Welcome to the enrichment center. Since making test participation mandatory for all employees, the quality of our test subjects has risen dramatically. Employee retention, however, has not. As a result, you may have heard we're gonna phase out human testing. There's still a few things left to wrap up though - first up, conversion gel. Now, the beancounters told me we literally could not afford to buy $7 worth of moon rocks, much less 70 million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground them up, mixed them into a gel, and guess what: ground-up moon rocks are pure poison.

ARE there alternatives?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_hands_wikileaks_volunteers_gmail_data_to_us.php

But I went and ordered 24709000000 litres of concrete to fill North America. We're going to try again from scratch and see if we can do better the 2nd time.

Not sure what else to say, the title actually captures it all.

Why are you surprised at how any market works?
There are always people willing to spend alot of time creating an alterego.
Games with highly detailed character creation functionality draw specificity these people.
In old times people raised their phone bills through the roof just to chat with their 'friends' on chatboxes.
Free to play games using micro-payments have based their business model about the very concept that people are prepared to spend money to enhance their entertainment experience.

This principal is almost ancient.
What about this is not to comprehend?

Create a great looking product in a platform that does not allow you to simply copy it, and you have a product you can sell.
Like renting land, its a very boring way to tell someone you get to call THIS your home. You're not just renting land, you're also renting an atmosphere, a scenery, a social network.
When you make a scene like that, you are allowed to ask money for it, just like any piece of art.

no one has figured out how to do real world business in a virtual world
700 US Dollars tell me otherwise. But that is selling what people WANT inside a virtual platform.
A friend works with a company that sells real-estate and has virtual versions of the houses people can walk through inside Second Life to get an impression of it.

Today, Second Life is a visual chat room
And a FPS, Roleplay Platform (granted, alot of chatting going on), an Educational Tool, Prototyping Tool, a Marketing Tool, an Art Medium
And I have yet to see anything better that offers thesame freedom to work AND play in.

Meanwhile, the sourcecode for SecondLife is available and alternatives have been created using this framework.

But I must agree, the image that has been sustained by the media that Second Life is a scam/fake/dead does have its impact. Like any economy, you need people. Preferable alot. Without people the sales drop and profit drops with it.
Second Life users come and go and the influx has become smaller. Hardly any advertises exist for Second Life and the smaller businesses have had to quit because sales no longer sustain the costs of rent/fees.
Only the most prominent businesses are able to keep afloat.

The real reason lies with the company Linden Lab. It seems it sees itself as purely a facilitator and doesn't feel it needs to advertise its virtual platform. And granted, if it was a platform which you would NEED, but its not. There are cheaper alternatives, established alternatives.
None of which offer what Second Life offers

You have a digital platform on which people initiate a vast array of activities. To initiate your own activity to the fullest extend possible, it is advised to purchase an allotment of this digital platform to utilize as you wish.

Comparison:
The internet is a digital platform on which people initiate many activities.
Through websites people engage in virtual sex, purchase of products, games in many shapes and form and purely for informational purposes. Should you ever want to initiate any of these activities for yourself instead of just consuming, it is advised to purchase web-space for yourself. Although the hard-drive on which your web-space resides is quite real, your website is virtual. Depending on your activities, many aspects of it will be regarded as virtual.

Back to Second Life:
There are consumers there with demands, most demands revolve around their avatar, their representation within the social environment of a virtual platform.
If you are able to design clothes and/or accessories that are of interest, you can sell it for a competitive price. If you sell enough, you can run a profit while also renting land. Just like if you can rent a web-server and make a profit from advertisements.

However, thanks to badly informed media reports, virtual is now compared to fake. And even though the story describes about ACTUAL wealth being generated, instead of accepting it as proof virtual does not mean fake, the story is instead ridiculed and claims about scams and fraud are made.

I own no land in Second Life but I have made scripts that aid product seller in offering products to their customers, and in exchange receive a percentage of the income. My expenses are only the time I've spend programming the scripts, which ended a while ago. I've started making a profit years ago.

TL;DR
Virtual Land = Webspace
Virtual Demands = Real Demands
Virtual Profit = Real Profit
270 virtual dollars = 1 real dollar

...in which lots of people hiding behind pseudonyms insult each other...
Still not a bad thing.
...if their names were actually attached and the comments could follow them home.
That is a bad thing.
You don't want some random internet user coming to your home to make his point without using words.

A series of bad decisions can deplete a company's goodwill reservoir exponentially.
How many PR mistakes does Google need to reach terminal velocity?

I heard about this interweb thing, bunch of nerds sending text to each other from universities. Why are they wasting all this money on it? There's absolutely no money in this internet thing. Funny how things change when more people use it.

...recognize illegal sales. Only allow a numeric value to be placed with the product description. No matter what, nobody can claim copyrighted material has been transferred.

...to boycott it to a sufficient degree. Unless Google pulls a facebook on paypal.

Does Zeljka Zorz make articles about the obvious?
And if so, howmuch canyou earn?

"Sun emits heat"
"Images relay information"
"Computers consume energy"
"New agencies accept quantity of quality"