First of all, I don’t take speculations into account and, apart from that, 5 billions USD is waaaay too much, even for Second Life.

Metaverse Millionaires, such as Anshe Chung (her company AnsheChung.com, and her page on Wikipedia: Ailin Graef) don’t answer such a question… Of course, they’re interested in running their businesses and can’t shout a (low) bid on Second Life value.

Similar projects and metaverses, like Project Entropia, are less valuable, because they are not as “famous” as Second Life.
A comparison, though, is important, to set a lower bound for our bid.
Project Entropia is an excellent and well-designed virtual world, with its own virtual banks since may 2007.

Entropia is owned by the swedish company MindArk, which reported a 2006 in-game turnover of over 3.6 Billion PED ($360 Million USD).

A company that is able to report 360 Million USD of gross income can have a profit margin of 50-100 million USD, so it can be roughly valued at 1.5 billion USD. Second Life, therefore, is worth more than that.

So, how much is Second Life worth?

1. Most famous Metaverse (+300 million USD)
2. Difficult to use (-350 million USD)
3. First runner advantage (+400 million USD)
4. Roughly one million of active users, and more than 10 millions registered users (+250 million USD)
5. A growing economy, and more than 240 million Linden dollars a month in income (+200 million USD)
6. Big companies investing in Second Life, such as IBM, Cisco, Amazon and Google (+150 million USD)
7. Educators using Second Life as a teaching tool (+100 million USD)
8. Huge growth in third world countries, like Brazil (+150 million USD)
9. Uses Debian and MySQL, so it’s easy and cheap to add up engineers (+50 million USD)
10. Client software is now open source (+80 million USD)
11. The hype about Second Life is high (+300 million USD)
12. Metaverses are in general growing fast, as the necessary hardware power (+200 million USD)
13. Gambling has been banned (-200 million USD)
14. Second Life has its own currency, with a dynamic exchange rate with the USD (+100 million USD)
15. Lock-in policy: users invested time and money to create content that has a value only inside Second Life (+250 million USD)
16. No big competitors out there, yet, so still time to grow and improve the system (+200 million USD)

TOTAL: 2,180 million USD.

This value will be probably doubled during 2008… who knows?
What do you think about that?

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Post from: Second Life Pros