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Nov 17, 2002, 7:19pm

Ive just been browsing though www.Planet-Source-Code.com looking for information on DirectX and I was surprised at how many of the comments actually spoke of Active Worlds, there are tonnes of them. But for all this we don't see as many new people in Active Worlds as we used to, is there a reason anyone can think of this despite the price rise and that silly 'credit card details for trial but be aware we will try to charge you for the first month if you don't cancel before your times up' system that's scaring people away? I know for sure that on downloads.com there has been allot of negative advertising regarding Active Worlds after the price rise and ill tell you, I think its the very first time such a action by a company has resulted in personal 'tsk tsk' statements against the company name by its actual users using their screen / real names.

I think its about time Active Worlds Inc took a leap and decided to do some other advertising and attempt to get some more outside businesses in, a while ago I posted about the advertising abilities of Active Worlds with regards to the file formats that they sued, but now I would like to talk about the advertising capabilities themselves.

I visit the website and find out how much it is to advertise in Active Worlds, an amazing $500, and I thought to myself "I wonder if AWI actually does have a market for this" so I visited AW GZ, where any adverts would be displayed, to my amusement I found only 1 advertising Truespace 3D which is not displayed all the time, just rotated every so often. I thought to myself, Why are outside businesses not taking up the opportunity for this advertising, I think it can be put down to several reasons.

At the moment the pricing is too over ambition, its okay to be confident and believing people will pay for your product but not putting the prices up to an extent that your prospective consumer base will just ignore you because they can see your inexperienced with handling pricing and advertising, and hence will think that you run a weak business.

The possible situation is that there is a lack of interest in advertising globally, while this is true it also means that advertisers are looking for more interesting places to advertise in so that they get maximum exposure and can ride out the advertising providers huge price hikes as they try to stay afloat. But I can think of many types of businesses that may be interested to have advertisement packages in Active Worlds if only they knew about them and various other conditions were met.

By various other conditions I obviously refer to the price of things and the availability of the products and the advertising space allowed. I think that it would be a good incentive to drastically cut advertising prices to somewhere and offer a better package so that they receive something like this.

Advertising Package 1 - $150 a month
---------------------------------------
# A picture in AlphaWorld GZ and AWGate GZ with an activate URL attached and a bot in the vicinity in the region to monitor how many people click the sign to create statistics.
# A plot in ! at Mart and a monthly based citizenship for which to create and build a shop in it.
# A tagline on their advert object
---------------------------------------

I think this would work better than a flat out $500 a month system that currently receives only 1 (to my knowledge) advertiser on it.

Anyhow on with the post, id like to talk about how Active Worlds Inc actually advertises itself because to the best of my knowledge it doesn't advertise anywhere but in the occasional trade fair which I haven't seen it do for quite some time. I think that now AWI is getting better profits then should devote some of this money into external advertising so that it can further boost its revenues by getting more people into active worlds which will serve 2 tasks, 1 of which is to prop up the community that is slowly failing (don't flame me but we have seen allot of good people leave over the last several months) and 2, it would bring in more citizens and hence more money. Efforts should be made to please the citizens enough to get them to come back to AW and for them to remove their negative publicity of AW from things such as downloads.com's comments system.

Next on the list, the Beta, I too think that its about time that it was released, I think we have most of the bugs worked out of it now after hundreds of crashes we now very rarely get any in the Beta team which is a good thing, if you keep developing a product and saying it will be out soon but it never is because your adding new features people will eventually get board of this (Unless they're on the Beta team) and will start ignoring everything that the company says which is a very very bad thing in my opinion as some of the information that the company gives out about the browser is important enough for us all to know about.

Forwards on onwards, I don't think anything needs saying about the state of the newsgroups, I think that that's all been sorted.

EMail! AW is packing GB's/S of transfer power and Ghz of processing power, would it be that hard to give everyone in AW an at my.activeworlds.com e-mail address, I know it would be initially hard to work out such as some people change their names allot, so it may have to work on citnums (as long as I get mark at my.activeworlds.com ^_^) It would be a nice thankyou to the community that has just pulled AWC out of certain oblivion. POP3/4 please E N Z O :)

AW Promotional CDs, we all know that AOL likes sending them though our homes, but why not attempt to start up pilot schemes where Active Worlds CDS could be bought in shops and them have the following on...

- Separate AW installer for off the CD
- The entire megapath, AW object path, AWGate object path contained locally on the CD that the installer will copy to the hard drive for the people to use, nothing is worse than downloading 1.6 MB on a 56k modem and then having to wait for 15 min for this supposedly great 3D world to load.
- Bots (with the permission of the copyright owners) so they don't have to download them as well

Just make em enough to cover the price of making the CD's and distribution, £5 / $10 maybe?

Anyway, enough of this very long post... Maths test tomorrow

- Mark

Nov 17, 2002, 8:23pm

Flagg told me earlier this year that they've tried lots of advertisement,
and while they may of got results it wasn't enough to pay off the ad costs.
With the price hikes it may be a different story though *shrug*.

Speaking of such, check out what I found last night while looking at the
best inventions of 2002:
http://www.time.com/time/2002/inventions/rob_environment.html


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Nov 17, 2002, 8:44pm

LOL.

[View Quote] > # A plot in ! at Mart and a monthly based citizenship for which to create and
build a shop in it.

Nov 18, 2002, 7:16am

lindinlabs has some things going aginest them, to use that program they
require high speed itnernet which last time i heard only accounts for like
10 percent of the internet users in the world. at least activeworlds can be
used by people on all connections. though i wouldnt mind a option for user
side particle generators, if it slows peoples comptuer down they can turn it
off, but then we could have relaistic raina nd snow and water features and
smoke anf fire. i have seen it done in other programs.

coryashire

ps. please dont start working on it now cause we need 3.4 first cause we are
getting sick fo waiting for new featurs and stop so us on the outside can
get a chance to enjoy it before all our accoutns run out of time cause if my
acount runs out this march and 3.4 is not out by then im outta here cause i
am getting sick fo waiting.



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Nov 18, 2002, 7:18pm

ya, malka is on the beta for that lol. luck ^&$#
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Nov 18, 2002, 9:50pm

That's what's wrong. Advertising does not sell citizenships. A good
product sells citizenships. Advertising just lets you know that AW is out
there. The best thing for AWI to do with its advertising is to try to
develop a brand image and advertise that. So when people say 3D worlds,
they don't think Quake, they think AW. Right now it's not exactly like
that. The key to doing this is to find the right balance of advertising to
cost ratio so you at least break even.

Advertising on radio is a good way. Especially during the 2:00 to 5:00
block, where I think rates are reasonably cheap. Who listens to the radio
during these hours? Kids, who after school go cruising. Those who listen
to the radio in the office. People who listen to the radio while web
browsing. But the only way this'll work is to have a good commercial. Get
your audience's attention, then keep it interesting.

Magazines = baaad. Their rates are too high and they are too highly
specialized toward a particular audience.

Chris


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Nov 18, 2002, 9:54pm

Oh, and hire a media planner!

Chris

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Nov 19, 2002, 4:58pm

Yes, but the idea is to develop on existing concepts to create new ones, I dare say giving a school a free world, browser installation package and about 3 citizenships for free to use in their school would be well worth a few thousand students seing it.

- Mark

Nov 19, 2002, 6:27pm

That isn't advertising.

SW Chris

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Nov 19, 2002, 6:45pm

That's invasion of the teens.

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Nov 19, 2002, 8:01pm

Advertising, Promition, Development, Sneaky backdoor tactics, who cares %_%

- Mark
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Nov 19, 2002, 8:09pm

ye2s but we might be able to rope some people in to becomming citizens.
personally i think the best way would be to have a referal system. people
in aw today talk about telling frineds about it. well how about a system
that would be for every person that you refer to aw you get a point but only
if the person registers for a first month, and like 5 points could be a free
month or a bot incress and 15 points could be a free world hosted for a
month or something. this way they could get there citizens involved with a
incentive but if people do it then they would be getting new people in with
out paying a thing. it could work off word of mouth and people could print
out little cards that have there citnumber on them or something, then when
someone registers for the free trial there would be a feild for citnumber
refereal or meybe tey could sign up for referal numbers. and pending and
final points could show up in the referers citizenship info. i think that
would b a great way to get people. i might send it in. cause it would be a
very small amount of time to program into the registering thing. yes i
think ill write a formal letter. dont steal my idea of coruse it will be
here for awcom to see also since enzo is finally cleaning up the newgroups.
well ta, im off to write a formal propoal.

coryashire



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Nov 19, 2002, 11:46pm

Here's hoping you use better English in your "formal proposal" than you
do in your NG posts. :P

[View Quote] --
Goober King
Paragraphs are your friend!
gooberking at utn.cjb.net

Nov 20, 2002, 5:56am

Little off topic but you got my attention with the 10% statistic. Where'd
you get that? Last time I checked, in PC magazine about 6 months ago, it
was 40% on broadband and they even mentioned that most people *thought* it
was more around the lines of 75%.

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Nov 20, 2002, 5:48pm

Well if you use the wrong method for the wrong situation, you are wasting
money. :)

What you described is sales.

Chris

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Nov 20, 2002, 7:30pm

I asked E N Z O about this aggggessss ago and he said he liked the idea, but implimentation would be very very hard.

- Mark

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