Earning a living from content creation?

This is somthing that's been on my mind since I started my little business.

Is it possible for a person to really make their living by creating and selling things in SL? Putting aside land, casinos, private island rentals etc, can a person create products in SL, set up a shop and make a RL living by seling them?

In short, if I work really really hard on my business can I go tell my boss where he can shove his crappy job, pleeeeeaaaase?

Vale

Yes it is possible. I know a few people who do exactly that.

It's not easy though, so don't give up the day job just yet.

Here are my thoughts on it.

Its possible definitely, I was looking at the stats and it seems the number of people who are making a livable amount of money from sl (3k and up) has grown..dont know how much trust to put in those numbers though.

Im a designer in RL as well and I also work in the music industry (though I have taken a much needed sabbatical from it to kind of pave my design path more). The designer work is self employment ..lately ive been devoting all of my spare time to creating things in SL. If i were not self employed i dont think the time i spend in sl creating would be possible at all.. and i think THAT is what helps me make the money i do in sl.

The thing that worries me is how 'safe' i would feal solely living off of an income in sl. Dont get me wrong, this is exactly just a platform to further my self employment... But the thing is...with the way Linden Lab acts, i often find myself wondering "when will it end"... I dont think id feel safe going out and buying a home on SL profits even if I was making 6k a month. Nor would I feel safe raising a family on it.

BUT people do it. And i guess as with any job...you could just as easily lose your RL job. I mean, theres always stories about big businesses laying of thousands of employees..so i guess really, whats the difference?

My advice is just- take the chance. I took the chance of cutting down my RL work, and extending that time into SL..and it sure paid off. i dont regret it, but in all honestly like I said.. i dont feel 100% safe.

Opinions differ im sure.









Ps- one great thing about designing in SL , atleast for me, is that i dont have to work on something everyday. You can make something, put it out, and theres SO MANY people in SL, rotating in and out, that youre always selling something. Just need to keep dishing out those new products just to stay fresh and have things for the returning customers. its easier than any Rl design work ive done in a lot of ways.

But I really want to!

I've been hammering away at PSP for almost two months now, I've learned alot and my things are starting to come together now. My little business so far gets about 10-20 sales per day, which I don't think is bad considering I'm so new. I've just started work on my new shop, going to completly redo everything, starting from scratch with the lessons I've learned

For as long as I've been doing this I've never really known how high to set my sights, I've never known what was possible as far as making money goes. Right now I'm just having fun, I'm my own boss here, the ruler of my own little evil empire and there's nothing else I'd rather be doing with my time. If I can just bring enough in to make ends meet I'll be more than happy, if you get a job you love you never have to work again!

Vale

This is somthing that has already crossed my mind, I wish I'd discovered SL way back in the begining, I'm starting to think I've jumped in just as SL is starting to come apart. On the other hand, SL is growing faster than ever, SL are strugling to keep up but at least they're trying and, fingers crossed, they'll be able to pull it off. If SL really does end up with 100K+ online and stable we'll all benefit. Fingers crossed <<<---underlined twice in red.

I already know there isn't a job for life here, but it's the first step. Right now my RL job pays just above the minimum wage, it's dull and unrewarding work and without wishing to sound big headed, I've always thought I could do better. Running my boutique here has, if nothing else, given my the type of confidence boost that I've never known before, the sky really is the limit.

Vale

I would say it is certainly possible. So you are making 10-20 sales a day on a small operation. Let's say your average price is L$200, and so you are making somewhere between $300-400 US per month. Now have a look at the big enterprises like Nyte & Day, and just try to imagine what they are bringing in in comparison to your one little shop.

Well, I dont know..I cant really fatham a platform such as this being gone. But there are a lot of things that can happen. I think this was a breakthrough and I dont think this will ever fade away, second life might... But the essence of it wont. After having the luck to find SL and interact with ppl i often thing "DANG! what was i doing online before this?!" id hate to go back to basic chat..this is so much more.

Im sure in the near future we will see others like SL which allow users to create their own world to pop up..then, we will have SLers migrate there....leaving this SL with less people or whatever. And leaving u in a new world if you chose having to see if your stuff is accepted there like it was in SL. (There are already other worlds but none ive found allow me to release creativity and make RL money for it)


I guess just worry about the NOW, and when the future brings that type of problem- tackle it.


Really, what IS certain in this world? Nothing. Your life, your job, your family....nothing is promised to us. It could all be gone tomorrow. Sure SL MIGHT be gone in 2 years, but there are also employees of RL jobs who ha ve been with the company for 15 years who just MIGHT be layed off as well- things happen. Its best to not live in fear. But ive just always struggled wondering how ppl feel safe....just from the actions LL has pulled out with in the past, they dont strike me as people who care for their user base.

Would it make sense for someone trying to earn a living doing free-lance texture design work in SL to also try doing similar stuff for other virtual worlds and games and such? If so which ones?

I could probably live off what I make in SL. But I don't trust it to be in a fit state in six months time, or something could happen to wipe out the prefab market and leave me with nothing.

So I'll make hay while the sun shines.

Yes, I would think using anything you can to further what youre doing is good. (Not only virtual worlds but there are other places, eg turbosquid)

I dont know of any other virtual world where the money flows like it does in SL.

My strong advice is "Don't pack in the day job".

SL is a great way of generating a real second income if you can build up your product portfolio over time. However, in my experience it is not a secure primary income source because of the bugs, downtime, changes and new threats that lurk on the horizon. Build in your lesuire time and over the months and maybe years you you will have amassed enough content to expand your enterprise and have a second income that matches your primary income.

I believe it is possible to make a living from SL (content creation especially). Some people make millions of linden that way. However, i don't... I'm a content creator but nothing i sell is that valuable. I could do it if i wanted to, but i haven't. I make a few thousand linden a month. I am happy with what i made because it makes things easier in SL. Someday i would like to reach for that goal though. I just don't have the right moral to put myself into a situation where i have to help millions of customers figure things out hehe.

My aim with selling things I make (and also in small-scale land dealing) is to make enough money to cover my costs of being a land-owning premium account holder - plus a bit extra on top if I'm lucky.

Selling stuff in SL is a bit hit and miss because you are in competition not only with other maker/sellers, but with freebies - some of which are pretty good.

I have bought very few things in my 6 months in SL - I've either made use of freebies or made my own things. Things I sell are mostly things I've made for myself or made just to see what they look like, and then thought they might be marketable.

Now, though, I'm working on ideas for things to make primarily for marketing, like my 'CODA' modern house - I don't actually live in one of these because I like the place I built for myself beforehand and don't want to change it. But if this wasn't the case I would live in one!!!!!!

There are people who make a living from their sales in SL.

However, it's very difficult - and if you are skilled enough to be able to do it, then you could probably make more money by doing the same kind of work as an RL job. Also as others have mentioned, the SL market is very fragile.

In the current status, it is more likely that you'll earn more money by doing "metaverse consultancy" than by actual sales in world.

I started SL with ambitions to make some side money doing content creation, a friend had told me how he was making shirts and selling them, and I also got wind that the game dollars were exchangable for USD so I got busy creating a fill in a market gap. To this day I have never purchased any L$ from Lindex everything I have purchased and all land purchases have come soley from my business profit. I currently pay a $125/month tier fee to LL for my almost 1/2 sim worth of land that was all purchased with game profits.

On a good month I pull in well over two thousand usd net profit, my ambitions for this month are to make ten thousand usd net profit. I am also currently in the process of purchasing a private island from LL and this is all being paid for by my game profits.

When I started selling at a fair rate I told myself 5 thousand L$ a day = 500 usd a month and to me that was worth it to continue. I never wanted to replace my RL job with SL income because I found it to be unsteady and risky however I did leave my RL job last week and intend to make twice as much on SL this year than in my RL job.

So yes it is possible

I think the answer depends a lot on how much money you consider "a living."

If you live somewhere where, say, US$500 a month is a lot of cash, you can probably do it if you work hard and have skilz. If you live in Beverly Hills, it might be a little tougher to make enough to live on.

Alvin Toffler stated it best, what, 40 years ago?

A little book called Future Shock, if I recall correctly.

Could anyone find *any* job that was done the same way as it was just a few decades prior?

You can't, and it's more true today than ever.

When I went to high school I learned how to draw engineering and architectural drawings on vellum paper. There were computers then, of course, in fact the IBM PC had just come out.

But there were no web designers, there were no search engines, no cost-per-click, no text messages. Yahoo was a term for an idiot and rofl's were real, and kinda made you dirty.

So... can you make a living on the grid? I look at my first life business and its dependency on the internet today, and ask...

Will you be able to make a living *without* the grid in ten years?

Something to think about.

When I was a college freshman, only a top-of-the-line calculator could handle square roots. I remember having to pay $80 for one because I needed it in my statistics class. Engineering students were still using slide rules clipped to their belt loop. (It would be a few years still before calculators could fit in a pocket.)

And in graduate school, ONE person was using this oddity called word processing to edit her dissertation. She had to use the single dumb terminal in the graduate dorm to connect to the university's main frame to do it and periodically we would hear her screams when she lost her latest draft due to some unexplained system glitch.

Fast forward 30 years and I work as a developer in an enterprise level internet company, coding in C# on the .NET platform. I was a SOCIOLOGY major in college; now I'm a programmer.

Grab the wave.

Try it part-time for supplemental for a few months and see how that goes. Don't think about doing it full-time until you are confident that there is extra money out there if you only had extra time to work for it.

Personally, I have many business ideas. But my modest goal is that the profit I make from any business will exceed the money I spend on playing Second Life. If anything I do turns into a way of making serious real world money, I'll deal with that situation when it happens.

Swapping your RL job for a SL one isn't as risky as you may think. Assuming you can always go back to a RL job if this all suddenly fails. I am finding more and more, I spend more hours in SL creating and selling, than I actually do in my RL job. There will come a day soon, when I have to decide, do I go to the office, or to my computer downstairs? The decision will be, how do I pay the mortgage and the bills? If the income from SL exceeds or matches that of RL and shows a growth pattern, then a simple phone call to the office would be my answer.

Life is not a rehersal.....

Making a full-time living wage on content creation in SL today is a lot like intending to make a living in professional sports. Many, many people play the game. Very few - perhaps 2 percent - make a profit from it. Maybe 200 people out of the millions who work in SL make what most people would call a full-time income that they can live on, just from working in SL. The ones who succeed have a rare combination of talent, dedication, hard work, initial investment capital, and being in the right place at the right time. And much like making a living in Sports, it only takes a few small events, entirely outside of your control, to bring it all to a crashing halt.

I make a steady positive L$ flow in SL, and manage on the average to take a little cash out for non-SL expenses every month, while paying 100% of my in-world expenses with profits earned in-world. That includes paying for the purchase of a modest parcel of land on a private island and paying my monthly maintenance fees, paying rent on three mall vending sites, as well as providing a decent budget for myself and several alts to cover clothes and other in-world expenses. Life is good, in SL, for now. I work 10 to 30 hours a weel on SL-related stuff, in addition to holding down a full-time day job in RL.

But what I earn in SL couldn't possibly compare to my earning potential in the real world.

Being self-employed in SL, as in RL, means you have no benefits package, no retiurement plan, or any of the other perks of having a normal job. In general, you work twice as hard to get there when you're self-employed.

Can it be done though? Well, it depends a lot on your standard of living. If all you are capable of in the real world is a minimum wage job, and if you have the right skills and talent for work in SL, you could do just as well in SL if you apply yourself. I know one person who is doing just that.

She's happy with her income, but it's far less than I could support my own family on. If you're a college graduate with a degree and decent job skills that real world employers pay good wages for, I think it is unlikely that SL could ever match that.

so some things don't change then?

Our college motto ..... backup, backup .. BACKUP!!!!

If you can even cover half your tier or make some extra $L to spend in world, I would say it is worth it. I don't know if there will ever be a content creator that becomes the next [insert well known land queen's name here], but I have known a few that do quite well in their craft. Anything is possible with the right ingredients, knowledge and patience in SL. How much is enough is all relative to your standard of living and expectations.

... is that combination even possible!?

Yes. Case in point: Someone who has artistic talnet but who also has physical limitations that prevent them from working more than an hour or so without resting. It would be impossible for them to hold down most RL jobs. But in SL, they can work a bit, rest, work a bit more , rest... and can essentially work at the pace their body allows them to maintain, setting their own schedule.