To many of the big companies entering into Second Life, their entire presence in the 3D world is a form of advertisement. I assume that was a common mindset when the Internet first came about a decade ago. Everyone could have a web page, and it was like a 24/7 virtual billboard. It took a few years for the web to develop into something more functional then information delivery only, and eventually the concept of advertisement as a viable revenue source developed. Don’t get me wrong, email ads and annoying banners have been a way of life for the 2D virtual world since almost the beginning, but as a source of revenue it took a little while. It wasn’t until targeted ads with the backbone of AdSense and AdWords, courtesy of the Google empire, that the Internet maximized the ad model.
Now consider Second Life again. We have the
Well, my answer is maybe. From a technical perspective one of the first problems is the concept of targeted. It is much harder to garner useful information from the current 3D environment of SL then it is for Google to keyword search the webpage you are browsing. You could use the type of store or establishment that the avatar is in if someone would qualify that information for you in a meaningful way. You could query the description of items that the avatar is wearing or carrying, if only scripters and builders would bother to fill those in all the time.
I think that the person that comes up with the right solution might just build their own empire one day.