Virtual MTV

After watching "Showstopper" yesterday I was talking about how MTV is trying to drive traffic from its television channel to its website. Here's a great example of what they're doing there: Virtual Laguna Beach, a 3-D animated virtual world where you create an avatar and interact with other virtual characters in an immersive environment.

Just like television and movies, the virtual world of MTV.com will be commercialized through product placement/advertising. As this article in Wired describes:

[L]ike YouTube and MySpace, MTV still needs to find a way to make the virtual world pay. User participation and brand building aren’t enough. Jeff Yapp, an MTV executive vice president...thinks that VLB has the potential to generate bigger bank per person than the TV show from which it sprang.

“If you look at our monetization on a viewer basis for Laguna Beach, we’re making pennies a person,” Yapp says. But, he says, visitors to Virtual Laguna Beach might buy a DVD of the show, a branded T-shirt, or a virtual T-shirt for their avatar (in-world currency can be purchased with a credit card at an exchange rate of 180 MTV bucks to the US dollar). And hardcore fans will be able to get virtual crash pads and flirt via VoIP when MTV launches a $6-per-month premium service.

MTV may never match revenue from TV commercials by becoming a virtual landlord. But the opportunity for advertisers is another story. In VLB, products can be integrated into the virtual experience. Instant-messaging windows can be skinned as Cingular cell phones, virtual Pepsi cans are a surprisingly popular accoutrement, and Secret deodorant recently ran a contest in which VLB members confess a secret—the best secrets got turned into video clips that were screened for virtual audiences at the Laguna Cinema and other locales in VLB.

Advertisers can’t help but love an online space in which the hard-to-reach demographic of teenage girls makes up around 55 percent of members (which explains why a guy who signs into VLB is usually mobbed with potential admirers). About 40 percent of all members are under 17. On average, users visit six times a month for 35 minutes a session. (The typical Web site devoted to a television show receives just five six-minute visits per user per month.) And sign-ups have continued to rise since the end of the Laguna Beach season in November. Yapp talks about the network’s ability to push a “fire hose” of viewers toward the service.

Basically, MTV wants to create a social networking site, something like Facebook or MySpace, but using a 3-D animated environment that is saturated with consumerism. I haven't played around with VLB (in part because you can't do it using a Mac, which is what I have at home). If any of you has given it a whirl I'd love to know about your experience.