Real Profiting in SL?

Hey all,

Newbie question: How many SL'er out there are actually making a firstlife net profit of, oh..say $50.00 US or more per week on a regular basis from the shops, etc. that they have built in SL?

If so, what's required in terms of time invested and real money invested to get that amount of profit per week?

I ask this because I'm interested in setting up some of my business ideas in SL, but I'm wondering if it would *really* be worth the effort to do so.

Thanks,
Yirrk

I think some people are making that, or even a lot more.

I don't know how many there are or what percentage of SL it is - but such a figure would be a bit misleading anyway because it wouldn't allow for the fact that not everybody on SL wants to make RL money, and not everybody who does want to goes about it in an effective (or even sensible ) manner.

It also wouldn't allow for the fact that as with any economy where innovation is slowing down, it gets tougher over time to find a niche, so it'll probably be harder for you than it was for anyone who answers Yes to your survey.

But, SL is an excellent place to try out business ideas and a lot of people who have come into it with that attitude have indeed made a good profit so I'd go ahead.

my advice is:
if you come in SL with this idea in mind, you lost already

There is the chance of making plenty of profit here, but, just as in the real world....


Do not invest your money and time, unless you are willing to LOSE IT ALL. You may not get a dime for your work. So do not quit your day job, and plan retirement on it.

Try your plans as an experiment, and then celebrate your sucesss, or lick your wounds and come back at it again.

How much time and money will depend on what your plans are really.

Make things that people want, and especially things people want that no one else is making. That's my advice...

Don't listen to these anti-profit people, buncha hippies.. Come in here and make all the money you can. Be greedy and profit. Look out for the leftists who shun profit and rather you pour your money into SL, produce something, and give it away for their enjoyment at $0.00.

If Anshe can make US$150,000/yr being a Land Baron, you can find your niche and profit.

I am posting under my alt to protect my business.

I own a well know business in SL under my main account. I can tell you there is profit to be made. I cash out anywhere from $350-700 per week. My best week ever was $1800 in december following my best product release yet. My average is probably around $400.

I spend nearly 40 hours in SL a week, about half that is pleasure though. THis is why I have two accounts, sometmes I have to take some time every day to just enjoy SL and keep the imagination fresh.

I have two SL businesses, no one knows we are at all linked. One is well known the other one is still growing to its potential. They compete with each other infact.

Posting under my Desmond account because, well, that's me

I don't have any other businesses than what I say, and what I have is pretty transparent.


Yeah, you can make money in SL, a lot more than 50 USD/wk.

But for me, it's a passionate hobby, not a job. I've yet to cash out, ever. If I did, I'd be making California full time minimum wage, roughly, for my efforts so far.

Worth it?

Just for the money, not at all.

you misinderstood me, what i mean is to first enjoy the game rather than seeing your first premium account as an investment in your pfuture success, you may success or may not, its not that easy to make a living in SL and most peoples that do didn't start with htis idea in mind.
You will loose a lot if its your only motivation

I generally spend 10 to 20 hours a week and can cash out 50 dollars. My best week was 200 dollars. Not much for the amount of time for it. Mostly for the pure joy of doing it and helping out new people. This business I've been doing is only 6 months old and bigger plans ahead. I would suggest to get to know SL first and grow into it (business) slowly and gradually so to make those first mistakes as small as possible.
One of the mistakes I made was putting up a lot of badly designed photographs for my boxes. Just didn't look as good as they should've. I changed those and had better results.
I only spent 20 dollars to get started back in September. I took my daughter to Great America with money earned from SL. That made me happy, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to afford it.

Listen to Kyrah, KDC is one of the more successful specialty brands in SL. But I doubt Kyrah started by thinking about how much money he could make. Instead, I'm guessing Kyrah started making KDC stuff because it was fun first.

Play, meet people, try things, learn to build, texture, animate, and/or script. Make what seems interesting and fun for you. That's the best chance you have of building an empire in SL, do what is fun first.

Anyway, can you make $50 a week? Of course, it's possible to make 20 times that per week. I'm betting that there are some content creators make even more. But it is unusual. And it takes a lot of work to build up a successful business. It takes some creativity, a little sense for marketing, and time. At first you are unlikely to make much. I doubt you will make minimum wage for some time. But the great thing about SL is if you design something really nice, it's possible for you to sell hundreds of copies of it over time.

According to Business Week Online (link on main page of secondlife.com), over 3,100 earn a net profit of $20,000 annual revenues.

X

Hi Yirrkala

Yes it is more than possible - I personally know of those whose only income is their SL income but as others have said you have to go into it with the expectaion that it may fail - a bit like any enterprise I suppose.

For example I have been selling prefabs and garden furniture and assorted related items for about 2 months. If I had been doing it for the money then I would have failed because I spend about 3 times what I make on paying for the rentals lol. So basically at the moment I am paying mall owners for the privilidge of giving my stuff away!

However I am doing it beacuse I enjoy doing it - I have been in SL for over two years and only recently have I started marketting my stuff. I do hope that things will pick up and I start to make money to at least cover my SL expenses - but I am not relying on that.

I would also say that - to me at least - having a "niche" product is not that good a deal in SL. If you make them well - then clothing seems to be the best item to sell. People buy so much clothing and never have enough - always buying more. With my prefabs, I have a very limited audiance. People dont keep buying houses like they do clothes for example so while there may be more profit per item - you will generally sell less.

Anyway - short answer is - yes you can - but be prepared to fail and dont forget to take the time to enjoy for world of SL. Money making here is NOT an "easy option" generally

-
Timmins

I assume that is 3,100 people in total earn $20,000/yr. Because I doubt that 3,100 each earn $20,000/yr. That would amount to $62/million per year. And there is no way in the world that $62/million dollars is being pumped into SL from the general public to feed those income levels. Nevermind the fact that LL is at break even or in the red and struggling to get off its $11/million dollar welfare check.

I'm sure she did - but business in general in SL has moved on since then. Many of the people who started off by "building for fun" have gained experience and gone full-time and are now building excellent quality items and making money, which is fantastic. But if a newcomer wants to succeed in the same way, they have to make a name for themselves in the market where those things already exist, and that might well require more work to start with than would be "fun" for many newcomers - unless you want to limit the market to the people with exceptional initial talent who can produce high quality work with a "fun" level of effort right away.

It's already the case that if there are certain things which, if you build them for fun, you will know you will only ever get fun out of them because the commercial market has a strong market leader. If you're happy to build purely for fun then that doesn't matter, and you might even make some money from variance, but if you have actually have the goal of making money eventually it's probably a bad strategy to build them (unless you're doing it as a learning exercise of course).

Indeed at current exchange rates there is only US$2m in the entire SL economy. (From the economic statistics page L$738,808,797, divide by 298 = 2479224). So for a total of US$62 million a year, 5 people would have to be cashing out the entire SL economy every month. Um...

It also of course means that if you think about folks like Anshe things get interesting! Anshe owns at least 100 sims so her tier as it least US$195 * 100 = US$19500, plus she's quoted as making US$20000 a year which is $1666 a month, so even without taxes or her company overheads that's US$21166, or in other words 1% of the SL economy's resources for a single person. To compare to the real world, the US money supply was 9311 billion dollars a few years back (probably more now) so someone with 1% of it would have had 93 billion dollars. That is more than the current worth of Donald Trump and Bill Gates combined!

That 20000 is the AVG of 3100 peeps. It's inflated by the bigger guys. I suspect the median is pretty low compaired to the AVG.

I think this is true. I only started a 'business' about 1 1\2 years into SecondLife. As for the number, I can say yes it's about 50US$ per week, but that's all i'm saying.

One other side note. Is that whenever somebody cashes in their Linden Dollars, somebody with US Dollars has to be buying them. Otherwise the price falls until buyers show up to the table. Right now, there is only about L$1/million - L$1.5/million linden dollar Buyers between L$300 - L$330. And that only amounts to $4000-$5000/dollars. Anybody trying to cash out more than that will crush the valuation of the L$. Which actually works in my argument on why the L$ will be going lower soon.

There is something like L$10/million Linden Dollars forsale between L$300 - L$290. Which means that SL needs to see an inflow of around US$35,000 just to move up the L$ valuation 10/basis points. But you only need somebody cashing out around US$4,000 to see the L$ drop 30/basis points. Translation, there is a brick wall to the L$ moving higher and a floor made of pixie sticks holding up this bubble.


I laugh at my enemies who proclaim the L$ is going higher... They are missing the big picture... This baby is a 1929 Crash waiting to happen. L$738/million lindens in circulation and only a dusting of buyers with US$ to hold up this currency's valuation.. PuhLez....

If that's the kind of statistic Business Week give I'm left wondering if LL should endorse them.

That's like saying that on the day Philip Linden got the US$11m venture capital, 100,000 residents made an average of US$110 each.

Hmm.... simply looking at the money supply doesn't tell you the total revenue of how much people make, you need to look at the number of turns the money supply make, each month. It's the transactions that generate values in an economy, not people hording.

Unfortunately that number is not available, the number of transactions and their range yes, but the total $L changed hand per month is not. I did some estimation a while back and the number of turns per month was about 3.7. (It would be really nice if LL would publish the actual transaction in $L volume)

That represents the US$2 mil(or ~700mil$L) in money supply had generated ~ US$8 millions transactions in the month of June alone. and nearly USD100 millions in a year. In addition to that many landbarons are getting paid directly. So yes it is more than possible for those number published to be real.

Really, looking only at the money supply tells us very little about the economy and how much people are earning. I'll start worrying if the monthly money supply turns falls below 2.
(There are a whole lot more factors to economy than most of us realize.)

I agree.. For anybody to put a dollar figure on the SL Economy, they need to determine Second Life's GDP. And the only way to figure out that number is to add up all the L$ dollar transactions per month. Right now, LL only's list the number of transactions with a ball park range of the dollar amount per transaction. Like I mentioned in another post, the only hard number we have is the L$1 transactions which are just under L$1/million per month. But a GDP number would give us the economic size of SL in real dollar terms.
Looking at the LindenX means nothing when it comes to the economic health of the economy itself. LindenX is really a symptom of the economy.

I think you missed my point, Yumi (And I don't think we are really disagreeing either).

I'm saying that if your business isn't fun to you in SL, if you don't enjoy the things you are making, I doubt you will ever be a huge success. For most people it takes many months of work before they really see a decent return on their time invested (if ever). Some of that work won't be fun, but if you don't really enjoy making the things you create, it's doubtful you will be able to slog through the not-so-fun times. And it's doubtful you will make something good enough to become a hit.

Find what you love to do in SL and then do it as well as you can, and then if you are lucky, you might make decent money doing it.

profit can be made
it may or may not be worth it

profit goal isnt everything tho.

fun is most important
focus on fun and dont worry about profit

thats teh best way

There may currently be only 10 million between 290 and 300 which is UNSOLD on the Lindex, but 10-15 million is sold per day which means 300-450 million lindens are sold each and every month. In other words, roughly half the total Lindens in circulation are bought and sold monthly.

Incidently, before the drop from 300 to 330 there was usually 12-14 million between 290 and 300 so I'd say the Lindex is in much better shape than it was.

I'd say what can easily be done is support a tier. I think most people who can have a bit of skills and can make a few unique things have the potential to support their gameplay. Beyond that, I don't know. I know I only make about $20-30 a month at best, so I'm not one to talk