I have heard it said  – there’s a whole economy based on Virtual Gifting, according to some like Nick O’Neil, see Will Virtual Gifts Become a Billion Dollar Business?

“…Yesterday Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners released an analysis done by the company which suggested that Facebook could generate up to $43 million this year alone from virtual goods. How does Facebook generate so much money from their virtual goods?”

I’ve met Nick a few times, btw, most recently at the Social Ad Summit he put together last fall, here in NYC.

While I’ve been thinking of Virtual Goods more for Second Life, or in Social Networks like Facebook – Virtual Goods can now exist outside of Social Networks (refer to Giftd: The Portable Virtual Gift Store).

But, while reading about virtual goods, I wasn’t thinking that I’d be interested until I realized that I could create my own virtual versions of my art work, and gift it to whom I wanted (at least, on Facebook, right now) and embed a link in the application back to the blog post that talks about the painting (where there is a post to link to, that is – not all works did I write all that much about – so maybe it’s better to point to a generic page for such cases.

Anyway, to make a long story less long, here’s the link to my application – Send Marshall Sponder’s Paintings and if your on Facebook you can download my application and send my paintings to your friends – share the application liberally and, it’s free.

I noticed that, were my application became popular – it might well generate a lot of traffic to my site – and that I’m able to track the traffic within Facebook and with Google Analytics, is getting met to think there might be something in Virtual Gifting, more than I actually thought, up till now.

Since most of my virtual paintings are directed to pages on my art blog, artnewyorkcity.com, that’s where I checked (see below):

There’s not enough visits to tell much, yet – but I’m wondering if virtual gifting really could generate more than good will, the traffic that comes with it, as the applications are viral.