Venue familiarity and web-based virtual worlds
When given the option to download the latest Radiohead album for free directly from Radiohead’s promotional website, 2.3 million people opted to download it through BitTorrent.
This factoid comes from research just released by Big Champagne and MCPS-PRS. I picked up on the news here.
The research goes on to explain that venue familiarity was a key determining factor for those downloading the album. People find things through channels they are familiar with on the Internet, and for 2.9 million people, P2P networks happen to be what they know instead of the URL of the Radiohead website.
So how does venue familiarity apply to virtual worlds?
A major reason why branded web-based virtual worlds have gotten traction in the past few years is venue familiarity. Disney’s Club Penguin may not be a household name today if it had not been distributing its games on Miniclip, a site that is known by youth as a top destination for casual games.
It goes without saying that the web offers the largest number of “familiar venues” of online users. When you combine these familiar venues with a virtual world experience built with a portable and embeddable technology like Flash, the result is a very cost effective way for publishers to maximize their exposure and reach, not to mention integration with their existing content.
