This post was meant to be quick & glib, with a glimmer of of insightful commentary the future of advertising online, specifically in products like Second Life. However, I ran into some very thoughtful writing on the subject that’s way more interesting than what I had to say. So, I’d like to write about their writing…a metapost.

Google released Lively a couple months ago, and I’ve been meaning to write a post about it since July. Lively is a virtual world, like Second Life; users customize a character, or avatar that represents them, and rooms in which to interact with other users.

I found out about the launch from a Hitwise company blog post about Google’s next moves. Hitwise is one of the major competitive intelligence tools for the web. They provide information about web trends relevant to specific industries, and help companies understand how well they’re doing on the web relative to their competitors. They wrote a ‘how awesome are we post’ because six months earlier they predicted Google would launch products around health and entertainment, based on the interests of Google.com visitors.

So, the Hitwise prediction gave me the idea to write about ads in Lively and Second Life. Second Life got a lot of attention over the past few years in part because the “game” developed a vibrant economy involving the sale of real estate, clothing, and just about everything in between. Sensing opportunity, several businesses have established themselves in Second Life. [Link: NY Times] Google’s shrewd. They definitely want in on new opportunities to serve ads. Games? Heck yes! [Link: another NY Times piece]

I looked around to see if I could find any writing about ads in Second Life to springboard my post a bit. Cause, honestly, I never got into Second Life, despite liking Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash…a lot. I hoped to get commentary from someone who really knew advertising and the Second Life community. As often happens on this great series of tubes, I found more than I was looking for.

Here’s Ilya Vedrashko’s 2006 post about American Apparel’s Second Life store. He also wrote his thesis on the subject, for his Master’s in Comparative Media Studies at MIT (cool program BTW). It’s called Advertising in Computer Games. Rather than comment further, I think I’ll read his thesis and revisit the subject in the future. Hey gamers! What’s been your most interesting encounter with advertising in a game?