The business opportunities presented by interactive media and 3D virtual worlds
Friday, July 4th, 2008
“By 2011, 80% of active internet users will have a virtual world account.”
Gartner Research, April 2007.
This quotation was identified by one of the presenters at HYPHEN on Wednesday evening. The event focussed on the opportunities new technologies bring with specific reference to Second Life and online gaming. There was quite a lot of discussion about the business opportunities these playful, often entertainment-focussed spaces deliver. Apparently BP identified virtual worlds as the “breakthrough technologies for 2008”.
I don’t think any of us need to be told about the serious business opportunity online gaming brings. The image to the left is Miniclip’s growth chart and although you might not be able to make out the text on the graph, all you really need to know is that the units on the horizontal axis are years and the units on the vertical axis are users (in increments of 5 million).
So what about Second Life’s business opportunities? A few years ago, any business which had a presence in Second Life was guaranteed some publicity out of it but these days that’s not the case. The last Second Life story I heard reported with any gusto was that of Ailin Graef, the Chinese businesswoman who built a business by buying and selling virtual land and made rather a lot of money in doing so. Perhaps that’s the business opportunity Second Life presents…but then, most of us don’t want to build a business in Second Life. We’re busy enough trying run the business we have created in our first lives. (more…)
