TORONTO - NichePartners believes it has found its new marketing plan in SecondLife, an Internet-based virtual world that gained international attention via mainstream news media in late 2006 and early 2007.
While SecondLife sometimes is referred to as a game, it does not have points, scores, winners or losers, levels, an end-strategy, or most of the other characteristics of games. Rather, it is more like Sims Life. To date, more than 6 million accounts have been registered on SecondLife. Many are registered with credit card info, so this allows NichePartners to reach a massive audience for branding, profitability, and more. SecondLife already has embraced a more "mature community" and currently is in the process of developing an age-verification system based on users’ IDs to add an extra layer of protection.
"Essentially, SecondLife is a virtual world, similar to a game, where you can build anything you desire, including marketable products—virtual or not—and, of course, adult entertainment itself to entice a sale," said Robert Assum, head of marketing at NichePartners.
"Its simple: We’ve been in SecondLife for about half a year promoting our sites to test the profitability of SecondLife customers, and during that time, I’ve seen a real emergence of new users—to be exact, over 4 million new users registered on the system," continued Assum.
The bottom line is impressive, according to Assum, as NichePartners has been showing promising conversions based on simple tools he made within SecondLife. "It can be hard to explain how such a ‘game’ can render such profits, but in a virtual world as the Internet is, it’s only natural a 3D version like this would do extremely well," added Assum. Sony Corp. also is launching a virtual world in its upcoming new console—so there is no doubt competition will soon build for SecondLife, he commented.
Assum plans to launch In World tools with NichePartners and will offer assistance to people wishing to make their presence. "By no means is this easy; much like any good idea, it’s in its infancy stage," he said. "I’ll continue to build, build, and build some more, while I educate others that a new potential profit stream could be made by having a presence on SecondLife."
