now, in the form of contextual ads, displayed on billboards, triggered by chat.  (Think AdSense, but in 3D.)  As with web-based systems, however, the context can be comically off.  In this demo video-- presented with the help of statuesque Flange Bohemia of ContextAds, the SL company behind this technology-- I say the following:  "I want to go on holiday.  I'll first need a lot of money. I want to go somewhere that has good Indian food. And perhaps play some cricket. I'll drink some fine ale there."  The sponsored keywords are "holiday", "money", Indian", "cricket", "ale", and even if a few of the ads are demo-only, you can discern the system's prone to miss as much as hit.

"There are issues with the technical side," Flange acknowledges, "but a few of those (delay, etc) are built into the SL client."  As with AdSense and web hosts, Resident landowners can set up ad feeds to billboards on their property, then collect a revenue stream as ads are displayed.  The system looks for sponsored keywords, which trigger server-side scripts that in turn make HTTP requests, pushing images and videos to the display.  Advertisers bid on keywords, and tie their products to them with a web link.

But what happens when several keywords appear in a single chat line?

"The highest bid will get priority," Flange explains. "However, lower bids do still have a chance - just a lesser one - of getting shown.  So advertisers with a smaller budget can still use the service and not get swamped."

As with advertising on the broader Internet, of course, the potential and perils are linked together-- for land owners, a chance to defray their server costs, and perhaps even make a profit.  For everyone else, more intrusions of commerce and the outside world, not all of them necessarily desired, not to mention the attendant bandwidth hit from the feed.  And as with the broader Internet, I suspect, Resident opinions will be just as varied.

Comments

[Osprey Therian]

Ha! What a development!

[Ordinal Malaprop]

Hmm - this sounds just a tad remote-chat-monitor-y to me. In an against-the-ToS sort of context. I suppose if one also had a large sign saying "THIS BILLBOARD IS LISTENING TO YOUR EVERY WORD" it might be all right.

[Flange Bohemia]

Regarding the chat monitoring, I should perhaps make it clearer in the documentation: While a board obviously has to listen to speech in its immediate vicinity in order to serve ads, it doesn't store chat locally or on the server, neither does it pass any details of the speaker to the server - just the actual text of the chat.

[Cyn Vandeverre]

I expect that shortly there will be some software that will block those ads, just as there is for the regular web, like Privoxy. I almost never see ads anymore; it's great.

[Laetizia Coronet]

Yay, more pointless texture lag.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

Well, this looks like it uses video streaming rather than textures, so if you're not on the parcel the adverts won't be visible, and you would need to turn streaming on to see them in the first place.

[Doug Randall]

This exciting new development will probably be almost as popular as spam.