How can creativity flurish

Hi all,

ive been in SL for about 3 months and i have a project that i wish to start building. I've been looking around for a 2048 - 4096 size parcel and seen some pretty steep prices. My question is how do people make non commercial projects work? Is SL just becoming a huge shopping, gambling, sex mall? What about learning, sharing, beauty and stunning architecture. is there anyone out there who has an educational non profitable project running that has found a way to cover costs? Is the best approach to slowly set up a group and charge membership fees?

Ive read on these forums that people are expecting a drop in land prices but with the influx of new people it seems that there will always be a land shortage. In the UK house prices just keep on going up and up month after month, everyone says this cant continue but it isn't slowing down.

thanks for looking

Hi Silence,

The simple answer is that many of them just pay the money. Yes, it is quite expensive but it can be worth it, especially since an excellent build will be noticed by others who will then often offer you building jobs which will help pay back your costs.

Another option is to try and find a sponsor. Usually you'll need to do some smaller builds first in order to show that you're good, but once you've done that you should be able to find some assistance. For example, you could offer to include adverts in your build, or you could place your build on land that's near to rental housing, so that the attractiveness of your build adds value to the houses.

I believe there was and probably still is an "SL Public Land Preserve" - made up largely, I think, of unused Premium 512s contributed by island owners - where you might be able to place it, too.

To be straightforward about it, there are lots of people who feel the same way you do and who make enough money to support some extra land so you just really need to find them and they will probably be able to help.

I've wondered this myself... the quantity of land/prims required would seem to make a lot of projects really expensive to run. Maybe the owners just approach it as the cost of a hobby they enjoy and write it off as money spent on entertainment or whatever?

Well, as I am mainly in SL to relax from a busy job during daytime, I use my credit card and buy the L$ I need. Simple as that.

I invested a lot of money into my house and studio. And I currently I am working on my galary... all for my own pleasure and to share with others. I do not earn a single L$ with it all.

Morwen.

Have you tried contacting land owners that lay baron (the land that is)?

Offer to embelish parts of the land with sculptures and 'architectural' buildings in small areas, to entice people to want to live there.

If you create modern art sculptures, approach Mall owners and give them some of your work, maybe include a notecard giver? Those who create appartment complexes for the 'open areas', stairways and foyers? Offices of commercial buildings.

If you want to give them away free, thats your choice.

It's an issue we're constantly battling with at Stratics.

We have 8000 sq m of Rosieri - but with the plans we have could easily fill a region. Unfortunately, without going down the same road as everyone else and having camping chairs, *.ingo, casinos and laggy malls to try and recoup the costs.

But we do it for the community, not the money. We might recover $1 a month in donations out of the $40 it costs us for the land.

Broccoli

A lot of people fund their projects by starting businesses in SL; selling the things they make and using the profits to fund their creative dreams. Svarga came to be this way and so has my Botanical Gardens. Yes, you have to pay real money at first getting started while you build your sales until the income starts covering tier. As you are able to cover more tier, you can start to expand - or save up monies to buy a sim. It is a slow process.... For the impatient, there are credit cards.

That's me exactly. I've got 4096m, my tier is $25 and whether I 'recoup' a penny of that inworld or not is irrelevant to me. $25 is the cost of a nice dinner out, or lunch for two. It's about the cost of a trip the cinema. It's well within my budget, and I get many more hours of entertainment from SL then I would from a visit to the cinema.

I like to build stuff and I like having the space and prim-allowance to build whatever I want, without too many interruptions.

I'm even toying with the idea of expanding, but the jump from $25 to $40 / month tier is a big step at this point.

-Atashi

Really, it's a game for rich people. I'd love my own island, but I can't justify the expense to gratify a whim.

If the cost of islands really fell to such an extent that they were comfortably affordable by most people, just think how SL would take off!

Not true at all, I'm not rich and neither are most people who own islands. We simply figured out a way to pay for them and cover the tier on them. Some are bought from sales of in-world creations and others are investments that pay for themselves through rentals or resale of the land.

Actually, it's NOT a game for rich people, it's a game for talented people.

With just a teensy bit of effort and a few unobtrusive vendors, recouping the costs is easy.
The point is that people want to buy stuff. It's part of the game.
If you're making something quality (which I'm assuming you are), it takes nothing to add a vendor. Or, even easier, set it For Sale in the edit properties.
Then, chuck it in a box with a picture on it, set THAT for sale and go 'round to all these places with free vendor space. Or rent some vendor space. It becomes worth it to do so.

Instead of complaining about the huge malls and shopping places, use them. I own almost half of my sim and, other than my workshop, high up on a mountain, all my other land is bare, with just a couple of trees. Makes for a nice environment, I think.
Guess how much it costs me each month.

Nada.
Zip.
Zilch.
Zero bucks.

Why? Because I sell stuff. Not huge. Not tonnes of stuff. I'm not a major name by any means. But I've got a bunch of vendors out there and it pays off.

Think of it like RL. If you're interested in just building, then you gotta have some way to support yourself. The great thing about SL is that you have the opportunity to do so with a bare minimum of effort.

The vast majority of islands are split between multiple people. Even the islands named after big SL brand names often have several people involved in them - they just use the big brand as the name of the island because it'll attract traffic.

Unfortunately, since the tier fee was increased, it is no longer a viable option to support an island by reselling the land on it (and one of the press releases around that time suggested that the price rise was in part deliberately intended to eliminate this)



But not everyone wants to sell stuff. If you buy land on the basis that it's supported by sales, then you a) have to start worrying about positioning, marketing, and other business angles; and b) have to spend time making what others want to buy, as opposed to what you want to make. There's nothing wrong with either of these, but equally there's nothing wrong with people who don't wish to do them.

Remember that business is a competitive environment, and it can't be depended on to enable this kind of thing - it doesn't scale. If it so happened that every person on SL wanted to build and sell things to support their building, they couldn't all do it, since the real money would have to be coming in from someone.

Creative art has *always* been an underfunded endeavor, in RL as well as SL. That's why my RL partner, who was a painter, ended up training to be a first-class machinist. She got tired of being a starving artist facing a life-time of untenured teaching jobs that lasted only a few semesters. I'm a writer who doesn't write anymore because I too prefer to make a decent living wage.

After just a few months of living in SL, I lost total control and bought 8096sm of land so that I could begin an arts-centered project. With luck I can sell a few items on the side, rent out a parcel or two, but for the moment this purchase and the $40/mo land tier are funded out of my pocket. And may well remain that way for the forseeable future.

If you're on a shoe-string RL budget, this kind of self-indulgence is not possible. I squandered a good chunk of my Christmas bonus on the land price, far more than I EVER imagined spending when I first joined. What's $10 a month, after all? Hah! Little did I know...

The land tier will come out of my freelance business income (assuming I can log out of SL often enough to keep that business afloat). As hobbies go, this is not too bad. I keep reminding myself that it costs a hell of a lot less than a golf club membership or an annual trip to Cancun that my co-workers enjoy without a thought.

Silence, did you think of renting ?

I own 4 big parcels of MAINLAND with 5000+ sm each. I'm giving 4096 sm for RENT for 6,200 L$ per month - this is ~ 23 USD. There are no restrictions, you can do any project you want on my parcels. I won't intervene in any way.

The price is actually cheaper than owning land!
Please consider:
- You don't need to pay land tier to Linden Lab - you save 25 USD
- you don't need to have a premium account - you save 6 to 9 USD
- you don't have any risk at all with selling the land
- you can move on whenever you want.

This one does. I'm in Second Life around 96 hours (four RL days) every month, and if I add up all of my current monthly fees and in-world spending, I end up spending about $3 USD for every hour I'm in Second Life. It's an acceptable entertainment value for me, considering I've largely stopped buying books, movies, or other games because I simply enjoy Second Life more.

But like others have said, there are numerous legitimate ways to support a not-for-profit project. It just takes some up-front effort and connections-making in order to make it happen.

Again, no different from art projects in RL. The friends of mine who are still active as artists have to continually scramble to find funding. Their art sales barely cover the expense of the materials themselves, and certainly not enough to cover the cost of studio rental and promotion. Art gallerys take a big cut, so even those who are "successful" are still barely making ends meet. Their lifestyles are frugal and they often even live in their studio, or in apartments that are smaller than their studio.

The only artist in my acquaintance who isn't struggling is a trust-fund baby, who can afford to indulge her interests without sacrificing her standard of living.

Indeed. The challenge for creative people throughout history has always been how to keep food on the table and still be able to work at their art. Most have paid the bills through commission or in the employ of the church/aristocracy. Michelangelo didn't paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as a hobby; he was on the payroll of the Vatican and therefore had to sell what the Pope wanted to buy. Creative people need to keep a roof over their heads too, and that frequently means doing non-creative things to pay the bills...ask any of the thousands of actor/waiters in New York or LA.

Here's the thing...
Selling stuff, products or services, is the only way to MAKE money in SL, other than donations and I think we all know that that ain't gonna pay the rent.
If you want to fund a plot of land to build on, which the OP seems to want, then that money has to come from somewhere. Either from RL, which I assume the OP doesn't want to do, or from SL.
The questions were:
"...how do people make non commercial projects work?"
and
"Is the best approach to slowly set up a group and charge membership fees?"

I was speaking to these.

If someone wants to have something that costs money, like a plot of land in SL, then it has to be paid for.
My suggestion was to set up small vendors, selling whatever it is that they are building.
If it's not supported by sales, how else would/could it be supported?

Also, I disagree that one "a) [has] to start worrying about positioning, marketing, and other business angles; and b) [has] to spend time making what others want to buy, as opposed to what you want to make."

I explained what my setup is in SL and how it gets paid for. Only on one occasion did I worry about positioning, and that was to get a fantastic spot after a redesign. The rest of the time, I just rented a spot (which pays for itself) and plopped my vendors out.
Also, I have never, not once, ever spent any time making what others wanted to buy. Never. Every single thing that I have ever put on sale has been something that I wanted to make, either because I enjoyed the challenge of the idea or because I thought it was a good idea.

You seem to have taken my suggestion of setting up a few vendors to mean "give up everything you love to do on SL and concentrate all your energy on making a business". Nothing could be farther from the truth.

I don't know what exactly the OP wants to build, but surely there must be some market for it. Even if they only make a couple of sales a month, even that will help pay for the plot.

That's all I was suggesting.


As for "If it so happened that every person on SL wanted to build and sell things to support their building, they couldn't all do it, since the real money would have to be coming in from someone", there IS money coming in, every week, with stipends (for some), thus, it's not a completely closed economy, with the same money just changing hands like in a Monopoly game. If everyone DID try this, then money would STILL be made. Not a lot, and it certainly wouldn't keep SL in the black, but money would still be there. Add to that, I certainly never suggested that every person on SL wanted to build and sell things yadda yadda. I was offering a specific solution to a specific person's problem. Someone who WAS looking for a way to support their building.

No, I mean that there would need to be real money coming in. For those stipends to be cashed out to pay tier, someone would have to be buying the L$, and paying real money for them.

And I know you didn't say that everyone should do it. But the problem is, if it wouldn't work if everyone did it, then somewhere sometime there's got to be someone who can't. I responded because I got the implicit impression from your post that you thought earning money that way was a "minimum of effort" and anyone who couldn't must lack talent, and those aren't necessarily the case.

But... but... you're basically setting up a straw man. Your point doesn't have anything to do with what I said, nor does it have to do with the topic at hand. The original poster asked how funding a plot of land for them to build on could be done. I offered the option of selling the things that they build. You spun that into me advocating that everyone should do it, which it patently incorrect. You were arguing points I didn't make.

You attribute other things that I never said to me.
You got the implicit impression that I said that anyone who couldn't make money from selling things must not have talent? I'm sorry, but I never said anything remotely of the sort.
I will say, now, that making money "that way" CAN take a minimum of effort. I am living proof of that. I spent a lot of time building what I want, doing pretty much exactly what the original poster desctibes and, over time, built up enough to be able to afford to have 1/2 a sim without going out of pocket. I "worked" at it, designing and stocking vendors, placing them and paying rent, for approximately 8 or 9 hours in the past year. Even if I double that... hell, let's triple it and call it 30 hours... I think it could still be described as a "minimum of effort", wouldn't you?

I offered up my experiences as an option for how to pay for a plot of land.
That's it.
There was no commentary on others' experience or talent levels, no supposition, just a suggestion based on something that I KNOW works.

Then I'm sorry. I probably read too much into the start of your post:



My response on reading this - and I accept I might have been wrong - was that you were implying that anyone who didn't recoup the costs must either be lazy (ie, unwilling to make "a teensy bit of effort" or untalented - after all, it would be easy otherwise.