Second Life the latest channel suffering anti-commercial backlash

I've spoken before about the growing speed of channel abandonment, the fact that - as Paul Sweeney and Ars Technica have observed - younger people are ever ready to abandon a social or communication channel or platform once it becomes polluted with commercial messages. Over at the Web2.0 conference, the already-traditional "what do real people do online" (Read/WriteWeb) panel brought up spam as second only to security as a concern. People talk about being on IM for hours a day, or being on YouTube or MySpace for hours a day "with friends" - no-one seems to talk about being on email for hours at a time.

Now the Second Life Herald, newspaper of virtual world Second Life, launches a near-hysterical tirade of abuse against real-world marketers and brand managers claiming fatuously to have achieved some sort of “first” by replicating their businesses within the Linden Labs world: “more likely, I would say it is a case of a bunch of desperate clueless fucktards trying to show how bleeding-edgy they are, and, given that SL is the bleeding-edgy flavour of the month, they are wrapping themselves in the Linden cape of bleeding-edginess.”

I'm torn on the implication of this one. On the one hand, it seems that the long-term SL population is becoming vocally disenchanted with a sudden influx of marketeers now that their world has become flavour of the picosecond. That looks like the precursor to channel abandonment.

On the other hand...unlike channels such as email and MySpace, there's a sense in which virtual real estate in SL is infinite. It might be annoying for long-term business operators in SL to hear Crayon claiming to be the first business to launch there, but (unlike email spam) they can simply give Crayon a wide berth. There's no real interruption. Moreover, the costs of switching channel here are not merely huge, they are almost infinite. What's the alternative to SL? WoW, perhaps, is the facile answer but it's by no means the same thing. SL runs at a server per three users according to some estimates (BrokenToys) - the cost of producing anything remotely like SL, of offering a channel to switch into, is huge. What exactly do disenchanted SLers do when the quantity of commercial messages passes their tolerance threshhold?