Similarly to Call of Heroes, social networking site Habbo will see a partnership with advertising provider Double Fusion. The deal with cover the virtual communities in North America, and will see the company handling "all activity related to advertising sales, sponsorship and promotional opportunities."

To those not in the know, Habbo is basically just a virtual world where users can log on and talk to each other. Think of it as something like Facebook meets The Sims meets Earthbound.

Double Fusion’s president and CEO Jonathan Epstein feels his company and Habbo are a great fit:

"As a company I feel we’ve developed technology and sales expertise that’s focused on delivering advertisers unique, engaging advertising experiences in games, and of course games are virtual worlds with a plot. We’ve done some work with virtual worlds in the past, and virtual worlds are a natural extension of the gaming experience – where users are creating their own plots. And among the virtual worlds Habbo has been doing it longer than anyone. They’ve been at it for 8 years, have a huge audience, and have tremendous experience in building successful ad campaigns already."

Honestly, since people are already spending real money on virtual items in the game, if there was ever a place for in-game (or in-social network if you prefer) advertising, I suppose this is the place.

Sulake's (the company that runs Habbo) Teemu Huuhtanen, their executive vice president of Marketing, Ad Sales and Business Development declared the end of his company's morals (okay, just kidding):

"We work with over 200 advertisers across the world, and the advertisers aren’t usually thinking about ‘impressions’; that’s kind of an old school way to think about things. They’re more interested in if the users are getting engaged with the items, using them and showing them off to each other."

Softpedia observes that "apparently, more and more companies that are involved in game development and game maintenance are looking at in-game as a clear and simple way of boosting revenue in a way that does not affect the end user." If they don't affect the end user, why is so much money and effort being put into these things?