Last week we kicked off a weekly feature with an interview with Reuben Steiger from Millions of Us. This week we're happy to present our conversation with Michael Wilson from There. There runs its own virtual world, but the company has also provided the technology to build private platforms like MTV's Pimp My Ride, Laguna Beach, and The Hills. We talked with Wilson about splitting that business, advertising in virtual worlds, and opening them up. On open standards, Wilson had this to say: "I will volunteer right now to have a three-way call with Phil Rosedale and we can ask him. And then we’ll record his answer." Philip, interested in an interview?
Virtual Worlds News: What have you been up to in developing There?
Michael Wilson: We’ve had a few core priorities for There. The first one is that it’s PG-13 as a social platform. One of our first priorities every day is to maintain that and make it accessible to as many people as possible. And if you look at, sort of, our hidden agenda internally, we’re focused constantly on stability. We’ll call a halt to new features occasionally to just go fix bugs and make the platform run better. The second is that when we’re looking for new features to add, we ask our users. We regularly poll the users and say, “Give us your top 10.” We don’t always do everything in that list, but we shoot for a 50-75 percent average. The third big priority is to improve developer tools while still maintaining the quality of the platform.
VWN: You've worked to create private worlds as well. Do you see Makena or There moving towards one or the other?
MW: We do both. There is of course our flagship. It’s 99 percent user-generated content, but we’re starting to bring brands in there. The first was a performance from Sean Mims this week. And that’s amazing on a number of levels. We have Capitol Music Group, an entire record label, coming in, and, second, frankly, there was a lot of question of how this would work. But it was amazing. We’re using both There as a platform for CMG and we’re continuing to produce white-label worlds for MTV and potentially others. The thing about those is that you have to pour traffic into them. And other virtual worlds have done this by calling reporters every day to say "My dog died in the virtual world." "The next day they call because "My dog came back to life in the virtual world," and the next day they're there to say that "There's a new dog." We want it to happen through actual content.
VWN: If you poll users about new features, do you poll brands about what would attract them?
MW: No. They may ask for extra stuff, but the main force is our members. The advertisers come to us for our members. They may ask for certain things, though, that coincide.
VWN: What sort of things are your users asking for?
MW: In our next release, though I’m not pre-announcing anything, we have a tip jar, an ability for members to tip each other. We have some improved developer testing tools that will make it much, much easier for developers to improve their products. We have some improved camera controls. And we’ve already released certain things. Some of the things they ask for, frankly, we can’t do in a reasonable time frame, or we’ll do later, or we just don’t want to do it.
VWN: Has there been any interest or movement in taking There to a mobile platform?
MW: What I can say is that we believe in extending the platform to as many devices as possible and to more light-weight devices. We’ll be making an announcement next month about lighter weight devices. The problem is that the Asia
VWN: Are you looking at expanding internationally?
MW: We allow other people in, and we localize the product. But we’re not building a new cluster in
VWN: When you bring brands into There, how do you approach integration?
MW: We’re very picky about the brands we allow into the world. We’ve had people come in and want to put up traditional advertising, and I just said no. The brands have to support our core values, PG-13 and brand protection, and then we look to see whether the experience that they want to give makes sense for our world. The CMG experience is great for us, because it was designed to work well with the community.
VWN: Why do you think entertainment brands like CMG are now moving into virtual worlds?
MW: I think entertainment brands, the reason you seem them in virtual worlds is that they stand to leverage the platform the most. The key there is the talent, and it’s a whole new way to interact with their fans. I actually believe there’s going to be a strong cohesion between people seeing a music video in There and then buying an album. That's much stronger than for other types of brands. I can’t imagine there being a better reason to buy a Dell computer in a virtual world instead of on the website. I just want to go look at the specs and buy one. I think you’ll eventually see linkages where you watch Lily Allen and then you click an object and the CD arrives at your house or you download it. It’s an easy step from impulse to purchase.
VWN: What is There's revenue model?
MW: For every virtual world that has an economy, the place that you make your money is in currency sales. That’s the vast majority of our revenue. As far as advertising revenue, I’m not going to talk about projections. I think a lot of the exciting thing is the question of how you charge for advertising in a virtual world. If I can deliver an experience that's rich and immersive, how do you charge for that?
VWN: How do you go about charging? What sort of metrics do you look for?
MW: We throw terabytes of data back to our advertisers. We know when someone gets near an advertisement, who they are, and how they interact with it. And then you get a question of how you charge for it. That’s the next big important question. What’s the model?
VWN: What do you think the model is? Care to speculate?
MW: No. What I need is an expert to sit down with us and work on how to do it.
VWN: It seems like that way of collecting measurements is unique as opposed to having to build systems into the back-end of a Second Life sim.
MW: We have built data collection into our platform since day one. It’s just there. We use a company like Metaversatitlty for CMG. Do I think it’s an advantage? I think so. And it can affect the behavior of the engine itself eventually. You and I are standing in
VWN: So it's like a 3D version of Google's contextual advertising.
MW: Yes, but we have far more information. We have your entire history in the virtual world. We can identify you as someone with a female avatar friend who has a birthday coming up. Then we can look and see that that friend was looking at some sunglasses for a while, but didn't buy them. Then we advertise them to you.
VWN: Are you worried people will be concerned about privacy violations?
MW: I’m a privacy freak. But the information is not individually identified. It’s aggregated by unique, random identifiers, but I don’t tie that back to John Smith or expose that to advertisers.
VWN: I know you've worked with Trilogy and The Electric Sheep on other worlds for MTV, are there other organizations you're looking at?
MW: The Sheep were mainly there for events. The large majority of
VWN: Are you looking to build gameplay elements into There?
MW: We are a new way for people to communicate and express themselves. We want to give you another tool in your tool kit to communicate. If there are gameplay elements in that, that’s great.
VWN: What are you most excited about for the future of virtual worlds?
MW: I’m most excited about making the experience more and more available to people through lighter weight devices and more platforms. I’m not the guy that believes I’m going to use a virtual world to go buy books from Amazon. Why would I wander down a virtual aisle? But if I want to meet someone and have a deeper experience than Facebook or MySpace, a virtual world is a great way to do that. You have to be careful, and this may just be that I’m old, but you have to be careful of what people use this for and how you build it out.
A group found that less than 5 percent of the world uses Web 2.0. It’s a mainly
VWN: A lot of talk has gone into whether the industry should be building for the mainstream that way. Have you thought about opening up to allow other, simpler platforms integrate with There?
MW: We’re building APIs to expose information about your virtual world experience into 2D places. It’s not our focus, but we need to do it. We’re working on Facebook apps to show people what your avatar is looking like. For us to create another social network, I think there’s only 3000 now, that’s not good for us. It’s up to you to decide how to integrate us into your social network.
VWN: Does that mean you're interested in integrating virtual worlds or providing open standards? Some sort of way to transfer your avatars and items?
MW: Nooo. For me, at least, do you use Microsoft Sign-on?
VWN: No.
MW: Why not? It’s compatible with 1000s of sites. The fact is that any time a site becomes sizable, it becomes jealous of its users. I would love to put up a function for you to see your World of Warcraft character in There, but how many seconds after that do you think it would be until I got sued by Blizzard?
VWN: Some people have said that it would be beneficial for the entire industry, though, regardless of how protective the big sites are.
MW: I will volunteer right now to have a three-way call with Phil Rosedale and we can ask him. And then we’ll record his answer.
VWN: So you're open to the idea then?
MW: I haven’t said that we’re open to it. There are practicalities behind it that cause problems.
VWN: What sort of growth have you seen in There?
MW: We see about double digit growth per month. I don’t get into the numbers game because it’s so murky. You can talk about how many users you have and all that, but I’m not going to get into quoting numbers. We just gave up. It became a battle of just constantly asking what it means.
VWN: So along those lines, you're not interested in releasing metrics to the public?
MW: If an advertiser came to me, I would be more than happy to talk to them about information with their products.
VWN: What are your biggest concerns for the future of virtual worlds?
MW: My biggest concern, if I have one, is that I’m concerned about fragmentation. If we end up in a situation where there are hundreds of virtual worlds for people to go between, no one has a good experience. I want people to enjoy virtual worlds and use them, not go “Oh, what do I use?” Right now there are four major IM networks. If there were 50 of those, can you imagine what that would be like?
VWN: Do you have a solution to that or a safety net?
MW: All we can do is try to offer the best experience for people to talk about their identity. You have to accept the competition.
VWN: Is there anything else people should know about There or the virtual worlds industry?
MW: This is a brand new industry, and there’s room for everyone. We should all just enjoy it and remember who the customer is.
VWN: And who is that?
MW: The members.
Joey Seiler
www.VirtualWorldsNews.com
joey (at) showinitiative.com
(512) 535-8650
skype: joey.seiler.vwnews
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