Second Life's land auctions can be used to reveal the real-dollar value of the trade happening within its virtual borders. It comes to $2.17 million annually. 2L has about 2000 users [edit: 2,000 is the number who actively engaged in trading in this period. 2L has many more users than that.], making the annual per capita trade volume $1,084. If the 750,000 users of Sony's virtual worlds traded at about the same rate, that would come to $814 million. It's another hint (the first came in this post) that the amount of trade within virtual worlds dwarfs the amount of trade on eBay (which, according to my own tracking, probably amounts to no more than $100 million world-wide).
Here's how I got the $2.17 million figure: Second Life allows users to run their land auctions in both real dollars ($) and Linden Dollars (L). By the Law of One Price (stating that arbitrage will eliminate price differences in comparable markets), the same effective price must be reached in auctions of both kinds. One 2L user, Kathy Yamamoto, posted land auction data showing that the average Linden price for land was L5.47 and the average dollar price was $0.0294. That implies that $1 buys as much land as L186, meaning the exchange rate between dollars and Lindens is 186 to 1. I queried Philip Rosedale, Linden's CEO, about trade volume within the world, and he reported that the first week in February saw about L7.76 million in trade among the 2,000 users. That's worth about $41,700, or annualized ("times 52" if you hate business lingo), $2.17 million.
