Business opportunities

Apart from camping etc is there anyway to make money in SL?

Seems to me that the furry that got the cream was the early bird.

Has anybody who joined quite recently made a succesful business?

You can make money but as LL don't have a customer service perspective, it would be foolhardy in my opinion to invest big in any business venture here. LL will think nothing of putting a knife through your business model overnight.

Having said that, the business opportunities here are massive, you just need to be creative and find the right niche, it's a very creative place.

Yes, however you have to have a marketable skill.

Clothing, buildings, furniture, vehicles, toys, animations, scripting, operating a mall, flipping real estate... those are just a few of the ways to work and make money in SL.

you can also take classes to learn to make and do things

learn to host events
learn to work in clubs or stores

there are alot of ways to earn money in sl rather then to suck up resources camping for such low $L's

What one has to remember is that there are loads of other people in on all these activities. You might make beautiful houses, cars or clothes, but so do many other people. Add to this the huge amount of good freebies available and the fact that anybody can make stuff once they've learned how, one can see there's no such thing as a sure-fire winner.

As for land speculation - there is money to be made but you can also lose - like when a land price crash happens, as it did last year, very suddenly. There will always be cheap land too - people desperate to sell some land to reduce tier fees before next account date etc.

I'm not trying to put you off business in SL - I do it and I've made a little bit of money but success is unlikely to be easy.

However there is one area that I think still offers opportunities - that is making sculpted prims (sculpties) because relatively few people have mastered how to make the sculpts in other graphics programs and then import them to SL.

There is the answer i was looking for.

I think a lot of people join SL after reading articles about how you can make a lot of money. They then realise its harder to make money in SL than RL and leave. This could be the reason for the huge turnover in residents. I would imagine LL have some sort of press officer, it should be their job to get the majority of the press who write about SL to concentrate on other things apart from the econemy. Maybe then people new to SL would arrive expecting somthing different and would find the whole experience more rewarding. If they then go on to make some money then that would be a bonus.

They're looking to do that, they want to promote creativity and positive apsects via their marketing channels. They need the help of residents to achieve this goal though as the place is so vast and they don't want to be seen as favouring people, as that would cause some strife.

Check out the economic statistics

http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php

out of 8.4 million residents, less then 20,000 of them made more then US$10 in June, and that was before they paid tier or rental on land.

Only about 9,000 of those residents made more then US$1,000, and again that was before they paid tier on land or rentals.

I found out about SL from "The Money programme" in the uk

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6708417.stm


I saw the images of SL and thought I would take a look for myself. But how many people saw this programme and joined because they thought they could make thousands? If the end of SL is in sight, as lots of people are predicting, it will be down to introducing RL money into the "game".

I am confused. I followed that link and I see 42,597 users with a positive monthly cash flow for June. Also, while that is before tier and fees it also doesn't incude L$ made from land sales, correct? Selling land is a major source of income in SL, right?

Not trying to start a fight, just not sure I understand what I am looking at.

I agree though that SL is anything but a venue to get rich quick.

there are oppertunities, think out of the box

33597 of them campbots?

Yep.. That many that made > US$0 but only 20k or so made more than US$10. Total minus the number that made < US$10.

Yes I see now I was looking at positive cash flow at all levels, not only those earning more than $10 US.

There are new people becoming involved in business quite often. It _is_ difficult, and it _is_ more difficult that it was when SL was starting - because there's more competition now, and the competition is more skilled. But it is possible, and there are people doing it.

The only one major change is that it's become harder and harder to do what was the original SL ideal - have something you want to do/be/achieve in SL, make things that help you do/be that, then sell them to earn money to help you further with that goal. Nowadays, many of the big businesses devote 100% of their SL time to their businesses, and if you want to compete with them, you have to too. In terms of strict capitalist economics that's improved efficiency and therefore a good thing, but it's a bit harsh on mixed-goal users..

If you have a marketable skill, it is easy to generate positive cash flow in SL, and with time it isn't difficult to generate enough income to cover your costs. What's hard is making enough L$ to equal what you'd earn flipping burgers at McDonald's.

If you are good with graphics and have the image editing resources, AND you have a sense of style that is attractive to others, you can make money designing anything from textures to clothing to accessories to skins, etc.

If you are spatially talented, patient, and your idea of beauty appeals to others, you can make money designing houses, offices, boats, sculptures, etc. Related to this perhaps is designing avatar shapes.

If you are a programmer, you can come up with your own build of the SL client, or scripts that make SL objects DO stuff: open and close, make noise, give stuff, report stuff, etc. Related to this would be the ability to design animations (make people's avatars move in particular ways, anything from walking with a manly swagger to diving off a diving board to having sex to playing football).

Some of these items don't make you much money per item, but with tens of thousands of residents always freshening their inventories, the overall volume can build up over time if you keep designing.

If you are a socialite, you can host events that other SL residents find entertaining. Hire out your services to new malls, clubs, groups, etc.

Maybe your gifts are more business-oriented. Find things you can sell for more than you paid. Find markets you can make more efficient. Find a way of packaging or presenting goods that are better than average, and sell your services to existing merchants. Find a niche that is being overlooked.

Into game design? Then design a game. People have already designed everything from table games to first person shooters to easter-egg hunts. Sell the game, sell admission to the game, or sell game gear.

Invest in others with more talent than you. Check out the stock markets (there are a half dozen of them). Offer to finance an artist's shop for a share of the profits. Commission an item or script you can imagine but can't make. (Just remember there is little recourse if you get defrauded in SL; it is helpful to communicate clearly, copiously, and in writing).

If you are an administrator, you can assemble a team that does all of the above and seek accounts for turnkey operations for RL companies jumping into SL. You secure an in-world "home" for them, design their facilities, create and outfit their avatars, and make their creative ideas reality.

These are ways to make money I thought of just off the top of my head. Chances are, at least one item here (or one I missed) sounds like "fun" rather than "work" to you. So have fun with it. If things ever reach the point where you can quit your day job--well, that's serendipity.

you used to be able to gamble

One small note: you can't do this for money. The SL client has an "infectious" open-source license, so if you distribute it, everyone else has to be allowed distribute it too.

You _can_ have someone pay you to create a custom client for them, but unless you already have a reputation, this isn't very likely.

Its possible to make good money. But keep this in mind- LL doesn`t give a sht about you.

Some programmers are apparently making money by creating custom clients that log in their alts, scan for and buy cheap land, then re-sell the land for a higher price. In this way programmers are making money through their own custom builds.

Well, ok - but when someone asks for good ways to make money, encouraging them to write a landbot wouldn't be my first suggestion

Right, what cHex said above is a perfect summary.

My advice for people trying to start a business in SL is that that NOT be their primary motivation for being here. If they're already in love with SL and spending lots of time here and they love building or landlording or whatever, then they're in a good position to make some money.

But if your primary motivation is to profit, then you'd generally be better served working a very few hours a day at a Real Job(tm) and spending the rest of the time on, say, an MMO you DO enjoy.

It's kind of like being a fine artist in real life. Art is not typically a profitmonger's first choice for a career. But for someone who already feels driven and inspired to make art, then deciding to sell it is just sort of a side effect.

Myself, I prefer not to "invest" more money in SL than I pull out of it. Being able to turn a reasonable profit is part of the fun for me. But I am not inclined to try and maximize that profit by, say, buying tons more land or whatever...

I put "invest" in quotes above because generally speaking, I believe that thinking of SL as an investment is an extremely high-risk prospect for the long term.

Thanks for all your comments.

The point of the post was not really to ask for ways to make money. It was to find out if people come to sl to make money, as acording to a lot of press it is easy to do so. This being the reason for over 8 million accounts yet only a very small fraction of those are still using sl. And are LL marketing the game correctly?
I'm sure anyone of the sl residents has the ability to make some money but only a small amount can make a living out of it I believe that a huge majority of the people that do make a living out of sl are the ones who joined at the begining, and that we will not hear about rags to riches storys of residents that missied the boat when sl was launched. As has been said in previous posts, there is a lot of competition. Lots of people selling the same thing and offering the same services, I think these people have been left long behind. The only way now to get your name and products or services Known to the masses would be to invest a lot money into sl to start with, and at the moment investing in an sl business seems to be a huge gamble (no pun intended).

There are not 8.4 million residents. There are 8.4 million registered accounts. Considering there are individuals with as many as several hundred alts, I don't think this is really indicative of anything.