make a living

If you go to the economic's page, then on the upper right you will see a "raw data" field. Click on that link and go to the one marked "in world business profits", you will find addtionial information.
There it shows:
160 - $1000-$2000
92 - $2000-$5000
41 - $5000 and above

In addition, it shows the changes in those numbers for the last several months.

Just thought others might find it interesting.

The question is what they consider profit.

For example, they mention that they don't include land trading - presumably that's deliberate, since they want to show the rewards for creating content. But the problem is that land rentals are often done just by paying another avatar, or a rento, in L$ - and those presumably do show up in those stats. If they don't (ie, they're only allowing for Buy sales) then they're not accounting for networked vendors either.

As I understood it, the economic stats is calculated based on any time an object is paid, any payments fo upload fees, or any time a "pay" transaction is done betwen two parties. So that would include person to person reimbursements for land rent, land purchases, and all that. It absolutely DOES NOT take into account what your cost of content creation was. How can it possible calculate how many hours a dress designer spent outside of SL making the textures for their new dress? It also has no way to balance "sales" versus "mall rental" versus "What I blew last night buying sexy pose balls and sex toys to play with my girlfriend". So it shows all sales as 100% profit, which is a lie.

A realistic example:

Bob spends 10 hours designing textures for his new car (shows zero cost or profit)
Bob spends 20 hours writing scripts for his new car (shows zero cost or profit)
Bob uploads ten textures for use on his car (Shows a debit of L$100)
Bob spends 10 hours building the prims for his new car and testing it (shows zero cost or profit)
Bob rents mall space for the next month (Shows a debit of L$200)
Bob sells ten cars at L$1000 each. (Shows a credit of L$10,000)

So it shows Bob made a 'Profit' of L$ 9,700? (roughly $35 USD)

But wait... Let's say Bob's time and effort is AT LEAST worth as much as the unskilled worker at McDonalds who flips hamburgers in the back. $5.00 an hour, for a nice round number. 40 hours work at $5 an hour is $200. And no one paid him for that time.

So Bob has, so far, actually LOST $165 USD by spending 40 hours designing and selling a car that he's managed to sell ten copies of this month, as opposed to spending that time working a minimum-wage job.

Or to put it a different way, if he stops there, he only got paid 87 cents an hour for his week-long effort in designing, building and marketing that car. And that assumes he can actually sell that many, at that price, every month. Without advertising, that is unlikely.

Bob has to sell a hell of a lot of cars to get back what it cost him in time and effort to create that product for sale.

If he sells ten more cars next month, he still has the mall rental fee as overhead, so he makes L$9,800 that month (Still roughly $35 USD). He would have to keep up that sales rate for 6 months before he was actualy earning more than he would have by spending that week of his life flipping hamburgers.

Now, if he creates a new car every week... eventually he'll have lots of models to choose from, and his sales might increase each month. He doesn't have to stick with just cars, either.

Those big SL merchants who offer hundreds of items for sale didn't just appear overnight. It took lots of time, effort and hard work to produce their complete product line.

Ceera, I agree with you... I think people are unable to grasp the "real" and "not real" when it comes to second life and certain things (ie... time, energy and lindens).

You can make extra spending cash from playing a SL, which is a game. It is more money than playing other games (ie... WOW, Puzzle Pirates), and they require the same amount of effort.

If I were to put all the effort into building me a RL business, I would be a millionaire. What I got more from SL was the knowledge and confidence to work a RL business. If I take that into account with my Dollar earnings from SL, I made a whole lot more. Knowledge and Confidence are priceless...

So I tell people to play the game, have fun, learn to run a business, and take what you have gained to the RL and make a million.

I don't think that quite works, though. Most of the successful businesses I see in SL are the ones that are best aligned with the "micropayments" model in SL - that is, make a large number of products, and sell them cheap. It makes sense: it's very hard to convince someone to give you a million dollars, but relatively easy to convince someone to give you a dollar, and then do that a million times.

The problem is, in RL the micropayments model doesn't work anywhere near as well because of manufacturing costs. You can't make a really good product and then sell a hundred cheap copies anymore, because every one of those copies has a manufacturing cost, and if you want to keep that cost low enough to be able to sell cheap, the restrictions start making it harder to make your product really good.

I am not refering to the business model... but the confidence to say that you can find the model that works for you...

People ought not sell themselves short, and settle for burger flipping at Mickey-D's

Owning a RL business is fun, takes knowledge and confidence, and will make you a million much faster than SL will

Ah, that's where it was, I was wondering why the cut-off was so low, we know there are at least a few people making serious money in SL.

Yeah, what Ceera said. Even making the $1000 range a month is literally working for pennies when you take into account the amount of labor for that money. That was her point, if you worked a minimum wage job you will very probably make more per hour than in SL, except for a tiny minority. Now, if this is extra money for you that you would not have had anyway, and you enjoy it, great. If it's the equivalent of a part-time job that is more fun than flipping burgers, great. But LL loves to push itself as some sort of "business platform" and trot out anomalies like Anshe Chung. Which is, frankly, bullshit. If you have the design skills or programming skills that can turn you a good profit in SL, it is highly likely that you could make much more in RL with those same skills.

As one of the 563 who make $200 or more per month (more or less), I kinda gotta half agree, half disagree.

Ceera's instance is certainly valid, but the thing to keep in mind is that once the work is done, it's all free money. No overhead past the first investment, as long as you work rent and fees into your budget.

This is money you get for sitting on your butt. You don't even have to log in!
I spend January every year away from the computer, other than checking emails once a day and reading the news and webcomics, as I am away from home and in a third world country. When I get home, there's a nice little chunk of change waiting for me.

At this point, I have half a sim, the $9.95 AND unlimited DSL fees all paid off by what I make in SL, and that suits me just fine.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is: Once you've done the initial work, SL CAN provide a VERY nice little supplement to your income.

A grand a month is nothing to sneeze at.

What Mickey says is true enough. After you put in a LOT of work designing a large product line, you can sit back and watch the money roll in. But that is also like Real Life, and getting royalties on a licensed item. It's not a LOT of money per item, but over time it can add up.

The point I am trying to make, however, is that we have a lot of new people showing up who have read PR Bull**** and news stories about how 'easy' it is to make money in SL, and they are coming here with stars in their eyes, expecting to sit in a magic chair and do nothing and become a millionare. And THAT simply is not going to happen. Anyone who makes a successful living in SL has put a lot of work into getting where they are today.

It's like an average runaway teenager showing up in Hollywood, and asking people on the street "How do I become a Movie Star and get rich?".

Precisely. If you have those skills you can labour away in SL and after spending a few months of effort to build up your product line you can maybe, if you do very well, earn a couple of thousand a month before SL expenses.

Or you can contract yourself out in RL and earn that in a week, every week, if your skills are in demand.

An SL business can be a nice hobby or source of extra spare change, but unless you happen to have the rare combination of sellable SL skills but no sellable RL skills you're always going to be making a lot more in RL than SL for the same time and effort.

Anshe Chung is often cited as an exception, but given her evident personal and business skills who's to say she might not have made a lot more trading real life real estate? It's said she has US$1 million in SL assets, but that's not all that much for a property portfolio, a couple of decent RL properties would cover that and she wouldn't need to be hiring a bevy of Chinese workers as staff either. She'd also have the security of real assets that aren't subject to LL's whim or the continuance of SL - try and borrow money from a RL bank on the security of SL assets!

Boys & Girls,

If you haven't figured out that Anshe Chung is a marketing shill of LL you need to work on your "don't believe everything you read" skills. Conveniently placed in a foreign country it makes a wonderful tool for LL to expound upon to every willing magazine to write about. Take it with a grain of salt.

Yes you can make a living, I do. Not much of one but it beats a cubicle by a long shot.

Enjoy your continuing fantasy...

Ah, yes, you can make a living selling lemonade if you wish. If..you..wish, that is. What kind of standard of living are we talking here? Let me give you an idea, if you have minimal skills:
If you can...
...make your avatar dance crazily...

You'll be living in a cardboard box the span of your life, my friend.

But, tis the standard of living you go by. They're not that bad. But I digress.

~~Carina

The counter-argument is that RL is a lot more risky. I have a friend who told me he earned US$1000 in-world last month (and was really surprised when I told him the % that put him in) and he was able to do that while still having a regular day job supporting him. If you want to contract yourself out in RL, you have to give up your day job first, and then if the contracting doesn't work out, you have to get another.. which might take some time during which you have no income..

And as for starting an RL business, I'm sure you've heard the stat that 90% of RL businesses fail. I don't think 90% of SL businesses fail. I know that the profitable percentages are low but I get the impression that's over all residents, including the ones who decide they don't want to try to start businesses, or those who have closed their business down and left, etc.

(Oh, and of course Anshe Chung is a real person! She was in SL for a while before the Lindens even supported the sale of L$ for real money. v1.4, I think.)

I assume the "90% of real life businesses fail" is a measure of the proportion that either do not make a profit, or make such a low profit that the owners decide they would be better off doing something else.

The equivalent measure in SL would be what proportion of SL businesses either fail to make a profit or make such a low one that the avies decide to do something else.

One advantage of SL businesses is that its practical to run them as micro-businesses - once you have your product and vendors set up then even if you only net $10 per month from sales minus vendor rental then you may as well keep running it because hardly any work is required to maintain the business and there are no production costs, delays, hassles etc. In RL the equivalent would be royalty streams.

That's why I think SL micro-businesses can work for spare change or as a hobby, but when it comes to making an actual RL living from your SL business you need to carefully compare the time and effort it would require to run such a large SL business as compared to how much you can earn in your RL profession.

To make even $40,000 pa you are going to have to net about 900,000L per month after tier and other expenses. Since the average item in SL only costs a couple of hundred L you need to be selling maybe 4000 of them a month, or over a hundred a day, plus extra to cover tier and expenses. Not many SL businesses have that sort of turnover.

The other disadvantage of SL businesses is that they have no or little capital value. In RL if you build up a business you earn goodwill and you can usually sell your business for real money at a price that includes goodwill. It might be possible to sell an SL business but since all SL business is so much more uncertain (LL could close down at any time) I don't think it would have anywhere near the same capital value as a RL business.

My honest opinion:

Take the metaverse seriously, and yes, you can get sickeningly rich here *provided* you have focus, some personal capability and basic social graces.

Proof: while most people are discussing the subject, others are quietly *doing* it.


If you take the metaverse semi-seriously - hobby-passion style... well you can still do quite alright.

Many people have escapist fantasies; at least I can claim my daydream is not financially unstable.

Well, I agree to a certain extent, Desmond (I don't know how many "sickeningly rich" people are in SL, heh). If you have a plan, are gifted in a certain area (like yourself) and work your ass off, sure you can achieve success in SL. But you can do that in RL, too and in some ways much easier. In others not so easy, obviously. Becoming a "land baron" in RL isn't an option for most people. And people discover abilites they didn't know they had here, like building, in RL that means going to school to study architecture. That is something I love about SL, that people can discover their hidden talents and express their creativity.

I think what puts a bug up my ass, and maybe others, is that LL pushes this idea of SL being some goldmine in all their PR. When in reality, your chances of success are no different than they are in your first life and the opportunities, given the limits of what kind of business you can create in SL, are fewer than in RL. There are only a certain number of skill sets that can really work here. I guess I just see a lot of people coming into SL with the fantasy of "getting rich through a game" and that is something LL encourages. Hence the unending newbie question: "how can I make money??"

To me this is just a hobby, a fun creative thing to do. Anything I get out of it, as far as money is concerned, is gravy.

The majority of newbies asking that question are asking how to get L$ to spend in world. Very few actually come in with the intent of starting businesses, it seems, and the ones that do don't generally ask that question.

One could express it that they want .. a 'living' allowance .. I'm sorry - it's Friday!!

Although Linden Lab certainly does like to spread the word that there are business opportunities here, they aren't telling anyone they are going to get filthy rich playing a game. LL is marketing to more than one target audience. One is gamers and roleplayers. Then there are people who are interested in SL as an avenue of creative expression, a way to discover and develop new skills, and to try out something like running a virtual business for fun and maybe a few bucks. Then there's another target market, which is businesses (and nonprofits, government agencies, educational institutions), and particularly third party developers. There's crossover between these groups of SL residents, of course, and these are some pretty big sloppy categories, but . . .

Having been interviewed by the press about SL, I can tell you that it is really difficult to explain to them about these distinctions when they are unfamiliar with SL. Sometimes, no matter how many times I tell someone that SL isn't, for me, a "game", it still gets written up that way. Often, although they're interviewing me because I have this development company that works for RL businesses, does business in US dollars, etc., when the story comes out they skip mention of my clients and all that and talk about my inworld shop that I don't really do much with anymore. So it ends up giving a very wrong impression -- that my disorganized little l o t u s shop is paying all of my bills and employing my contractors and it's all whimsical and quaint and easy.

The reality is that I spend an awful lot of time not even inworld . . . writing proposals, corresponding, reviewing contracts, on the phone, in meetings via Skype or in meatspace. Sometimes I have to travel. I deal with taxes, copyrights, background checks, the city's insane business license red tape, and more. And yeah, I get to have a great time creating SL content with my friends, which is the point of the whole thing. But is sure isn't a game, and it's miles from the image the press sometimes paints. Lately, I've been trying really hard to clear up this misconception (it's not easy to explain to a busy reporter or panel moderator that their list of questions just isn't appropriate). People are starting to get it, though, including the press.

Like some others have said here, yeah, it's possible to make real money here. But I would compare it, in most cases, to working as a freelance writer or illustrator or Web designer. Lots and lots of people write for fun or self-expression. Some will self-publish, and some will sell their works. Some of those will make money, but most won't make more than a few bucks. A percentage will make a steady but not spectacular living. Very few are going to be best-selling authors. Do you tell someone who wants to be a writer that they shouldn't do it because they are unlikely to write a bestseller?

It isn't about the money. It sure isn't for me. I do all the paperwork and the rest -- and charge for it -- so I can afford to spend as many hours a day as possible doing what I love. The administrative stuff involved in running my business, the marketing, talking to reporters, and all that . . . *that* is my day job, the one that lets me afford to spend a lot of time in SL building cool stuff with my friends.

Those aren't the one's I'm referring to, obviously. I hear plenty of questions about making big money in SL.

I disagree with you Kim. There is a reason Anshe Chung has become almost the mascot of SL, it's LL itself. How long was she and that Fortune cover on the home page? Like... forever?

That's a very good analogy. Wait, no, that's not just an analogy, that's the literal truth. Being, say, a clothes designer in SL is being a freelance computer artist. You're using Photoshop to produce an image; this is the work of a graphic designer. A lot of people get so caught up in SL being it's own separate world that they forget to consider the major intersections with RL, or that SL is the product of RL work.

If someone got on the cover of Fortune using your product, wouldn't you put it on your Web site?

Not for 6 solid months, lol. Look, this is just my take on the PR that LL puts out there, you are free to disagree.

If someone came to SL thinking of it as a game or a virtual world, and especially if they have thought of it that way for a long time and enjoy it that way, they might not want to change their point of view. Does the Land Store sell you the perfect parcel in a nice neighborhood where you can have the home you always dreamed of, or is it a Web store where you rent server space? Some people prefer to see it one way or the other, and some of us try to see it both ways, figuring this binocular vision offers a better perception of the situations's true depth.

It's risky, but possible. you see, LL have added a line into the TOS recently that says that L$ are not currency and that users have no legal right to recieve real-world monetary value in exchange for L$. At the moment we can convert L$ into US$, but because of this line in the TOS LL can withdraw that facility any time it likes. They're unlikely too, but it's still a risk.