Always wondered how much virtual money generated during a day and what is estimation for real $$. What percent of that $200k is real money?
Of course, there's no (officially sanctioned) way to convert PLEX back into USD, so such comparisons speak more to CCP's profits than anything else.
"Regular price is $200 but if you have 15 PLEX..."
[1] http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/eve-vegas-2013...
The real money values always thrown around in every article about a big battle in EVE are also rather misleading as most of the ships were not paid for with real money in my estimation. The big alliances have huge incomes from ingame sources from which they finance the big expensive ships like Titans and the ship replacement programs for the smaller ships for their members.
You also can't convert the EVE ingame money (ISK) into real money, or at least not in any CCP-sanctioned way.
As for the conversion, whether it comes from real money or not is debatable, but given that PLEX is pretty much the measure for real world vs ISK value, a conversion is easily made - just like for example Bitcoin is often converted to USD in articles.