Americans will spend ^[1] $1.2 billion on virtual goods in 2011. Facebook ^[2] has made ^[3] $470 million off these sales already. But those Farmville pigs and their kin brand-free. A German start-up, Iconicfuture, hopes to change that and is working to launch a marketplace where a licensee and developers can get together.

Just imagine what the addition of Taylor Swift Farmville goods might mean to that burgeoning sector. “We saw an opportunity to expand in this area,” says Iconicfuture’s CEO Ze’ev Rozov.

In many ways, it’s the next logical step to the virtual goods business. Games like Farmville are free to play, but its creators and Facebook get rich by selling people the individual goods to accessorize their avatar. Iconicfuture’s marketplace would allow licensees and developers to search for each other and create a database of existing goods that a developer might bring to a new game. The two parties would then split the revenues.

With the way branding can pay off in such a big way, why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

Read more at Venture Beat ^[4].