Eyes on AdHUD

Aryn Lassard perhaps has revolutionized the world of advertisement in Second Life.   Most of the advertising that you see currently involves a physical footprint.   Billboards, posters on walls, people walking around with signs around their necks, and so on so forth.   But AdHUD changes all of that with a bit of ingenuity to integrate it into a player’s HUD.   This way, a player can choose to enable or disable the display of ads and view them at his or her discretion.

There is also incentive to actually view the ads.   The users are paid L$1 every fifteen minutes.   This L$1 requires the user to click in a random spot to collect the L$1 which deters bots from being scripted to run up the bottom line.  In return, the users are shown ads that are fulfilling and very interactive and one that can be updated with a single click of the Update button on the Main menu.  Referrals of the advertisement HUD also allows the user to gain money from their friends HUD units, up to L$20.   While this isn’t much, it’s still offers incentive to share the advertisements.

Advertisers also gain from the HUD display versus billboards.   The heads-up display offers a more rich interactive image instead of a having a potentially washed out and pixelated image on the side of some building.   It allows demos to be sent directly to the user at the user’s request and also teleports and information cards are at the viewer’s disposal.  The advertiser in return gets real-time impressions, total user views, and four different levels of click-throughs.

As one can see, the small version of the ad seems to be taking very little of the screen real estate.   I will also point out that this is on a 1680×1050 resolution so your mileage may vary depending on what you can support via hardware.  The larger display takes up about a quarter of the screen.

Unfortunately, the current ad network has been full the last couple of days of viewers.  This is due to a user limit that has been set since the network is still fairly new and the advertising base supports a finite number of viewers currently on a payrate.  Lassard hopes to pull this limit when there are enough advertisers with AdHUD.  Just as with the current stagnant marketing tactics in RL, Second Life has yet to enjoy a new niche marketing  strategy.  Hopefully Lassard’s AdHUD breaks the traditional mold of advertising and begins a new era of interactive public relations.