Making 30k-50k A Year Selling On Second Life, Is It Possible?

[Amethyst Jetaime]

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bebejee wrote:

Anyways regarding Stiletto Moody, they werent that great according to posters at the third party forum, SM had others designing things for them, paid them peanuts and that too not on time, then sold the stuff overpriced, their shoes were just for that time, when people though expensive meant status.

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Stiletto Moody wasn't just a status thing.  They were the first to produce sculpted shoes that looked good and were a vast improvement over the prim shoes available at the time. Granted they were expensive, compared to most prim shoes, but they were such an improvement women paid the price if they could afford to do so.  Other sculpted shoes came out but at first they just weren't the quality Moody offered.  However eventually that changed too and a lot of people stopped buying Moody shoes since you could get nicely designed good quality shoes for less.  

 

They were also the first to produce sculpted feet in the shoes if I remember correctly,  however I never liked theirs as they looked like you were wearing a prosthetic and others came out with better ones for less money pretty quickly.

 

[Perrie Juran]

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Tari Landar wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

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Bobbie Faulds wrote:

Scion chickens actually started the breedables though Meeroos are cuter

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Scion chickens started it. But it went nuts all over SL and not just a smaller group with Meeroos.

- That's the key. Not to invent the thing, but to make it a fad.

 

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If you want to play the "who came first" game, Ozimals was massive before Meeroos were even a thought, much less popular. Ozimals is also stillquite popular among the breedables, far more popular than meeroos in reputation alone, but that probably depends on who you ask.

Ozimals made it a fad with their beta phases, and then brought it to the grid on a massive scale with their hunt and opening. In fact Ozimals took what was a dying market, due to the effects of Sion, and brought it to life. That paved the way for every other breedable on the market.

But, sion wasn't the first breedable, either, it was simply the first to be openly released to the entire grid(regardless of its popularity, which was actually larger than most want to admit, it just didn't last long due to the functionality).

Of course I'm a bit of a breedable nerd, so I probably follow the entire market, objectively, a lot closer than some might.

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Im not sure if the Chickens were so much a problem by themselves. It was the Number of Chickens and all the collisions they caused.  Also this was while LL was still trying to figure out how to handle the amount of memory scripts were using, so today the scripts might be a moot point.

Still, if New World Notes was correct, Scion Chickens grossed Six Figures U.S.D. in just one month.

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Tari Landar wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

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Bobbie Faulds wrote:

Scion chickens actually started the breedables though Meeroos are cuter

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Scion chickens started it. But it went nuts all over SL and not just a smaller group with Meeroos.

- That's the key. Not to invent the thing, but to make it a fad.

 

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If you want to play the "who came first" game, Ozimals was massive before Meeroos were even a thought, much less popular. Ozimals is also stillquite popular among the breedables, far more popular than meeroos in reputation alone, but that probably depends on who you ask.

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That's just the thing though.

Ozimals might have been popular with people who were into breedables.

But Meeroos got people who could care less about the concept, or even disliked it, to start collecting them. Ozimals - however big they might be among the hardcore, just didn't have multiple multi-sim malls, linden labs changing its advertizing programs, and stacks of blogs outside the breedables community talking it up.

 

But this is all a side topic.

The point I wanted to make here, is that to make 'real life bill paying' money in SL, you need to be THE FAD, the trendsetter. Or you might as well just consider it a hobby. But that said, $50k a year is not even enough to pay real-life bills...

 

[Lexia Moonstone]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

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Tari Landar wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

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Bobbie Faulds wrote:

Scion chickens actually started the breedables though Meeroos are cuter

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Scion chickens started it. But it went nuts all over SL and not just a smaller group with Meeroos.

- That's the key. Not to invent the thing, but to make it a fad.

 

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If you want to play the "who came first" game, Ozimals was massive before Meeroos were even a thought, much less popular. Ozimals is also stillquite popular among the breedables, far more popular than meeroos in reputation alone, but that probably depends on who you ask.

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That's just the thing though.

Ozimals might have been popular with people who were into breedables.

But Meeroos got people who could care less about the concept, or even disliked it, to start collecting them. Ozimals - however big they might be among the hardcore, just didn't have multiple multi-sim malls, linden labs changing its advertizing programs, and stacks of blogs outside the breedables community talking it up.

 

But this is all a side topic.

The point I wanted to make here, is that to make 'real life bill paying' money in SL, you need to be THE FAD, the trendsetter. Or you might as well just consider it a hobby. But that said, $50k a year is not even enough to pay real-life bills...

 

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Must be the cost of living where you live, I made less the $12,000 in 2014 and still managed to save 45% of my income.

[Tari Landar]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

 But that said, $50k a year is not even enough to pay real-life bills...

 

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I could live very, very comfortably on $50k a year. I have lived on far less, with a family, with rl bills of course. Cost of living plays a huge role though. I don't live in an area with a cost of living higher than the national average, it's pretty much on par with most aeas.

So, yes, if someone manages pulling out $30-$50k annually from sl income, it could easily be a very good living, especially for someone who knows what a budget is, and has self control when it comes to financial matters. I have made much, much less from sl income, and managed keeping rl bills affloat. I don't do so now, but if I wanted to put forth the effort and had the time, sl could quite easily be my only source of income again, and I'd still be doing pretty darn good.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

 

 But that said, $50k a year is not even enough to pay real-life bills...

 

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Maybe if you live in Manhatten.  Where I live $50K a year gets you a nice house and car as well as a comfortable life.  You even get to go on vacation to nice places.

Come to think of it, its probably why we have so many people from NYC moving here now.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

 

 But that said, $50k a year is not even enough to pay real-life bills...

 

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Maybe if you live in Manhatten.  Where I live $50K a year gets you a nice house and car as well as a comfortable life.  You even get to go on vacation to nice places.

Come to think of it, its probably why we have so many people from NYC moving here now.

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California.

$50k a year - I would be choosing between rent and food.

 

[Perrie Juran]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

 

 But that said, $50k a year is not even enough to pay real-life bills...

 

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Maybe if you live in Manhatten.  Where I live $50K a year gets you a nice house and car as well as a comfortable life.  You even get to go on vacation to nice places.

Come to think of it, its probably why we have so many people from NYC moving here now.

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California.

$50k a year - I would be choosing between rent and food.

 

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I just did a Cost of Living comparison between San Francisco and where I live on Numbeo.

The differences are scary.

Consumer Prices in San Francisco, CA are 32.12% higher than where I live.

Consumer Prices Including Rent in San Francisco, CA are 89.14% higher

Rent Prices in San Francisco, CA are 247.65% higher

Restaurant Prices in San Francisco, CA are 54.41% higher

Groceries Prices in San Francisco, CA are 34.38% higher

Local Purchasing Power in San Francisco, CA is 25.00% higher

 

[Lexia Moonstone]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

 

 But that said, $50k a year is not even enough to pay real-life bills...

 

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Maybe if you live in Manhatten.  Where I live $50K a year gets you a nice house and car as well as a comfortable life.  You even get to go on vacation to nice places.

Come to think of it, its probably why we have so many people from NYC moving here now.

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California.

$50k a year - I would be choosing between rent and food.

 

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I just did a Cost of Living comparison between San Francisco and where I live on

Numbeo

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The differences are scary.

Consumer Prices in San Francisco, CA are 32.12% higher than where I live.

Consumer Prices Including Rent in San Francisco, CA are 89.14% higher

Rent Prices in San Francisco, CA are 247.65% higher

Restaurant Prices in San Francisco, CA are 54.41% higher

Groceries Prices in San Francisco, CA are 34.38% higher

Local Purchasing Power in San Francisco, CA is 25.00% higher

 

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I wounder how that effects the cost of running Linden Lab and SL,  Land in SL might be cheaper if LL moved to Numbeo, or all most any where other then San Fransisco.  Would all so decrease the chance of SL being destroyed by an earth quake.  "Unscheduled Server Maintence, SL is down until the city is rebuilt" 

 

[Bobbie Faulds]

Actually not...corporate is in San Francisco but I understand that most of the servers are in Texas with a few in Boston.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

I wish there were servers still in Boston.. I would get better FPS again.. The only servers left are in Texas.

[Perrie Juran]

"We moved out of the facilities we had been using in Dallas; it's all in Phoenix now. Well, we call it Phoenix... I assume it's in that general area somewhere - I don't need to know, and usually you won't either.

With the use of the CDN, your network distance from the datacenter will make much less difference than it did before."

Oz Linden

[Sassy Romano]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

I wish there were servers still in Boston.. I would get better FPS again.. The only servers left are in Texas.

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Distance to data centre won't have any impact on the rate at which your graphics card renders a scene.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

I wish there were servers still in Boston.. I would get better FPS again.. The only servers left are in Texas.

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Distance to data centre won't have any impact on the rate at which your graphics card renders a scene.

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this is true, but there was less line interference when they were in Boston. It's only 15 miles from me..

[Syo Emerald]

Thats an interesting website...

I'm suprised San Francisco is that expensive...I compared it to my hometown (big city) and you would need to nearly double your income to keep your standart. I got the same kind of result with New York compared to my city. Other big US cities were affordable with much less increase in income.

[Perrie Juran]

 

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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Sassy Romano wrote:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

I wish there were servers still in Boston.. I would get better FPS again.. The only servers left are in Texas.

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Distance to data centre won't have any impact on the rate at which your graphics card renders a scene.

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this is true, but there was less line interference when they were in Boston. It's only 15 miles from me..

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I wonder what your ping time to a CDN server is now compared to Phoenix?

They haven't said where all these servers are located, but I'm averaging 20ms compared to pinging Phoenix where I get around 50 - 60 ms.

 

ETA, Wow have we gone off topic! 

[irihapeti]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

ETA, Wow have we gone off topic! 

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you maybe not get pinged for that

q;  (:

[Evangeline Arcadia]

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Mesh hands and feet and then the body, that's all Slink. You can't look at any shoes now without them being Slink compatible. 

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I'm constantly complaining about this to friends in-world. I've seen some gorgeous shoes at various places and it's really annoying to find they are only for slink feet. I don't want to pay thousands of lindens just for some feet, so I can buy nice shoes. I hope it doesn't become the norm for all shoemakers. If slink feet were half the price they are I might consider it, I do get that the maker may be trying to make a living but I'm not prepared to pay that kind of money in SL for feet (or a mesh body for that matter). 

Just a two minute rant:)

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Evangeline Arcadia wrote:

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Mesh hands and feet and then the body, that's all Slink. You can't look at any shoes now without them being Slink compatible. 

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I'm constantly complaining about this to friends in-world. I've seen some gorgeous shoes at various places and it's really annoying to find they are only for slink feet. I don't want to pay thousands of lindens just for some feet, so I can buy nice shoes. I hope it doesn't become the norm for all shoemakers. If slink feet were half the price they are I might consider it,

I do get that the maker may be trying to make a living but I'm not prepared to pay that kind of money in SL for feet (or a mesh body for that matter). 

Just a two minute rant:)

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Slink feet are 675.. not thousands..

[Bobbie Faulds]

And chances are you are looking at shoes for the high feet. Right now that's what most are. Those or the mid feet, so 1350 for the 2 feet. You really only need the flat if you go barefoot a lot.

[Evangeline Arcadia]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

Slink feet are 675.. not thousands..

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Really? I could have sworn they were a whole bunch more...must be my old age!....:matte-motes-bashful-cute: off to check them out again....(although it's still annoying that some of the best shoes I've seen require Slink....)

[Medhue Simoni]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

Yes it's possible.  The majority don't make that.  When LL used to post the statistics, that amount would put them in around the > 0.5% of top earners.

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Yep, when LL would post those stats, it was easy to tell where anyone stood in the whole scheme of things.

 

Most people do not make that much, but when you consider what it cost to own a sim, then you have to conclude that those people are making some kind of profit to cover those costs. So, yeah, people overall don't make that much, but there is obviously enough economic activity to support the system. This doesn't mean it isn't declining gradually tho.

When talking strictly about selling content, I think it really comes down to 2 things. 1st is that you have volume. If you are trying to make $50k of a handful of products, that likely isn't going to cut it, not to mention that such few products exposes you to less data to make better decision or learn from. 2nd, is find your niche, and a market for that niche. Many times, it is a few products that support the whole operation. This is also why volume helps, as you never know which products will be the 1's that really take off. Even for myself, it is really only about a dozen products that I sell that make up the bulk of my profits. Today, I put out many fewer products than I did years ago, but sell much better than when I put out products in masses.

I also don't think most people can understand the scope of the community. 100 sales on a new release over a couple months is not an uncommon thing, if it is a good product, and a "hot" item. If that product costs 500 lindens, that is a hundred, or so, dollars a month off 1 product. If you can just make 10-20 products that sell like that, you are golden. This doesn't even consider what happens if something is realy "hot". I'm sure that in the clothing market, or hair market, selling 500 on a new release in the first month is done on a pretty consistant basis.

I see many people questioning whether there are enough new customers for any merchant to maintain that kind of income. Surprisingly, when I look at my own stats, it's not new customers that are really the problem. If there is 1 thing about SL that should amaze everyone, is the amount of new people coming in every single day. It's almost crazy, and crazy for any "game". Yeah, a certain percentage are bots, but that still doesn't explain all of the daily influx.

What I think many people do not consider, when thinking about how virtual goods work, is how the business model is far more superior than any real world business model. The key reason is the fact that the items are easily reproducable. So, in a market like this, there is no cost to replicating, or even holding inventory. After you create the products, most of the cost of production is over with, and a good 90% of all sales are pure profit. It's the only reason the industry is sustainable. As long as you get the product to the market, you are guarenteed to make something back, pretty much. The added bonus today, is that there are many more markets to sell those 3D assets in. This means that today, SL creators have many more ways to capitalize on their creations outside of SL.

[Pamela Galli]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

What I think many people do not consider, when thinking about how virtual goods work, is how the business model is far more superior than any real world business model. The key reason is the fact that the items are easily reproducable. So, in a market like this, there is no cost to replicating, or even holding inventory. After you create the products, most of the cost of production is over with, and

a good 90% of all sales are pure profit.

It's the only reason the industry is sustainable. As long as you get the product to the market, you are guarenteed to make something back, pretty much. The added bonus today, is that there are many more markets to sell those 3D assets in. This means that today, SL creators have many more ways to capitalize on their creations outside of SL.

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Yes sometimes RL friends will suggest to me making something in RL, I guess thinking that would be some kind of step up. How little do they know....

[Natalia Basiat]

Full disclosure:

 

I ran an active business in SL from 2006-2009, then I gave up. I guess you could say I still run a business, but I haven't put much out in years and I don't even log in these days, though I get the bug once in a while and poke around.

However, when I started out back in 2006, I only made 200-1000L (linden) a month in the beginning. But within 6 months or so, I was making about $500 (dollars) a month and paying for all my shop rentals and land teir. I had a ton of vendor shops in nearly every niche mall. It would take me 8 hours to go around, once a month, and pay all my rent. To the OP: your friend that thinks he could work 4-6 hours and make that sort of money is wrong. I worked sometimes 14 hours a day.

At the peak of my income I was earning $1500-$2000 (again, dollars) a month. Then, within the space of a few months, it went from that to a few hundred, to 50 dollars, to almost nothing. I hadn't done anything differently, and the only thing I can think is that it was some combination of the economy crashing, big professional design teams moving into SL and the change of the search algorithm.  And I knew a lot of other vendors at the time making more than I was. One person I know of  made 'club' wear, and sexy dresses and made nearly $50k a year.

[Balder Miles]

 

It sounds unlikely. Maybe some years ago when SL was "hip". Seconf Life is a great concept, but an increasing number of rules and regulations killed the game. When I started 9 years ago anything was possible, but it changed quickly: I bought a Sim and made a casino, i bought slotmachines, poker and crap tables ect. worth 150.000LD. Suddenly Casino's was made illegal. 150.000LD down the drain. But land sales was good. I had close to 1.000.000LD in a SL Bank. Suddenly banks wasnt leagal either. The bank owner pulled the plug, and I lost a **bleep**load of money. Linden Lab must have been able to predict that alot of users lost fortunes when they threw the "banking ban bomb". and therefore I consider Linden Lab for being complicit in that 1000 some users lost their money  These were the main bump that made me more or less leave SL It's funny that "Second Life" is ruled by Real Life laws...bur who's laws ?. American laws.....It feels stupid for an european to have these restrictions.

One could wish, that Linden Lab moved their headquater to a country where they could turn SL into the world that  it could and ought to be.