During the past months, our trainee Matthias analyzed the virtual goods market, especially in the area of social gaming, social networks and virtual worlds. Today, SnipClip announced at the GamesBeat conference, where Oliver will pitch for SnipClip at the Who’s Got Game competition, that it will publish the results. The press release highlights some interesting insights:

Average revenue per monthly active user per year:

• non-gaming social apps: $0.37
• social games: $3.65
• virtual worlds: $8.04

Market potential for 2008:

• non-gaming social apps: $215 millions
• social games: $340 millions
• virtual worlds: $244 millions

If you want to know, how to get millions of virtual dollars, watch this. Very funny

On my search for more figures from virtual items sales in social networks or virtual worlds I got in contact with Vili Lehdonvirta from virtual-economy.org. I am so happy, that he and his colleague Juho Hamari started an own forum-thread on virtual-economy.org, where everybody can share revenue data and other metrics of virtual asset sales market.

This is a really good start and I hope, this can be a central point of metrics of the virtual asset sales market.

Good bye and stay tuned.

My presentation at the Webinale conference about how virtual worlds change the web business is now online (only in German language, sorry guys):

Shopping becomes social – again (shopping always was a social activity, but not on the Internet):

Yesterday the US Patent & Trademark Office published Apple’s patent application for “Enhancing Online Shopping Atmosphere.” The main improvement Apple sees, at least here, for online shopping is to make it a more social experience: “One drawback of online shopping is that the experience can feel sterile and isolating,” explains the application. “Customers in such an environment may be less likely to have positive feelings about the online shopping experience, may be less inclined to engage in the online equivalent of window shopping (e.g., will not linger in front of a display), and may ultimately spend less money than their counterparts who shop in physical stores.”

Read on: Virtual Worlds News: Apple’s Patent for a Shopping Virtual World

An interesting way to calculate the market size of virtual goods describes James McGough in his (quite interesting) blog. Here is the formula:

Virtual goods market = Potential users x Yearly user spend x Penetration

Read the full article at Virtual goods market size « Executive Summary

The place where virtual worlds and social networks meet is called Unype (from Skype). This mashup is crazy! Try it yourself:

Yes, the hype over Second Life is over. However, there are a few things we (as web-developers and entrepreneurs) can learn from Second Life and other virtual worlds. Second Life showed us, why people pay for content, why they spend not only money online, but also an huge amount of spare time and what customers really seek for on the Internet.

If you are interested, attend the webinale 08 and join my presentation (in German because most attendees are German):

Was wir von Second Life & Co. lernen können

Interested in what paid content and the social web have in common? Then contact me: szugat@paidcontentisback.com. I love to talk about these topics on your public or internal conference, workshops etc.

Have a good time!