Boom times? Or Bust? What's your experience?

LL is crowing about great press and financial data in their recent Blog entry.

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/press/blog/2010/01/31/second-life-receives-virtual-goods-propers-in-recent-news

Does this correlate to your own experience as a Content Creator and Merchant in SL, or to the experience of content creators or other SL business owners that you personally know?

My own businesses, in textures, clothes, furniture and even custom sim building have gone straight downhill since a high point around January 2009. I keep hearing other content creators and SL business owners (like sim owners) bailing out, shutting down, cutting back, or complaining about their own dismal sales. So who is actually "making bank", as the Lindens love to put it? Are any of you (or people you directly know) prospering in this economy? If so, doing what in general? Are any of you (or people you directly know), like me, doing far worse, and wondering where all these wonderful sales figures are coming from?

Seriously interested in serious replies, here. What is working for you, and/or what tanked recently?

My business matches yours. It went slowly down during last year. I understand that it was quite general across the grid. I posted last June that I'mm allowing the business to fade naturally until it's no longer worthwhile keeping going, and that process is still continuing.

I believe in the line of work I am in its is a combination of a lot of things. I entered the wedding business because I had a "wedding consultant" that did jack shit. I thought I could do a much better job and would not anyone going through what I had gone through. So our emphasis was service and pricing. We even offered low cost weddings for those that had limited funds to spend.

But in the last year and half, the market has changed considerably as there are more do it yourself choices and some places out there offers free usage of the chapel. It is very hard to compete with that.

Additionally, the "freebie" mentality I believe has transformed to the expectation of "everything" should be free. I cannot tell you how many times I caught actual ceremonies taking place although there is a sign big as day posting our fees.

For us, we just made a painful decision to bail out and let our sim go. It is not feasible for us to continue and those monies that we are paying for monthly tier on our sim to LL is going to apply towards a roundtrip plane ticket to see more of each other irl.

I will always be thankful to SL for meeting Will here, However, our priorities have changed as we transition ourselves from sl to rl.

So lilke I said it is a combination of things.

Sales have been up in my commercial locations, very good month this month. Land rentals are not so promising but I'm looking to make the inworld business less reliant on land rentals and having my fingers in more pies so this just makes the move take on greater urgency.

My SL business earnings have dried up and I don't see any upturn in the future. Mind you I saw it coming over a year ago and took measures to ring-fence my remaining assets so that I have a small parcel of land to use as my personal live music venue and pied-á-terre on the grid.

I've stopped building anything with a view to sales. I now only build stuff to use for my live music performances. My earnings from live music performances barely even cover my expenses so for me they're just rehearsal / practise sessions with a feed out from my studio to the internet.

So long as I don't buy anything in-world I'll manage OK. The business journey is over for me. As for where things go from here, I haven't a clue as my music seems to go down like a lead balloon... so in that sense it's very much like things in the real world!

Building and scripting have sucked, SUCKED, in-world for almost a year now. I don't have a business but if I did and it supplied people who build and/or script, I wouldn't be surprised that it'd been falling off for nearly a year.

In another thread here today, somebody mentioned a post at Ordinal's blog which I perused and found this line from last May:

She's talking about how chat tends to come out in the wrong order. Or get entirely eaten by the sim. Or takes a minute to actually happen.

The issue that has tortured fair Ordinal is SVC-3895. This is the bug that has destroyed building/scripting for me.

She doesn't seem to blame LL entirely for making SL suck so much over the last year but I do. They screwed it up then they ignored the problems for months and months and they're STILL stalling on deploying the fix - Babbage had a fix a month ago.

Linden Lab would be out of business now if they did not have a monopoly.

I made an Anime styled avatar about a month ago that has lead to a huge boost in sales overall in my store. I haven't even released the eyes yet. (^_^)

A little fresh content in a popular market can go a long way. (^_^)y

I always assumed that group chat issues were due to problems in group chat architecture, not the mono issue. Are you sure the two are directly related?

And here's something interesting: I can be in a Skype conversation with someone who is in the same group chat that I am, and he will see chat message reordering and drops that I will not necessarily see. He is 1700 miles further away from San Francisco than I am ... it is as if group chat is not at all streaming, but a set of separate UDP messages that can get reordered by individual queues between the servers and the client. ????
.

Not group chat. Chat chat.

Freshness is what SL needs. There are so few really unique items or ideas anymore. Shop one store after another and except for a few different colors the items for sale could be identical. Same with houses, animations, scripts...........it's pretty near all the same. Anyone who has been in SL for 6 months sees these items (that look the same, work the same, feel the same) over and over again...........they see that they already have that item and won't buy just another duplicate by a different creator.

Good for you Immy............when the going gets tough the tough get going.

I don't make or sell anything, but I do buy things.

I bought far more weapons and clothes (including shoes) in 2009 than 2008.

I didn't buy much of anything else, just interesting cheap junk here and there. Not interesting enough to remember exactly what, though.

I don't imagine you will find anyone publicly admitting to making bank. That spirit of creator cooperation that used to be a hallmark of content creation in SL has been long replaced by cutthroat competition. If I were "making bank" in a down economy, the last thing I'd be doing is being public about it and drawing attention to myself. At the mere mention of money, you'll have 100 new competitors overnight, all looking at your product line, keywords, ad placement, etc. You'll also draw the attention of content thieves.

I suspect you'll find plenty of people to commiserate with on a slowing economy and none that admit to doing extremely well (and by extremely, I mean earning a RL living.)

In the terlet.

I still make about the same. I'm just working a lot harder to do it.

Privately, I discuss income with a lot of content creators and land barons. Income is down across the board, except for a few tiny bright spots, and I certainly won't reveal anyone's confidences in me.

I don't expect, or encourage, anyone to quote exact numbers here. Just a general My sales are fantastic, and I am expanding.", or "My sales are doing better", or "my sales are about the same as last year", or "my sales are about the same as last year, but I'm having to work a lot harder to stay there", or "My sales are down, no matter what I do", or or "My sales are dead, I went out of business."

Probably should have made it an anonymous poll, but I've never bothered to create a poll here.

QFT

I have believed for a long time that LL doctors the numbers they report. Here are mine.



I had to sell off over half my land last month in order to keep the tier payments lower then my SL income.

And the charts for the previous two years looked a lot like this one.

Its hardly ( = not) worth logging in to work here anymore. I still do it just for the thrill of creating something new.

I find myself with a backlog of wonderful new things that I have created, that I just have not gotten around to packaging for selling. All the fun is in the creating, the packaging part is so tedious and boring by comparison, especially when the expected sales are so poor.

To answer the original question. Business is bad. I've got rentals all over the place and I haven't sold a single item. In fact I have only had one sale in the last 4 months. Before that I'd have a few sales a week.

I think this is partly that I'm selling things that I am personally interested in, and not attacking the popular markets. I just cant seem to get interested in building things if its not something that I myself would buy.

I've wanted to post a response something to the effect...

For the most part, SL is becoming a place where people do little other than try to sell things to each other. Lots of sellers, fewer and fewer buyers.

...but that's just the feeling I get trying to find real, live people on the grid. I have no actual metrics, other than a year-and-a-half old bot survey.

This morning I went through my extensive link archive of "best ____ in SL" forum posts, and here's another observation: There are fewer of these kinds of posts than there used to be. Fewer people asking where to buy stuff, and fewer people asking where to hang out and find things to do.

ETA: It's also increasingly like pulling teeth to get people to actually name places in the "where do you hang out" threads. Yes, this is a challenge. There's a new "where do you hang out" thread. Go forth and do the right thing

I tend to agree with ^THIS^ based on my personal experience. I just about have everything and really can't think of anything else to buy.

The Great Depression - Reloaded is having a significant effect on the grid, as it is in RL all over the world. I'm sure LL are goosing the numbers...the same way our governments are goosing the RL economic numbers to keep people feeling comfortable.

I think we all have to stake our hopes on the rollout of viewer 2.0 and a massive marketing to push to revive the virtual economy. Just like in RL, there are a lot of businesses that aren't going to survive a downturn of this magnitude. Some business models will be forever changed.

I'll repeat my call to LL to open land ownership to anyone, regardless of membership status. If they want to goose the economy, that is the single fastest way to do it.

My sales are consistently good and enough to take RL money out of SL regularly. I do almost no advertising now or promotion and offer new creations infrequently. When i was promoting heavily, offering new products and really working hard at it, I was making more, but tbh Im very happy with how things have kinda gone into autopilot. From the peak when I was really working it, my sales are now approx 2/3 of that now. But to me, the fact that my sales just kinda plug along without me now is very gratifying and I consider that to be a success.

That would wreck the estate business. And I don't think the folks that would buy land would replace the kind of tier that estate owners pay. It's too far gone now.

From Oct thru Dec it seemed I had to release lots of new stuff just to keep my income steady (running hard to stay in place). My monthly income is just starting to increase after falling to about half since last winter. Had a 15% increase from Dec to Jan. Many thanks to my customers and I'm feeling hopeful.

I got a great shot in the arm being invited into the Sculpts Only Mall (thanks Jubjub). I have been making new stuff and I've noticed that I have gotten better at sculpting. I got into two other sculpt malls as well and making enough sales at all of them.

My pet theory is that total sales may well be increasing but there are more and more content creators each taking a slice of the pie and the slices are therefore smaller.

As I have said before I shut down all my personal businesses 2 years ago and Textures after dark during hte last year. It was sad to do since we had been in business for nearly 5 years. But the HUGE size of the place required a major land investment that the sales were not coming close to covering. Add in the theft of our textures and thier appearance in freebie boxes and LL telling half the family that they cant do jack on a DMCA from a Canadian. We hung it up.

I AM slowly working on scripts and new builds to ressurect After Dark Prefab Houses. But I don't expect to ever make a profit on it. It's just something I have always liked doing.

In 3 years we have gone from owning an island to half a mainland sim to 1/4 a mainland sim to a 4096. At 4096 I can sustain the cost for a very long time without breaking my RL budget. SL is now effectively visit family and friends and just have fun building whatever takes my fancy.