How many RL companies making a profit from SL?

Hi,
I was interviewed about SL today, and one of the things I was asked was how many companies did I think were making a sustainable income from building within SL. I've recently been looking through the SL Developers list, so gave my thoughts on a ball park figure.

That is, how many RL companies, creating all their income by working exclusively on producing builds within SL, globably? This excludes land barons and people producing clothing, scripts, avatars etc. etc.

How many would you say?

Cheers,
Duder

Movix Media Studios

Electric Sheep and other developers are probably doing well in SL. But as for RL companies that use SL for marketing, they are mostly all operating at a loss.

yeah i dont think you are going to find any real world companies actualy making money in SL unless they decided to take up sl scripting and such and even then some of them have such huge overheads I dont think they could recover.

SL is for us "little people" right now and I Like that because its fun and a good hobby if huge coporation were able to earn at a profit in SL i think you would find that a good many of us hobbyist would be wiped off the map as far as totting our good was concerned over time. We would be reduced to the resident status in the sense that we would be consumers and creators but not really sellers with the corporations controlling the actual bulk of the economy.

Right now as it stands even someone making "a lot" of profit their paycheque is not that huge not enough to make anyone want to put the time and effort into it who already has a million dollar + profit corporation in the real world. For me this is a plus face it what we sell we sell for pennies in most cases content wise quite literally for the amount of time put in vs the actual money made its not that great. Face it the main reason why a lot of people do it is because its a great creative outlet very few people take home enough to actualy live on and most people dont make any money at all even though they sell stuff or try to

So in those conditions a corporation wouldn't be doing any better or they would have come in and whiped us off the map already

Also, the benefit of a SL presence to most RL companies is not measured in Linden dollars. Brand equity, brand awareness, and other marketing jargon is their objective.

So you'd say that there was nobody really making a profit from directly from SL, but benefitting from things like market awareness, brand profile etc. Obviously it must (maybe?) be working for people like ESC, Rivers Run Red etc. who are working with big RL companies creating a presence in SL.

In my interview, I'd thrown in an off the top of my head figure of about 25 - 30 companies, but it seems like I was probably way off the mark. Maybe it's far fewer than that even.

thousands of invdividuals are making money in SL

Real World Companies though? I dont know any.

To answer the original question, how many RL companies are entirely sustained by in-world builds..

Well it's not an answer, just a non-specific guess.. I can think of only two that I'm aware of - Electric Sheep Company and Millions Of Us. These are real world businesses (registered as corporations, LLCs, or whatever) whose primary business is content creation, not only in Second Life, but other virtual worlds as well. There are probably others, but these are the top dogs that I'm aware of.

There is probably quite a bit of room for competition in this field, and I do expect to see it grow substantially over the next few years.

EDIT: I'd forgotten about Rivers Run Red. So make that three.

yes but its my understanding in the case of electric sheep company that they started here and they became something as a result of being here aslo they are in the coder category we have ibm and all those guys here already (the coder category) who started outside of SL not inside and who have recruited into their companies from SL to do their inworld builds etc.

There is right now a limited amount that you can do that will transfer to "real world" coding and content creation are the only two things so most of those guys are here and to my knowledge are not making a dime only spending it and using sl as a marketing and training ground etc

I'm a bit confused, Duder. Do you mean content creation companies that develop only buildings, or something else other than clothing, scripts, and avatars?

My company is making a sustainable income; we create all of those things, and more, for RL businesses.

I own a RL hosting and development company and primarily use SL as a marketing/advertising medium for Shoutcast hosting, but other things like web hosting, scripting, etc are marketed as well.

SL is the cheapest form of marketing I've ever seen, and that includes also advertising on SL-related sites. One sale a month pays for all advertising we do.