Monday, November 9, 2009
Virtual Goods Start Bringing Real Paydays
Silicon Valley may have discovered the perfect business: charging real money for products that do not exist.
Silicon Valley may have discovered the perfect business: charging real money for products that do not exist.
So the inevitable “offers are scams” story finally blew on to the scene last week at the Virtual Goods Summit when TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington attacked OfferPal’s Anu Shukla for having misleading offers (e.g. sign up for Netflix, get 10,000 coinz) as a core part of her business.
Virtual worlds have had some real problems. Google, for instance, recently shut down an animated environment called Lively only five months after it was announced. And Linden Lab, whose Second Life online community was once front-page news, has neither reached many mainstream consumers nor created an important meeting place for corporate users.
The buying and selling of virtual goods is an extremely nascent market that seems to be heating up dramatically. Almost daily there are announcements pronouncing large virtual good revenues on the horizon and new forms of payments and rewards for the intrepid user.
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
So here is exactly what we do: Read more »
Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.