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>A handful of people making money does make it not a novelty activity. It's still a niche, but it's not a novelty. How so? A handful of people make money out o

• smashing 14y ago
  How many people made money off defensive HN comments?
• mistercow 14y ago
  I would say that what makes it a novelty is that people are making significant money off of the act itself. Take your example of hula hoops. People make money off of selling hula hoops, and there are a very few people who make money off of the exhibition of their hula-hooping prowess. But nobody is really making a business model out of hula-hooping itself. You could swap rubik's cubes and yo-yos in to the previous sentence, and it would still hold true. Hula hoops are a novelty, but selling hula hoops is not. But there are people out there making gobs of money off of the trade of virtual items and then manipulation of virtual economies, and not by enabling it (although that is also profitable) or by doing it as a parlor trick for others' amusement, but by the same means as any other economy is exploited. In particular, what makes this not a novelty is that the attraction that these people have to it is not that it is a video game, or that the idea is new and interesting, but that it is simply an unexploited opportunity.