For capitalists, whether money was real or virtual actually didn't matter.
What mattered was money.
And the kind of social superiority that came from having more money in their hands than others—that was what mattered most.
Of course, not every capitalist wanted to enter the Virtual World and develop a new market. They simply had no choice but to go.
According to Aurora's mathematical model, as the "New World" gradually stabilized, more and more people would enter it.
The fewer people there were in the real world, the more the market would shrink. With no one buying the goods they produced and so few consumers, these capitalists could only continue operating at a loss until they went bankrupt.
They had to pay their workers' wages. Even if their factories weren't operating, they still had to cover various maintenance and depreciation costs. All of that required money.
Lin Qi had also given them another path—
Go into space and develop new frontiers.
Although the population of the real world would decrease, the real world would not be abandoned, because this was where everything was rooted!
Whether they joined forces to develop alien planets or launched explorations of other planets and star systems in the future, all of it was possible, permitted, and enormously profitable.
Lin Qi personally advertised the "New World," drawing even more attention to the Virtual World and quickly making related discussions even hotter.
That was the peculiarity of the Internet age: traffic became visible to the naked eye!
In the past, the so-called "traffic" for the media meant exposure. If they published an article, the number of people who bought it represented the amount of exposure it received.
Or if they broadcast a news program, its ratings represented its exposure.
This kind of exposure was difficult to calculate.