ON VALUING A SECOND LIFE BUSINESS

WHAT AM I BID?

As I've noted in a couple of recent posts (see here and here), Second Life, the open-ended, virtual online living service, has received much attention from the mainstream media.  With a registered user base of over 4 million, and concurrent users as high as 40,000, it's one of the largest such services to date.

One of the unique aspects of the service is that most of what exists in Second Life has been created by the users.  This includes most of the neighborhoods, activities, and businesses on the service.

So it's notable, when one of those private businesses is sold on eBay for $50,000.

The Second Life Bureau of Reuters reports on the sale of a relatively large private commercial development on the service:

"The Amsterdam sims, a popular Second Life destination with canals, houseboats, and a sexually explicit red light district, sold on eBay for US$50,000 on Monday, one of the largest sales of a Second Life business by a private developer. 

The detailed re-creation of the European city was put up for auction starting at US$20,000, but the property with acquired outright with a single bid at the higher price by eBay user nedstede2769...

Amsterdam was created by Stroker Serpentine (real life name: Kevin Alderman of Tampa, FL) from high-resolution photographs of the city. The adult content-filled area was among the most popular Second Life sites.

According to the eBay listing, rental space for merchants in Amsterdam has a wait-list several months long."

Creating, nurturing, sustaining and growing a business of any size in Second Life is a fairly challenging and daunting task.  And it's very much early days for these types of online activities.  So a transaction of this type is a milestone of sorts, a harbinger of more interesting things to come.

Comments

[Nabeel Hyatt]

Note that Project Entropia, a similar virtual world with real money transactions (they even have an real world ATM card that lets you pull out your virtual currency into real dollars) has dwarfed Second Life in this category.

Just a year ago a person bought a "virtual" asteroid for $100k US currency. Even more amazing, he turned a profit on that purchase within 6 months -- how? He built and sold apartments on some of the asteroid, and built hunting grounds on the rest and renting time.

As usual, although Second Life has gotten all the press attention and helped define the medium for many - there are far more popular, and far more interesting things, going on elsewhere in the virtual world landscape.