Who's cashing out 1.7 Million USD ?

Woah I just read this article about some folks that are cashing out in excess of 1M USD from their SL businesses ...

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2009/03/million.html

"everal people/accounts are cashing out US$ amounts in excess of $1M per year (with the highest amount estimated at $1.7M), based on annualizing one quarter of data. Most of the top 10 are in the real estate business, but the group also includes a company that does events and one that designs virtual goods including shoes."

Well it would certainly not be me as I'm too lazy. I doubt anyone would openly admit to making such sums but did anyone think so many people were doing that well from SL businesses? I realize it is just a small handful but I'm surprised at the numbers nonetheless.

I think that is a collective number and Not an individual. Or is it? 1.7 M? gees

Hmm .. I'm not sure .. I kinda read it as there are some individuals cashing out over 1M a year (based on annualizing one quarter of data).

"Robin Harper offered some extraordinary financial numbers for Second Life's internal economy: based on a quarterly annualization the company conducted, they discovered that several Resident business owners were cashing out Linden Dollars in excess of a million US dollars a year, with the top earner grossing an estimated $1.7 million. "

I'm in the wrong line of work. >.<

Maybe we could start a business that involves reading and posting to the SL forums. We'd all be rich

Long time residents have a pretty good idea who those people are, but you aren't going to find confirmed names anyplace and those folks certainly aren't going to be advertising their income - not only would it be tacky but it also invites a flood of competitors to emulate their business model.

No one's going to pay to read our drivel.

/me nods. I have an idea of who they are as well but never really thought they made THAT much. Personally I try not to brag too much about the 100L I'm lucky to make a week lol.

Presumably it is one or two of the moby landlords, renting out a considerable portion of the land in Second Life. I am surprised to hear that any individual is doing 1,000,000$US that way, though. I would have guessed about a quarter of that, and only one person doing it, and maybe not lately.

Actually I'm gonna change the wording of this post a bit as I thought it would make for interesting discussion by throwing in a question since it is RA after all, but don't really want to start speculation on people's SL business incomes.

I'm not making anywhere near that much... not even close! But yeah, it's possible.

I believe the numbers.

That's just what we'd expect somebody making that much to say...

Well, I'm not one to brag about my earnings...

(because they're nowhere near 1.7M. Wowza!)

49 regions

21 are homesteads making roughly 5 USD/mo over tier,

tier on those 21 are going up from 95/mo to 125/mo shortly,

one full region is a gateway I'm paying tier on, not renting out.

Million bucks a year? Hardly. It's about 1/20th of that once tier is paid. And then I report my income to the US government, so it's even less.


Though if I ever get pushed to the wall, I've sometimes contemplated a single line ad in land forums: "Desmond Shang backed regions, no covenant whatsoever, enquire for details"

I have little doubt as to what that could do. Just not something I'm interested in doing with my life, really, so it's not on the table. I don't want to be 100% dependent on Linden Research.

Well, I suppose it's time for me to be cynical.

First of all.. that whole "a quarter extrapolated to a year" business. That means that some businesses cashed out $250,000 in 3 months. Nobody's actually made a million, yet.

Second. Note that it's money cashed out. Not money earned. The money could have been sitting around, as L$, for much longer.

Why would businesses, especially land businesses, be suddenly cashing out a large amount of money?

Possibly because they are winding up, or having to reposition themselves.

Like, y'know... for OpenSpaces.

Ok we all know who's cashing out 1.7 million a year. It's the escorts. They are very well paid and are the hardest working people in SL

Indeed. You might say they are no strangers to having it hard.

That's a good question, is it before or after tier is paid? Very, very significant difference.

Though if you are selling shoes or entertaining, tier isn't going to be that big of a deal. Perhaps they have to pay salaries to people, though.

As for the land biz, there has been a lot of repositioning lately by many. Though in my experience any sort of repositioning costs a fortune; it's not anything that allows anyone to cash out in great amounts.

If they are winding up, then... yeah, maybe. Though if you had a million dollars in reserves, why not wait until fall and see if the market recovers? Few people build a million dollar business only to cut and run. Hard to say, really.

I submitted a comment on Robin's blog, but I wonder if she is merely counting LindeX sales or actual processed credit. Because she used the term "gross" and not "net" I believe it's possible she's just looking at the sell orders, and not taking into account the tier payments made out of USD.

If you had a million dollars USD worth of lindens sitting in your SL account, and LL terminated your account or closed its doors tomorrow, you'd be SOL, right? Kind of a scary thought... I wouldn't have enough confidence to keep large sums of money invested in lindens, I'd be cashing out as much as possible and reinvesting into a much more secure real world account that has laws in place to protect your assets.

Even processed credits might not mean much since some people may prefer to have costs fall through to paypal instead of leaving useless cash in LL's hands.

Anyway, 1.7 million isn't so much. If you had 500 sims your tier fees would be 1.7 million a year. If you made $300 a month profit per sim (possible, but not so likely) you'd be making that much profit.

I think there's a few people out there with a thousand or so sims, right? Apart from Anshe I couldn't really name any to be honest, but I'm sure they exist.

This works at any level though. I have X in SL and I make 0.2*X every month. So is it better to cash everything out of SL or keep making that 0.2X for as long as I can? If I had a million stuck in SL but was printing 100-200k a month I might not want to cash out.

shiny Things! (prolly not, but it felt funny)

For those who pay their tier out of USD credit, the difference between the gross and the processed credit could be vast. For me, I pay my tier out of USD credit. The less that Linden Lab touches my rl accounts, the better. Too many horror stories of double billing, etc. so I'd like to keep that to a minimum.

Well - then let them pay for the privilege of *not* having to.