🌈🏙💰Metaverse Advertising Marketplace + New Podcast With Trislit
Request-2-Build
Before we jump into the blog I wanted to share my newest podcast with Trislit.
Click here ->> Trislit - The Gamers Gamer - Zima Red ep. 11
My guest today is Trislit.
Trislit is so deeply involved with the NFT space I don't think the one-line description does him justice. Trislit is like a dictionary on all things non-fungible token. Not only is he one of the kindest and wholesome characters in our ecosystem, he seemingly knows everyone and everything happening within our ever-evolving space. Which as you know, is no easy task.
Besides having immense knowledge of the NFTs he is also filled to the absolute gills with different ideas on gameplay, lore, design, community and essentially all aspects on what makes a great game. Speaking with Trislit made me appreciate the detail and nuisance of gaming. He made me realize that having a game or metaverse with the core basics figured out is not enough, to truly have engrossing virtual experiences we need to dive deep on the narrative. For its always the story that really brings experiences to life.
Please enjoy my conversation with Trislit.
🌈🏙💰Metaverse Advertising Marketplace
I have a lot of ideas about different projects I would like to see built in the NFT ecosystem. Unfortunately, I’m just one person and I do not have a single technical bone in my body. So, I have decided the best course of action is to blog about my ideas and hopefully inspire someone else to build them. (Or at least contact me so we can geek out about NFTs together.) I am calling this blog series, “Request-2-Build.” Let's dive in.
Advertising In The Metaverse
An obvious use case for virtual worlds is advertising. People are already spending much of their time online, and now the majority of ad spend is focused on digital mediums versus traditional mediums, such as print and TV. According to emarketer.com, 2019 will be the year where online ad spend is greater than traditional ad spend. Traditional ad spend dropped from 51.4% to 45.8% in 2019, and the trend shows no sign of reversing or even slowing down.
It's clear that ad spend is moving digital because our lives are moving digital, however, I do not believe internet users will stay content with today’s major platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. People are on the cusp of digital evolution: the “areas” we hang out online will start to look and feel more immersive than simply a web page. Mainstream games like Fortnite have already evolved into social spaces. (Read this great article by Owen Williams about this exact idea.) I strongly believe that future platforms will be open, blockchain-based virtual worlds.
Open
Openness is a key feature to future platforms because history has shown time and again that open systems generally win out to closed systems. A simple example of this is open-source software versus closed-source software. Open-source software leads to faster adoption, more innovation, and in turn, greater reliability. Also, with an open platform, the sky's the limit in terms of what users can do or build. If a user enjoys social media, they can create a 3D Facebook by publicly displaying pictures on a virtual plot of land. If a user loves education, they can host online courses on their virtual space. If they are technical, they can create a game or experience. The best part of openness is that the user has a choice on what to create and, because of blockchain technology, they have the right to monetize it.
Blockchain
Blockchain allows strong digital property rights and native monetization. Any digital landowner instantly has skin in the game because they have true ownership over that property. They are incentivized to build the best game, experience, or whatever because they can capture some of the upside. On top of that, building a game with blockchain-based assets allows instant connectivity to a ready-built, global financial system. The developers of a game or platform do not need to spend resources building new financial infrastructure - Ethereum is ready today. Users from around the world do not need to onboard to an arduous AML/KYC program to start buying assets in their native currency, they just need access to the cryptocurrencies that are readily accessible through numerous crypto exchanges all over the world.
It is for the above reasons that open, blockchain-based virtual worlds will become the platforms of the future. Now, we just need some sort of marketplace to effectively advertise within them.
Metaverse Advertising Marketplace
It would be helpful if a platform aggregated all available advertising opportunities within virtual worlds. Specifically speaking, it would be great to know the physical coordinates of the advertisement space. Imagine an OpenSea type website, but instead of NFTs for sale, it displayed an image of the virtual location and the relevant marketing statistics. For example, displayed statistics may include Visits and Average Visit Length.
Visits (24hrs): How many visits there have been to a piece of land within the last 24 hours.
Average Visit Length: How long on average a person stayed on a piece of land.
Perhaps in the future, there can be another stat for engagement, such as how many actions or clicks were made.
To help out visual people like myself 🤓, I created an extremely rough mockup of this platform based on a screenshot from OpenSea.
In this example, we can imagine that the NFT projects listed on the left are different virtual worlds. Visits and Average Visit Length are displayed underneath the parcels, as well as the ETH price for 30 days of advertising.
(Zoomed in view of the relevant marketing stats)
Now, imagine that once we click a specific piece of land we are brought to a page that shows pictures and videos of the property, similar to Zillow.com. This gives the advertiser a better sense of the space and how their ad might fit into the broader area.
There are already advertisements in the virtual world of Cryptovoxels and they can give us a clearer picture of what the ads would look like. In the below example photo, we can clearly see an “Origin City Market” advertisement and its surroundings.
Video clips are a great option to provide a 360-degree view on the space for sale. For example, the below video clip by Cryptovoxels community member Conlan gives a detailed look at a build he created in-world.
Providing landowners with photos and videos to market to advertisers is a great way to increase content and gather more information about the land. If a landowner posts a terrible photo, advertisers will likely not want to advertise on that land. However, if a landowner posts ten beautiful photos and a video walkthrough, advertisers will be more likely to purchase advertising and thus increase usage of the metaverse advertising marketplace.
Direct URLs, like the one below, are yet another feature that can be added to a metaverse advertising marketplace to provide advertisers the ability to “physically” walk around themselves.
Direct property link: https://www.cryptovoxels.com/play?coords=N@3W,4N
As for pricing, landowners are free to charge whatever they’d like. This seems to be the most efficient solution to discover fair advertising value in virtual worlds because no one truly knows what the value is. We could possibly base it off a system similar to website views, but virtual worlds may actually lead to greater engagement since they are more immersive than a webpage. Who knows!
There you go, a metaverse advertising marketplace. Now all we have to do is build it 😁. Of course, there is an unlimited number of factors and features that we did not cover, but I think you get the gist. If anyone is building something like this, please reach out because I’d love to chat. Also, my DMs are always open if you want to chat about anything metaverse or NFT related.
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Stay tuned for more articles on unique digital assets and all things virtual. 😎