Virtual Equity
I recently heard the term “Social Media Equity” for the first time in a recent post entitled ”The Benefits of Social Media Aggregators and Lifestreaming: A Look at Friendfeed” written by Maki of DoshDosh.com. I have to say that I like this term a lot. The virtual world has become a fascinating place and its financial impact is beginning to rival that of the physical world.
Take the term “digital real estate”, which some use to refer to virtual properties in online games like Second Life. According to the article “Is there real money in online real estate?” by MSN Real Estate correspondent Christopher Solomon, Ailin Graef may be making around $150,000 per year from her digital real estate empire.
When speaking of digital real estate, it is important of course not to confuse it with “virtual real estate”, which is a term that some use to refer to web domains. Domain names have potential cash value or equity based on several factors which might include how clever the domain name is, the amount of incoming traffic, any pre-existing name recognition, or similarity to a popular pre-existing domain.
For about $10 a year you can sit on a domain name without the need for any hosting in the hopes that someone will come along someday and buy it. Starting at about $5 a month you can ad hosting to your domain and change your online prospects dramatically.
With virtual real estate, as with physical, it’s not just the address that is important in determining value, you also have to look at the size of the property. With hosting you can add as many pages to your site as you want, with each and every page that you add your SEO presence grows, and as it grows so does your site’s value.
All of this suggests that the equity of the virtual world has very real value in terms of real dollars and cents. What is great about this is the nature of the barriers to entry in the online world.
At Feedback Secrets, we believe that if an opportunity has no barriers to entry then it is not a very good one. There are definitely barriers to building your online equity; however they are barriers of desire as opposed to barriers of circumstance.
For example, if you wanted to get started with investment properties or flipping houses but you had $100 in the bank and no job, you would most likely be out of luck. The barriers to entry, when it comes to virtual equity are the willingness to work hard, be creative, and potentially risk your time.
Tags: social networking, social media, virtual real estate
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