Despite a raft of headlines about its potential as a shopping environment in recent months, Second Life creator Linden Labs has conceded that few of its resident stores are yet making fortunes in the virtual world.
“Most of the brands that have come in have not created a strong enough presence to create a significant business for them at this moment in time,” Linden Labs marketing director Glenn Fisher told the Le Web 3 conference in Paris this afternoon.
T-shirt maker American Apparel opened an in-world virtual store this summer, before the alternate-reality world enjoyed a surge in popularity from a wave of newspaper and magazine features.
Fisher also updated the conference audience with a range of statistics on business in Second Life:-
- $7m is exchanged in trade by avatars every month
- The SL economy is worth $84m
- Not including land deals, there are $500,000 in monthly purchases
- There are over 7,000 businesses in-world
- The average revenue of the top 10 businesses is $25,000
- The top 100 businesses gross $6,300 on average