How to make 5.000 US$ per month ?

wow, a lot to read, think about. (i'm the topic starter); was away for 6 hrs.

Is there somewhere an official note of the 'Open Source Servers' ?

That's not enough.

That's why a said: 5.000 US$. You have to pay taxes, insurance, pension fonds, ...

After all this max. 60% stays over.

Actually, that last statement especially might not be true.

Have you heard of Achaea? It's a MUD. A regular, text-based MUD. Except that you can buy game money ("credits" with real money there. It's very expensive - around 4 credits to the US$1. A pair of working wings might cost 2000 credits (they let you teleport on a particular command). A staff, which lets you emote without your name appearing at the beginning, might cost 500.

And yet amazingly enough, it actually works, and makes money. Why? Because they're successfully managed the social side of the game so that these things are "special", unique abilities that others don't have. People will generally pay to have that kind of thing - not just the object, but the social role and advantages that go along with it.

The problem with SL is that it doesn't have that. You can pay for content, but the only real way to have truly unique abilities is to make them yourself. Any premium content can be brought down by competition, or by self-creation, or (since SL has no united goal) opt-outs and apathy.

Maybe the problem is that SL isn't gamey enough?

To be 100% completly honest some of you are missing the point. Your not looking at web 2.0 folks this is web 3.0. If you have read the latest reports as i have 80,000 million people in the next 8 years will be involved with something like this. The truth is that there is money to be made and had in second life it's a GREAT new source of income. To leave your day job right now might a bit premature. Build it and test it if you make it work then GREAT your on your way.

See, the sly way to do it is to offload all of your work responsibilities on to the office muppet, work out how to connect to SL for 8 hours a day without getting caught byyour boss, then you get paid to play SL....and SL pays you to play SL - win, win

just dont get sacked or you will be buggered (not litterally)

To the original poster: Open Source servers are the next logical step after open sourcing the user client software. LL had not set a time table for making an open-source server available, but I believe they have indicated that it inevitably will happen at some point.

As for the potential for profit... Yes, the potential is certainly there. But the reality, right now, is that successfully making a full-time living in SL at this time requires a lucky mix of skill, financial starting capital, a creative concept, timing on market entry, and LOTS of hard work. It's like any entreprenural venture, To get started, expect to work much longer hours and have a far greater risk factor than doing a normal job for someone else. Most start-up companies fail miserably. This is true in SL just as it is true in real life.

People like Desmond and I have actually run the numbers, managed sims, run SL businesses... and we have seen what it is like in the current market. Desmond runs a very well-managed and large group of sims, with a very loyal customer base. And yet judging from his comments here, he still has what in the real world would be considered a heavy turn-over rate. I've priced out all the factors for sim design and construction for clients, trying to piece together a viable business plan that does more than break even. Yet in most cases, the numbers people here have bandied about are accurate - a single sim generally won't produce more than $100 USD to $200 USD per month in profits, even if you manage to keep it full. And keeping a sim at full occupancy is very hard.

Some other observations:

1. People will, in general, pay far less for your time and effort than what your real-word time is worth. For most SL work, a RL minimum wage job pays more per hour of effort.
   
2. People will, in general, not pay large amounts of money for intangible "assets" that could irretrievably vanish if the LL servers have a bad day.
   
3. Clients that are willing to pay something reasonable for your time and effort are few and far between.
   
4. Average "good customers" still come and go with astonishing speed. Even when you do everything right yourself, people move on, get bored with SL, quit... It is very difficult to maintain a customer base.

With all that said, why am I in business in SL myself? Because I enjoy it. The work is fun, for me. Other people fork over the money to buy servers, and I get to create fantastic, beautiful places for them. It pays my expenses for my playtime in SL, and gives me a recreational activity that keeps my mind active and doesn't cost me anything, aside from my time, to enjoy. AS Desmond said, if you aim just at the money, you won't make it. Do something that gives you pleasure... find something that you can do well and that you enjoy doing, and if that is also of value to others, you may succeed quite well.

SL is not simple to make it in. Owning an island doesn't make you successful...I've actually seen it bring some to their knees trying to keep up with content creation and managing their islands. I own one island which is hard to keep running and keep up with all the problems. 9 islands would be insanity to me!
To be successful in SL in the amount you want to be, I'd say you better be doing something fairly unique to SL. There's alot of competition and alot of established business in your way.
A few things to think about when thinking of profits:
Advertising Costs~If you [just] build it, they [probably] won't come, if you tell them about it, they might.
Traffic~Most commercial areas require a good amount of traffic to stay afloat if you are renting space. People don't want to rent somewhere with say 300 traffic for x amount when they could rent somewhere else with 15,000 traffic for the same amount in most cases.
Employees~Maintaining 9 islands on your own would be insane...employees are almost a must here.

I have only listed 3 things, but these three things are the most important to alot of successful businesses in Second Life. If you only had one island with a great store on it that was way popular, you might not need to worry about traffic or employees, but we can't all be so lucky, and from reading your initial post, I don't see that you are trying to put a store up on these 9 islands.
I'm not saying that it can't be done, throwing up 9 islands and profitting the amount you want to in just 6 months, I'm saying I don't see it happening.

http://www.designnine.com/news/node/944

In short, you are little late to be thinking of this as a business model. Second Life shares some similarity to an MLM scheme as regards economic viabilty over time.

I wonder if this would work?

http://www.south-pacific-island-for-sale.com/real%20estate%20vanuatu%20land.html

specifically,

http://www.south-pacific-island-for-sale.com/real%20estate%20south%20pacific%20island.html

It *is* an island.

Would a tsunami be considered a technical downtime issue?

This thread reminds me of an old Steve Martin routine...

"How to be a millionaire and never pay taxes. First, get a million dollars..."

Learn to crawl before trying to run.

Start small then work your way up if it goes well. This way you won't be risking much if you fail.

I love the people who writes these articles, not long ago someone else accused SL of being a ponzi scheme. They always forget one thing:

99% of the people who play SL do it for fun! They have no interest in making money from it. And they will always be bored with their old hat and want to buy a new one.


I think the authors have allot in common with the OP. They come into SL with one thing in their minds: Make money. And of course, everyone wants to be the new Anshe Chung. When their plan of blindly pouring money into SL, thinking it will come out the other end, fails.... they go write an article claiming it's all a ponzi scheme.

Actually, the guy who wrote the article in Valleywag, did exactly this.


Content creation is the foundation of SL's economy, it will always be, and it will always be possible to make money from it.

Forget trying to invest your way to a fortune. You're much better off looking for investment opportunities in RL. Preferably one that not everyone and their hamster is trying to get a piece of right now.

Heh, you need to figure out how you're going to make money, and roughly how much you think you can make per month from rent etc. Add up the numbers and see if it comes out. My gut feeling is that you can't make 5000 a month off of 9 islands without investing pretty heavily in them at the beginning to make them extraordinairy. Good luck though .

I was hoping somebody would tell it here ...

But, we WUV you Gov'nah Shang!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFaeyQqftS0

Whoa, did I miss something, or did people forget to mention the landbots in this thread??

It's simple, Zoha - program yourself a landbot and take advantage of other people's mistakes to scoop up their land and don't give it back no matter how much they beg and cry. Then resell the land for market price, and you'll probably quite easily make $5,000/mo. The Lindens won't touch you, because it was a 'legal' sale.

I am being sarcastic here. I'll throw in my vote with all the rest - don't quit your day job yet. If you're at all technically inclined, you should probably do what one of the previous posters suggested and learn a modeling program so you can make sculpties, since those will be the next hot thing. The nice thing about content creation in SL is, you only have to create something once, and you can sell infinite copies.

Nice way to completely misquote.

I'm technically inclined (education: IT high school)

What is a good program for this ?
Where can I find more information ?

Stick with a RL income. No grid crashes, fewer griefers per square mile and RL doesn't close every other Wednesday for maintenance.

My 2c.

Google makes an online, 3D, user-content driven game. Your investment becomes worthless. Your income drops to zero.

You might be ok for months, or even a year or two. Want to bet your saving on it?

Personally I think a person who wants to rely on SL as their sole means of income needs their head examined.

Any competitor to SL on those terms will have a very hard time getting going, because SL already has such a strong content base (and therefore has more users, therefore gets more content, therefore gets more users...)

zomaigah! dont do it.

That`s insane!! If anything wait til youre already making 5k in game for like 6 months straight, THEN leave your RL job.

Or leave when youre approaching the 5k hit for a solid 4 months or so, then leave to devote more time to what youre doing to hit the mark.

But to outright quit your job is foolish. Don`t do it.

You can get started with sculpty making use wings3D, at http://www.wings3d.com/ and you will find an url for an exporter plugin some discussion of how to use it at /8/20/183764/1.html .

Oh please.

Even the people making 800 a day?!

Sure it can crash. But you can wake up and go into your office in RL and be told you`re fired. Nothing in this life is sure.. nothing.