Nothing can make a head spin quite like trying to wrap it around the concept of virtual worlds as anything more than something a creepy neighbor used to sit in his mom’s basement and experiment with. But they are coming out of the basement, slowly but surely. They sure seemed to be a viable, real life medium at the Digital Worlds Conference held two weeks ago in New York. And newly created worlds such as the vLES (virtual Lower East Side created by vMTV and Vice magazine) and the CosmoGIRL! virtual prom (a CosmoGIRL! and There.com creation) got so much coverage by the mainstream media, it seems as if everyone is hip to these virtual worlds but you.

Not true. The reality is that while virtual worlds are more developed and have more visitors than ever, everyone is not “doing it”…yet. Over 70% of the users are children (with influential, malleable minds) and the others are using the medium for video games or Second Life, both of which are largely based on fantasy and not what the “new” virtual world creators claim their worlds are really all about. The applications now being developed for virtual worlds for purposes like real world business development are still on the fringe.

At the min Day Summit today, keynote speaker Geoff Ramsey stated that virtual worlds are good for two things: to learn about community activity and to test new marketing concepts, the key words there being LEARN and TEST. Ramsey also suggested that hardcore users of Second Life should “get a real one,” a notion echoed throughout the digital community.

So while advertisers scramble to figure out how they can make their brand presence known and how to turn virtual interest into real ad dollars, most of the rest of the world is still googling “avatar”.

According to Compete, “s*x” is the top search term used at YouTube in March, followed by musician “Lil Wayne.” In fact, musical figures account for half of the top ten searches.

Top YouTube Searches (March 2008)

1.    S*x
2.    Lil Wayne
3.    Low
4.    Chris Brown
5.    No Air
6.    Porn
7.    Family Guy
8.    Soudja Boy
9.    Naruto
10.    Funny

Source: Compete

Just as it seems the entire Web and much of TV is going paparazzi mad and TMZ-ified with ephemeral clips of starlets getting in and out of SUVs (Quick! Panty check!), New York Magazine shocked us a bit the old fashioned magazine way on February 25. Its fashion issue featured the now-infamous Lindsay Lohan/Bert Stern nude Marilyn recreation. The online gallery brought NYMag.com to new heights, as we report in this week’s Min’s Box Scores. The site, which previous grabbed 4.3 million uniques, skyrocketed to 9.6 million, or a 120% gain. Page Views almost hit 156 million, more than three times the usual 35 million level. To its credit however, and unlike some magazine that get such momentary spikes, NYMag.com seems to have leveraged the spike. The site reports its March traffic retained some of the tsunami, with page views up to about 50 million and uniques to 5 million. Of course there may have been some residual Lohan-peeping going on into March that accounts for some of the lasting bump, but it has been our experience that these spike retreat very quickly. The art of managing capricious Web traffic will be a matter of marketing to newcomers as if it is the last time you ever will see them, because it might be.

User tolerance for searching search results is shrinking. Any search engine optimizer should be aware that only 8% of users will drill deeper than three pages of results, which is a decrease from 10% two years ago, according to iProspect. About 68% of users say they tend to go with first page results, up from 62% in 2006 and 60% in 2002. Also important is brand credibility, with 37% of respondents saying that being at the top of search results indicates a brand’s leadership in that category. The emergence of blended search results (images, video, blogs and text) have crowded the field even further, making less room on a page for traditional text-based hits. Companies should be optimizing and hyper-distributing multimedia into the search eco-system as well.

According to comScore’s new Wireless Report a majority of mobile Web users access the Internet in some way via their phones each day. More than a third of Mobile Web users access the data platform multiple times a day, double the number just six months ago. Still, the cost of service and data plans now has become the foremost consideration among user switching or upgrading their mobile contracts. For publishers this price sensitivity all points to an ad supported mobile Web model. The appeal of fee-based added services and downloadable applications is limited and probably shrinking fast. As users migrate to a mobile Web so will their expectations of seeing there the same business models they have enjoyed for years online.

As we have reported in both MIN and DMR, Yahoo’s new social media network, Buzz, is using its beta release to drive traffic from the Yahoo front page to a limited range of branded media sites. Yahoo itself has been touting partner success stories, namely sites that get massive spikes when one of the highly rated articles in this new recommendation engine floats to the Yahoo.com page. But now metrics provider Hitwise is suggesting that Buzz is rivaling Digg in the places that matter most to major media partners. Heather Hopkins, vp research, Hitwise, UK says she was “amazed” at new charts showing Digg.com driving only 10% more traffic to news and media destinations in the last week. To be sure, Digg.com still is the gorilla in the room when it comes to driving traffic to blogs, games and video. Hopkins concludes that Buzz’s quick rise proves “there is likely room for a new entrant in social news media.” Well, there is room if you have hundreds of million of eyeballs already coursing through your pages. What Yahoo is proving is that it still has scale no one else enjoys, and it can throw that weight around to its partners’ benefit when needed.

In-game video game advertising has been in the act of becoming for a decade now, but eMarketer claims it is only worth about $408 million in spending this year. While planting ads into console video games is the sexy part of the business, in fact the majority of spending ($286 million) is going in and around games on the Web.  Expect that spending to grow only to $478 million by 2012. Ironically, gaming is among the most popular online activities, and yet traditionally it is harder to monetize. As with social networks, people are highly engaged in what they are doing when gaming online, and they pay little attention to ads that generally are not well targeted in the space.

In a survey of industry experts on the effects of the expected recession on media industries, our own partner Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni of University of Mississippi tells Mediapost not to be too surprised if new print books emerge. Fortune, Esquire and Entertainment Weekly all grew out of hard times, when a soft ad market lowered the barriers for entry. The Internet will continue to prosper, maybe more so, because frugal media buyers will be looking for digital’s more precise targeting and ROI. Low-cost social networking and word-of-mouth techniques online may see some of the best benefit from a downturn, some media mavens predict. But the rich will get richer, Forrester predicts. Cost-per-action media like search is bound to look even better under tighter budgets.

Leveraging its leadership in the mobile Web space, with over 6 million monthly uniques, The Weather Channel Interactive (www.weather.com) will introduce mobile video ads to its inventory. The site already offers mobile video for compatible handsets, and these ads will include a banner on the video index page, a five-second pre-roll and a 15-second post-roll. Media buyers will be able to sponsor the entire section in its initial stages and eventually be able to buy the mobile units as part of a larger bundle on Weather.com and the TV properties. The Weather Channel recently held a 2008 Upfront where it rolled out an aggressive program of ad products across its platforms and report record sales for 2007. The company has been in the mobile content business since 1999 and is one of the medium’s biggest players.

In another sign that Microsoft is dead serious about becoming a major player in the online ad industry, the Redmond company acquires ad yield management solution Rapt and fold it into its existing Atlas ad serving platform. Rapt offers pulbihser sales workflow solution that already counts among its clients CNet, Dow Jones, New York Times Company, Microsoft, and Expedia. Rapt’s product includes pricing analytics, inventory management and business intelligence. The next front in the online ad wars is technology, which providers have the best tools that help publishers and marketers go to the next level of targeting and monetization.