Managing ephemeral locations in a virtual universe

A method for advertising in a virtual universe (VU), comprising causing a computer infrastructure to:

• render an ephemeral location in the VU by creating a mapping between a VU grid of the VU and the ephemeral location;
• transport a user avatar from the VU grid to the ephemeral location;
• present a VU-ad to the user at the ephemeral location;
• transport the user avatar from the ephemeral location back to the VU grid;
• and
• un-render the ephemeral location to cause the ephemeral location to disappear from the VU;
• wherein the ephemeral location is one of a plurality of ephemeral locations, and the plurality of ephemeral locations are managed simultaneously.