Monday, June 25, 2007

Making Real Money from Virtual Goods

The latest revenue model for online communities doesn’t
exist—literally. Several companies are already making quite a lot of
actual money, not through advertising or subscriptions, but by selling
items that are really just images on a screen. That’s the main theme of
the Virtual Goods Summit, a
conference held at Stanford last week, the brainchild of Google’s
Charles Hudson and my friend Susan Wu, a VC at Charles River Ventures.
  • Three Rings
    CEO Daniel James on Puzzle Pirates, a casual MMO: “We do about $350,000
    a month in revenue, of which $250,000 is virtual currency sales.”

  • Craig Sherman of teen hangout Gaia Online:
    “Virtual economy, we have about 50,000 completed auctions every day.
    Plus 12 virtual stores that are like an Amazon space, 6,000 items sold.”

  • Dan Kelly from virtual currency exchange site Sparter,
    on the total value of the industry: “It’s easily a billion dollar
    [secondary] market. Consumers have told us these things have value, the
    industry now is trying to reconcile that with their business model.”

Article Link

No comments: