vLES – virtual Lower East Side – MTV's New Virtual World

We have seen a few briefs in the marketplace for clients wanting to build their own virtual worlds. I have avoided these types of projects to date, as I just think it is crazy to try to go down this road. The numbers around Second Life are widely overstated, with them still averaging about a million unique visitors per month, which in web 2.0 community terms is not that much. The chances of you achieving critical mass are extremely limited. That said, Hasbro are doing quite well with their Barbie virtual world, however, the odds are definitely against a brand succeeding with this sort of strategy. The costs of implementing such a site are extremely high, and most rich virtual worlds still need you to download software to your computer, although granted, some of the second generation virtual worlds are starting to work entirely within the browser, albeit using Flash.

I do believe that the 3D web is coming and that gaining an understanding of this space is essential for all online marketers as it will continue to grow in popularity, however, right now I don’t believe the return on investment can be justified.

This hasn’t stopped MTV’s parent company Viacom, from entering the arena with their new virtual world, vLES – virtual Lower East Side. They have based this around the creative district of New York, renowned for young bands and music. You sign up as a fan, or a band. If you are fan, you can listen to and rate music, cruise around the various venues and attend live performances and events, and of course interact with other people. Bands gets to opportunity to promote themselves and get people to listen to their music as well as perform live.

This is sort of a Second Life meets MySpace.

A made a video of my first little look around vLES. There aren’t a lot of people there when I visited, although this is the first week. I actually like the concept and the execution is pretty good, however, I’ll be surprised if they can make up the numbers required to turn this into a viable community and business model.

For more on virtual worlds, check out this trailer for the upcoming documentary Second Skin which looks at this whole space:

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