Businesses have tried marketing to adults in Second Life. It's not working out for them. Instead, adults are gravitating toward casual games, while it's children who have shown themselves to be most receptive to marketing in virtual worlds. Such is the feeling at the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference in New York City, where aside from a single booth promoting Linden Lab's Second Life Grid, the place seemed like a toy fair. Barbie Girls Online, Nickelodeon, Neopets and Dino Kids are getting the big buzz at VW08. Teen-oriented sites like MTV's vLES are mature by comparison.Electric Sheep's Giff Constable says over the last three years, while he feels more people know what avatars are, he doesn't know any people over the time who have gotten one of their own. Part of that may be just what your definition of avatar is -- if it's meant to be an avatar on Second Life, that's one thing. An avatar in a social space like Facebook, perhaps something else.
Since Second Life is tied to a rather large client with high connectivity and graphics needs, that necessarily limits the scope to people who have good machines, Second Life installed, connected to the Internet with a decent connection, and are sitting at their computer and not doing anything else with it that might require a large amount of system resources.
When it becomes possible to take Second Life avatars off the grid -- then, perhaps, will they become more common for adults to use, and then, maybe, virtual worlds will once again be a space where adults are as targeted for marketing as children are now.
