Run Away! Run Away!
So it seems that several big corporations are running away from SL, if you believe Time, Forbes, and some Californian broadsheet which I will likely never read. It’s curious how the papers that are predicting doom and gloom are so far removed from the lives (both second and real) of the average SLifer.
As others have said, it mostly boils down to the corporate sims not having anything much that the average SLifer is interested in. No one is going to go out of their way to see a sim-wide advertising board.
RL products are inherently inferior to anything in SL. This isn’t a dig at those big RL brands. It is simply that SL doesn’t have to pay much attention to real physics. If the corps made fantasy (no, not that fantasy) versions of their products for use in SL, and marked them low but (subtly) branded, people might use them more and wear them on their avatars.
The other approach is to build a place where people would naturally want to congregate. the best xamples of this I’ve seen are the L Word and BigPond.
I’ve had a brief look at some of the sims owned by the news agencies in SL (reuters et alii), and to be honest, there’s nothing there that would make me want to go back. But that’s fine. News works best in a text medium, at least on the net. With SL running, bandwidth isn’t generous to allow for a decent high quality audio stream too - not compared to what you could get on one of those new fangled wireless radios anyway.