What Are The Biggest Industries in SL?

What Are The Biggest Industries in SL?

Conglom-O - "We Own You"

of corse

(wonders if anyone can remember what that was from)
- Sam

I assume you mean in terms of overall profit... so with that assumption:

(not in order)
Clothing
Weapons
Sex related
Entertainment

Those are the biggies.

Slightly below that is (again not in order)
Vehicle sales
non-sex related animations
homes & furnishings.

With land sales / real estate shifting between the two groups as the wind blows.

And before anyone challenges me as to where I got this list, my answer is "I ain't telling", so assume I pulled them straight out of thin air if you like.


NOTE: I include casino operations as part of "entertainment".
-AP

Edited to clarify my definition of entertainment

Don't forget to vote...

What I'm looking for is what Industries in SL command the economy...What are SL's Commanding Heights?

Sex related, then.

-AP

Land Baron (Real Estate Broker)
Most US$ turnover, but the cash doesnt stay in game for very long, so this generally doesnt have a huge influence outside of sinking the L$ a bit. (Of course people buying L$ for the purpose of barony raises it back up a bit too)

Retail (Clothing, Textures, etc)
Clothing is a huge industry, however the cash is very centralised in a few big-name sellers.

Construction (Housing Builder)
Not too huge an influence, a few good builders do make a high turnover, but not in sufficient numbers to have a big effect.

Entertainment (Movies, Night Clubs, etc)
Mostly these places try win it back on dwell and dwelloper incentives - so this catagory is generally outside of the normal revenue stream.

Gambling (Casinos, Lottery, SportsBooks)
Second largest revenue stream in SL to Land Barony. Huge turnovers usually involving rigged machines.

Programming (Selling Your Coding Skills)
Not very big in number of 'sales', individual pricing remains the highest of any industry in SL however.

-Adam

As a general umbrella, sex and clothes and gambling. Sometimes together.

If you want to make money fast, open up a casino, or make some clothes, or make a teledildonics ejaculation station or whatever.

Mad phat lewt.

LF

Retail does much better than gaming - clothing followed by sex-related. Also, the places with riggged machines do not make as much money over the long run. I dont think you actually know what you are talking about here. Nice try though.

-AP

As another thought...

If anyone is actively making ridiculous amounts of money building for folks (compared to time and effort invested), let me know. I've been trying to find a "fair" balance between my time spent on builds and value of the house built for over a year now. Can't seem to find the right balance.

LF

I've used a wide variety of gambling machines in SL, and have yet to find anything rigged. In fact, there are three or four that I can almost guarantee to make a small profit on, when played with the right strategy - useful when I run out of image upload money late at night! Being able to pop over to (establishment name withheld) and spend 5-10 minutes playing (game name withheld) and come away with at least L$20 more than I started with really hits the spot!

Oh, without question they are out there .. but in general the places that have 'em dont stay around for long. The bottom line is you don't get repeat business if your machines dont have enough winners... and like most industries, gaming requires repeat business in order to keep the doors open.

-AP

Also I didnt really think about contract programmers ... I suppose there is potental to make some decent L$ doing it if one is good enough. I prefer not to whore myself out like that though, which is prolly why it didn't occur to me

IMHO, I chose Clothing and Textures. I personally spend all my money on Clothing and uploading textures.

Sex toys and such would be part of the retail business and sexual favors would be entertainment.

From my own personal experience, clubs are a net loss. I lose about $500 a day on average.... but since I'm into this for my own personal enjoyment & challenge, I just consider it the cost of playing the game. My goal is to eventually tune things to the point of breaking even for sustainability, however.

Dwell pays peanuts, and at least where I fall in the hierarchy of clubs, developer incentive barely covers my land tier.

Maybe clubs at the top-most tier (Top 3 on fav places) make money off their dwell - but otherwise, I don't understand why people go into the club buisness with sole goal of making a profit - unless the club is intended to be a lost-leader for profits elsewhere.

I've experimented with mixing in a little bit of retail, and a small casino. The club definately increases the paltry retail sales (most of which are friends, who I've allowed to put their vendors up for free), but my casino always lost money horribly when I ran it. At one point, I just treated it in my mind like a more complicated free-money machine.

Recently, I outsourced 75% of my casino - since then, its helped offset the $500/day dent I take, but its too soon to tell how much.

Also, I agree completely with Taggy's statement about honest/dishonest games. I'm sure you can probably make a short-term killing of rigged games... but in the long run, people wont come back. (Not to mention the gigantic Karma hit). The majority of the activity I get in my casino seem to be all regular customers... I doubt I could count on them coming back if they felt they were getting ripped off.

There's no reason why making a profit and having an honest casino needs to be mutually exclusive.

Travis

Retail is clearly the biggest. Real estate only *appears* big because land is visible while what happens inside one vendor is not.