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In-game advertising in a text MUD would be pointless. The friction costs involved in ad sales, ad delivery, and ad tracking make it unfeasible.
Further, the amount of money that can be attributed to a single player also makes it extremely unlikely you could afford to pay individual players much at all. For instance, I was in the room last week when announced its new WildCoins system, which makes it easier for casual games developers to get money from advertisers, both for ads around the game and for ads in the game. It allows advertisers to basically pay for a players' play time by giving away these WildCoins, which can be used to play the games accessed via Wild Tangent's game server software (bundled on Dell, HP, and Toshiba OEM computers).
Judging by the numbers that Alex St. John, their CEO, threw around, paying a player $10 is very, very, very unlikely, even with CPM rates for graphical in-game ads being multiples of what people will pay for text ads. What Wild Tangent's system does is allow people to watch a 30 second commercial (which is magnitudes more valuable than a single text ad to an advertiser) and then basically pull a slot machine lever to maybe get some WildCoins or, more likely, not. Most of the time, not. Someone in the audience asked if it would then be possible to not just play a single casual game for free, but if it'd be possible for someone to watch enough ads to get to download and fully unlock the casual game (vs a one-time play arcade-style). He replied that it's theoretically possibly but that the economics of advertising mean that the player would have to watch a simply enormous amount of these 30 second commercials to even come close.
Assuming that advertisers would buy into ads in text games (unlikely given the small populations of most text games), a player would have to view literally thousands and thousands of ads to generate $10 in revenue.
--matt
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