I have to say, that this is one of the strangest projects I have seen so far in the realm of virtual goods. WhatsYourPlace is a web based platform on which you can buy virtual land on Google Maps for real money.
Let me explain to you, what is happening on this website
You just search for a nice place on mother earth via the integrated Google Maps - maybe you home, work, university or whatever place you might want to “own” virtually - and then you have to pay with real money to claim this as your property.
What you get is a colored square displayed on Google Maps - of course only within the WhatsYourPlace platform - and a profile page for this place, where you can add a description, tags, pictures, links and people can also comment your place. Additionally others can even mark Hotspots with flags on this map and attach a short text to it.
More over you of course also have this community stuff, like personal profiles, friends and so on. You can become a Fan of a place, you see who looked at this place and all that social 101 we all know.
So what does it cost? You have to pay about 10 Euro per hecta of virtual land and the platforms says, that they have sold so far 4.985 hectar - therefore they earned so far round about 49.850 Euro.
If this platform would really take of they could make a lot of money, even if this business model is limited 
The earth has a surfaces area of 14.894.000.000 hectares (without water areas). So if they would sell 1% of the available land on earth - that would be 148.940.000 hectares - that would still be a turnaround of about 1.5 billion Euro. Nice!
But why should I buy?
What I just don’t get is: why should I buy land? At the moment I can’t see the reason, what the benefit of it is? There could be a benefit if this is a website with a high traffic, which quite a lot of people use to … find place … review places maybe … maybe … maybe … I don’t know 
Then I would have bought a kind of advertising space on a Google Maps application. So that people always see by whom this space is owned and then they would see my profile page - but right now, I don’t see that happening.
The whole website is about selling virtual land. It’s not optimized yet to use it in any other way then that and unless that doesn’t change I don’t understand, why I should invest in virtual land.
But maybe I am not visionary enough? Would you pay real money to get a square on WhatsYourPlace? Whats the use of this website?
4 responses so far ↓
1 Knut // Jul 10, 2008 at 6:31 pm
I think in your calculation is a little glitch…
“The earth has a surfaces area of 14.894.000.000 hectares (without water areas). So if they would sell 1% of the available land on earth - that would be 148.940.000 hectares - that would still be a turnaround of about 15 billion Euro.”
So if I multiply 148.940.000 with 10 I’ll get 1.489.400.000 and not 14.894.000.000…
So either you sell 10 percent or get only 1.5 billion Euro turnover…
Sorry!
2 Tobias // Jul 10, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Hi, Im happy to comment on this one
WhatsYourPlace is primarily an entertainment platform. Not information, not problem solving, but plain fun. Yes, there are use cases with concrete benefit, like using parcels as guerilla marketing platform, as speculation object, or as personal gift. But mainly it is about people having fun to exclusively represent their favorite place to the world. And exclusivity is key here: when you buy a place, it is completely up to you what visitors of this place get to see. So actually reselling parcels is only a side issue that will occur only to a minority of places. It is more about virtually owning and representing a place that is personally meaningful to you. But this is all abstract, I think just browsing the platform already gives a good hint about how people use it and where the fun is coming into the picture.
Of course, whenever it comes to entertainment, benefit is a matter of taste. Some people enjoy it, others dont. It’s like watching a particular movie. Some people feel entertained and are ready to purchase a cinema ticket. Some people enjoy building their real estate empire on Second Life. Others find it more attractive, to “own” a real place, without much building work.
But thanks for the feedback, this is very valuable as we constantly try to react on comments by improving the platform. And for all English speaking folks here: In about three weeks, WhatsYourPlace will be available in English - and the best thing: it is not me doing the translation
3 Sebastian Küpers // Jul 10, 2008 at 6:50 pm
@Knut oh - a dot was missing between the one and the five - thanks!
@Tobias also thanks for your comment!
Looking forward to get more feedback from people who will play around with it
4 WhatsYourPlace » Blog Archive » WhatsYourPlace in Blogs // Jul 18, 2008 at 10:46 am
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