As proven by the incredible growth of the online game Second Life, virtual goods in media can mean big money.
Playspan of Santa Clara, CA received $6.5 Million in funding this September. Playspan's goal is to provide buying, trading, and selling of virtual goods for game developers and users. Playspan has already signed wth a few online game producers including: K2 Network & Urbaniacs.
All of the commerce will be handled in game through API's available to developers.

After entering and online T-Shirt contest in 2000, Jacob Dehart & Jake Nickell got the idea to create an online site that allowed people to submit their own designs for T-shirts. The young college-dropouts pooled $1,000 to start a community where aspiring artists regardless of age or experience can submit their own designs for T-shirts.
After an artist submits their design it is then posted for the whole Threadless community. Visitors to the site rate the designs that have been posted and after 7 days the designs with the most votes are made into T-shirts. Artists that have their designs printed are paid for their works, and Threadless begins selling the shirts. Almost every shirt design produced by Threadless has sold out and many have been so popular that they have been reprinted by request. Threadless.com has almost quadrupled growth each year and now recieves thousands of submissions weekly.

Just as Match.com is to people matchmaking, hubbuzz.com is to apartment finding. Hubbuzz of Centennial, CO is still in beta but looks to be a promising new way to find the apartment that you have always wanted.  You define what you are looking for: Beachfront, Downtown, Kid Friendly. After specifying the criteria for the location of the apartment you can then view neighborhood photos.
The service is free for apartment searching and is currently only available for: Los Angeles, Denver, San Diego, Colorado Springs, Northern Colorado, and Dallas-Ft. Worth, but promises to expand to other cities.