$$$$ - Is anyone making real money in SL???

Hi there,
I see lots of press coverage on SL now, and obviously Anshe Chung is mentioned a lot, but is anyone else many $$$ in SL. Anyone making a good living purely by working/trading here or is Anshe the only one? What sort of jobs are they doing?

Thanks for any thoughts,

Bute

I understand Aimee Webere is also making decent money. I know personally one person who is making their main income from SL, and a few others who are making decent pocket-money level incomes.

Yeah, lots of folks are...some of the more successful estate owners like Sarah Nerd and Desmond Shang, and content creators like Ace Albion (houses) and Lilith Heart (plants and trees) just to name a few.

Mainland land brokers like myself used to be able to make some money buying and selling land before landbots came in and took all the bargain finds as soon as they popped up on the list.

Yes, we make money in SL. Provide a service or make something people want.

If you mean revenue, yes. If you mean gross profits, not yet. I'm sure many others are in my situation.

Some do, but i don't think asking "who" is bringing the answer "how" .

at the moment, I break even .... JUST, but its about investment. you cant just walk into SL buy a busines sin a box and start making money.

In order to succeed its a long process and the if you are going to make something you have to be either better than everybody else or hit on an untapped market.

One of the things that always seem to go down well is clothes for both men and woman, but also shoes.
The land system is already heavily gamed and hense there are LOTS of parcels that just sit for sale for months and months and they change hands each time the price going up but nobody actually using it.

So I would recommend picking a skill that you have or learning a new skill and starting small, if you are behind your product then you will maybe hire a little "stall " somewhere and start to sell your items. Dont sell yourself too cheap and quality ALWAYS shines through so dont rush to get stuff out the door.

Other than that.....

Do it for fun ........... Money comes if you love what you do, and if it doesnt ...who cares


Marty

It isn't my main source of income, far by not, and was never intended, but I make enough money in different ways (sales, comissioned scripting, and so on...) to get the membership and a small tier fee paid... and still have some $ more at the end of the month.

Next to the usual advices of picking a trade you like I'd suggest to have a solid financial planning... Don't overtax youself with rents, fees, donations and whatever. Many businesses fail from start because their owners had no idea of the costs they face.

Yes. Of course. But only a small percentage of people are makign 3K + a month.. There is a stats page you can check out.


& I think hair is a very good market to get into.

Ive made enough Lindens to buy SL stuff. Ive never made enough to deem it worthy of cashing out of game and into a bank account. Im sure there is money to be made here but there is no job security involved. You ride the wave till it crashes. I do this as a diversion, and there is only so much time and effort Im willing to devote to a diversion. I do like messing around building stuff, taking pics, generally being creative. If you can make money doing something you enjoy, all the power to ya.

Whoop, wrong thread, lol. I don't make RL money in SL, but I am working on it! I'd love to be able to

I break even, meaning the profits from my clothes cover monthly tier costs and premium membership. So no, I don't make any 'real money' other than the real money that flows back to LL. Then again, my SL business is not intended to be more then a hobby. I get to have fun being creative, and I get to have the satisfaction of people wanting to wear my dresses. I get the kick of selling something unique to a niche market, and I would love it if one day I would run into someone wearing one of my outfits at a club.

I essentially get all that for free. Good enough for me.

Nah, I survive on Credit Card, spend $50 a month, which isn't much considering I own some land, and pay online fees for other games I don't play as often. Someone has to put money in for it to work and improve. And I don't have any quarrell with those that can create etc and work inworld for their money, but those that just fire off the bots and sit back and leech concern me.

That's been my philosophy, and my experience, in SL at least. I get an idea, enthuse over it, build it, and put it out there. The downside is time, working full time days at a "real" job, means the evenings are often used up with things-other-than-building, like following up on any customer issues that I couldn't solve through email-IM.

I don't ever expect it to last- my attitude is to enjoy it while it does last, and to work on improving my stuff continually, for my own satisfaction and enjoyment as much as anything. It may not be good business sense, but it seems to work.

This won't help you with the "how", but look under: http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php

at the section titled "Unique Users with Positive Monthly Linden Dollar Flow (PMLF)", and you'll get a breakdown of what sorts of profits people are making.

Note that that table is only a SUBSET of all users -- the subset who actually ARE positive in their L$ flow.

If you estimate using the unique residents over the past month instead (1,018,646) or the number of residents in May who spent any L$ at all (293,102), you'll see that in the month of May, only a fraction of them (39,215) had positive L$ flow.

Interesting numbers, but it still won't help you figure out "how" people are doing it.

I agree with the others -- do what you enjoy. If it earns you a little, enjoy that, but don't struggle and angst over it. If it costs you the equivalent of 2 Big Mac meals a month to have fun, enjoy that instead.

I earn RL money thanks to SL, but I wouldn't call it a revenue, it's too uncertain and prone to changes, hiccups, bugs and shutdowns to be relied upon.

But making some dollars is not my primary (nor secondary) goal here, I do what I do for fun, because I like it and because it allows me to meet and hang out with wonderful people (customers included). Of course it's nice when you get paid to have fun

That of course is the main problem. Even if you make a significant amount of money in SL you are always at risk of all your income vanishing at a moment's notice if LL shuts down or sometimes it'll just freeze up for a week because the game is screwed. There's far too many "single points of failure" to rely on SL for an income. It's perfect for making a little (or a lot) of pocket money though.

I am not nearly as succesfull as Ace, but I make a good buck in sl. That was however never my intention. Ace's philosophy is exactly the same as mine. I too find sl highly rewarding as it comes to expressing my creativity and enthusiasm. I too have a day job and find it hard to design/build at night because of the many customer requests. And I too am always aware that success and money today may disappear tomorrow. But oh boy, the fun it gives me!

I treat SL as a "labour of love". There is no way I can recover the full economic cost of the time it takes me to create an animation for SL, never mind make a profit - but I never had the intention of taking money out of the game anyway. If I break even in terms of paying monthly tier, I consider that a success. I have made my SL living so to speak.

You can make a sucessful career in SL, but I am sure you will need to work just as hard at it as you would in RL and also find some way of integrating it with RL - e.g., as have Rivers Run Red and The Electric Sheep Company.

What anyone can do though, is learn new skills and gain experience that can help them in many different RL careers - and, more importantly, enjoy themselves at the same time.

All content creators in SL barely make enough money to break even. Just enough to pay their island tier. Or the tier for 2 islands. Or 5. Or 10 islands and a 160k L$ classified ad. They all have to struggle to cover their costs. Even Anshe Chung, who may earn much but also has a lot of tier to pay.

That's the official statement of every SL business owner. It should also be the official position of the forum community, whenever someone is looking for a business idea worth copying or content worth reverse engineering.

It is possible to make a profit in SL and earn substantial sums of money, providing you don't work entirely within SL. We use SL as a place of networking to reach clients on a 'face to face' basis.

Since we began our ingame companies, we have delevoped and generated a lot of work that is both infacing and outfacing, and even some which has no direct link ingame, other than we use SL as a means to produce the goods the clients want.

For some, that is the essence of SL... a way to 3D showcase their talents to the outside world. Although we are not into fashion creation, imagine and up and coming fashion designer desperate to gain a good portfolio for RL clients.... comparivetly, it is very cheap to recreate those designs in SL and show case them to RL companies utilising 2D pictures and or 3D movies.
Developers wanting to showcase their designs in VR to investors.. simple, recreate the whole scheme in SL, take time lapse 2D pics, maybe add movie fly throughs and annotation, it's another layer of promotional media to support the developers proposals. I have been doing this for years using both encapsulated programmes and VR over the internet.

If what you do is soley within SL, then I would say, it is going to be slow growth within the goldfish bowl markets. Especially given that the vast majority can rez a prim and make some form of basic structure or item, add a texture and call it art, or a chair etc. Although we have made fair gains from our companies in SL, we do reinvest a high percentage, this is not to improve our dealings ingame, but to support our dealings out of game.

Although there is a risk factor that the game will shut down entireley, as long as second life is operating I dont think it is as unstable as you claim. I have sales accounts spanning over 2 years and I have managed to increase my revenue every month during that period despite all the downtime and technical issues. Sales seem to balance themselves out over a monthly period for me, so even if there is a week where the TP system is buggered things generally pick up in the following week or sales suddenly increase from SLX/SLB. Based on this I can now forecast what I will cash out of the game months in advance and I am rarely wrong. So I think you can run a stable business in SL and rely on the income.



I used to abide by the same philosophy as you Ace, i.e. I build because I enjoy it and any
revenue is just a bonus. I havnt felt like that this year though. Im bored with SL, Sculpties have perked up my interest a bit but I now see SL as second Job and the time i spend inworld is specifically geared towards increasing revenue. Pretty much all the friends i've made over the last few years have quit now so the only thing keeping me here is the income.

I wish that were true. If I earn enough in a week to cover only the rental of the stall I sell my goods in, that is above average. My products are good quality, my pricing is right. But I will not pay 160k L$ for advertising of course. (Man that is nearly US$ 600!) So people don't even notice my business exists

The real risk to depending on SL for income isn't that SL will suddenly shut down, or is prone to grid outages and bugs. The real risk is that if you hit upon an untapped market, or build a better mousetrap in an existing market, within a year you'll have hundreds of people competing against you with your own ideas. What SL lacks is any kind of "local" market. Let's say that in the real world you open a great hardware store. You might attempt to sell tools and hardware online, in which case you're going to have the same sort of competition issues that SL businesses must contend with, but you also have the local market where you're likely to only have a few competitors. We don't have that in SL.

People can do very well here, but sustainability is very difficult to achieve over the long haul. I used to make quite a bit of income from SL, and I still do alright, but unless I want to spend the bulk of my time marketing my wares aggressively, it's doubtful I'll ever get back to where I was when I had little competition. Three years ago I had one or two compeititors. Now I have hundreds. I've come to terms with that because I don't enjoy marketing. In fact I hate it with a passion. At the end of the day I have to make content because I enjoy doing it and let any profit I make from it be merely a secondary consideration. If my primary goal was profit it would hang like an albatross around my neck and suck all the enjoyment right out of SL for me.

I think it would easier to make money in SL or perhaps even an income if the whole system weren't so overpriced. As much as we like to think of SL as another world, it remains basically an entertainment venue -- with a little dabbling by RL companies and educational institutions. Having to pay $550 for a decent sized piece of land and then $40 tier every month on top of that prohibits making money and even curtails those who just want to have fun in SL. Once you get bored of your little 512m lot its time to leave.

I think in order for SL to become something more than temporary fun diversion they will need to cut their land tier fees at least in half -- if not more. To get people to pay that tier, land prices will need to plummet. Prims are addictive, LL needs to facilitate that more than they've been doing.