A lot of the research looks at the online economies of virtual worlds. Virtual worlds are time consumers often filled with many repetitive tasks and we have long determined that our average attention span has been dropping over the years. Some enterprising folks have come up with an interesting way to alleviate some of that boredom. Selling WoW Gold. That is right, they pay some one to do boring repetitive tasks or have a bot do them, then they sell the gold from the tasks for real money. That sounds like a total win for everyone involved. So if your time is worth money, look into it and start doing more interesting stuff.