A New BlogShares Economy: Two players cash out for real $$$

A BlogShares first: Protect and Gamble and Jon Gales have sold their virtual assets for real money. In fact, $100 (US dollars) each.

The slick entreprenuer who performed the deal, ac Securities, talks about his reasoning on his blog (the angryCoder):

Virtual money? Well, not always. That changed yesterday when I paid $100 to each of two different BlogShares players (Jonathan Galas [sic] and Protect and Gamble) to acquire their accounts and have their fortunes transferred to mine. Why would I spend $200 of real money for $200 million of virtual money? I did it for a couple of reasons. First, Seyed Razavi (the founder and brains behind BlogShares.com) is going to publicize the transactions heavily, as they are the first of their kind. I make every effort to drive additional traffic to angryCoder.com. Second (and more importantly), there is a great deal of opportunity in the BlogShares economy to make real money.

Real money? Now it gets a bit more interesting. After myself and a few others prodded Seyed for awhile, he agreed to expose an XML-RPC API into the BlogShares economy. Starting in June, developers will be able to build tools and interfaces that allow better interactivity with BlogShares. Those tools will likely be subscription based and cost a monthly fee. Who'd pay money to invest in a virtual stock market? Plenty of people, in fact. There used to be an extensive list of monetary contributors (myself included) on the BlogShares.com web site, but the link escapes me right now [Ed: here]. As another example, witness the number of people that pay money to play in fantasy sports leagues. This is the same idea, only with a bit more geek chic.

When the BlogShares competition really starts heating up, players will want better tools to make trading faster, easier, automated, and remotely accessible. Those that build the tools and have sizeable BlogShare fortunes will be able to dominate the market of making real money propagating the fantasy. I registered the BlogDayTrader.com domain name, and plan to release several tools built with .NET to facilitate BlogShares trading. It should be a great exercise in .NET development. Who knows? Maybe the New Blog Economy won't last. At the very least, though, I bought myself enough worth to allow me to curb the countless hours that I have spent on virtual investing. If you calculate the value of the wasted productivity that I just saved myself, I think I got quite a bargain. Now, off to my BlogShares Anonymous meeting.

So is this the start of a trend? Can we expect BlogShares on eBay soon? And should I put up a currency convertor between BlogShares dollars and US dollars (or Euros or GBP)?

Discuss.

Posted 13:19 22 May 2003