The LA Times has an interesting article up on the failure of real life businesses in Second Life.

The crux of the piece is that despite the hype, real life businesses are closing down their Second Life outposts due to little to no interest in them.

The reasons for the failures are open to debate; from firms not engaging Second Life citizens, through to simply a lack of actual people using Second Life (the LA Times says it peaks at 40,000 users at any one given time).

Au’s later notes in the same post that Second Life doesn’t rely on corporations for revenue and the decline of corporations on Second Life doesn’t really matter all that much to Linden Lab. Once the last corporation leaves Second Life, the user-generated metavserse will continue, and in some ways may even end up being better off.