2008 Woodie Awards
Second Life CFO visits CU
Aaron Fetterman
Issue date: 2/19/07 Section: News
- Page 1 of 2 next >
John Zdanowski, Chief Financial Officer of Linden Labs, which created and runs the online world of Second Life, visited Clarkson on Wednesday, February 7. Second Life is an online, multi-user virtual reality; people can create avatars and interact in a virtual world. Second Life has received a lot of attention for its rapidly growing user base-there are about 1.25 million active players.
If that number is not surprising, then the graphs of its economic growth surely are. Zdanowski manages the online economy of Second Life, making sure things run smoothly and that there is an adequate supply of land and linden dollars (which are used for money in the game). The unique thing about linden dollars is that Second Life's terms of use allow you to buy and sell them for real money on an open market; right now one linden dollar is worth around one third of a penny.
In his presentation, Zdanowski brought up the graphs of Second Life's expansion over the past few years. At first, it looked like they were all just marketing material, a series of too-smooth exponential curves with different things on the axes: premium accounts over time, virtual land over time, hours spent in the game over time, volume of cash flow over time. Upon closer inspection, you can see some bumps, and two things become impressively evident: how transparent Linden Labs' operations are, and how much interest is being focused on Second Life.
Linden Labs adds a new rack of servers about every nine days. Second Life deals out 4 gigabits of data per second; for comparison, eBay has 12 gigabits of traffic per second, and YouTube has 80.
Despite graduating from Clarkson University with a degree in Electrical Engineering, Zdanowski is passionately interested in the economics of Second Life. The ability to get real money from this virtual world is part of what is attracting people to it. As of January, 97 avatars, or residents, made over $5,000.00 per month from the game.
Residents make money by offering goods or services in the game. They might create a game or a special object and sell it to other people, or they might be developers like Electric Sheep, a company which can be contracted to build an island or building for you.
If that number is not surprising, then the graphs of its economic growth surely are. Zdanowski manages the online economy of Second Life, making sure things run smoothly and that there is an adequate supply of land and linden dollars (which are used for money in the game). The unique thing about linden dollars is that Second Life's terms of use allow you to buy and sell them for real money on an open market; right now one linden dollar is worth around one third of a penny.
In his presentation, Zdanowski brought up the graphs of Second Life's expansion over the past few years. At first, it looked like they were all just marketing material, a series of too-smooth exponential curves with different things on the axes: premium accounts over time, virtual land over time, hours spent in the game over time, volume of cash flow over time. Upon closer inspection, you can see some bumps, and two things become impressively evident: how transparent Linden Labs' operations are, and how much interest is being focused on Second Life.
Linden Labs adds a new rack of servers about every nine days. Second Life deals out 4 gigabits of data per second; for comparison, eBay has 12 gigabits of traffic per second, and YouTube has 80.
Despite graduating from Clarkson University with a degree in Electrical Engineering, Zdanowski is passionately interested in the economics of Second Life. The ability to get real money from this virtual world is part of what is attracting people to it. As of January, 97 avatars, or residents, made over $5,000.00 per month from the game.
Residents make money by offering goods or services in the game. They might create a game or a special object and sell it to other people, or they might be developers like Electric Sheep, a company which can be contracted to build an island or building for you.
Be the first to comment on this story