Guess who must be that 1.7 mio “top earner”? And the 1.7 mio won’t even cover the bill alone. There have to be payments received through other channels such as Paypal if there is supposed to be a profit at all.

Huge mistake.

Business in the metaverse is a swiss-cheese simulcrum of what doing business in the real world would be like, and you have to know where those holes are so you don’t expend vital energy on activity that simply has no relevance to the SL environment. Every business owner I’ve met who fails to take this fact into account is losing his shirt.

Sometimes they’re just in business for the wrong reason, and that’s just as lethal in on the metaverse as it is anywhere else. If you’re not in the business as a lifestyle choice because you get paid to do what you love (and you’re at least breaking even), or you’re not doing it to fill a need of some kind or adding something vital to the community, then you’re just burning your own capital needlessly. Is it really worth spending all that money every month just so you can prance around in a suit or have a coterie of sycophants?

If you think this comment is about you, then you need to sit down and rethink things. It might be.

I don’t feel that your posts were stupid at all. I agree that it actually is difficult to make money in Second Life, or at least when I was in SL it was. I just don’t think it’s impossible.

1.NO problems with Porn, But is the virtual user gen economy going to be only 16 year olds flashing on cams, and a few giant sex toy makers, who like stroker will get knocked off via IP messes like the ones in SL, over and over again. Good to be a RL lawyer,aka Benjie, but even the Porno biz gets tight when every corner has 20 hookers.

2. No Problems with speculators trading in servers as faux land. but thats a Miami Future, not a future for a global metaverse.

3. No problems with RL pundits and experts of the week conning as much money and PR as they can from those hungry to be “cool” in corporate waiste world.

4. No problems with hacker experts getting the same folks to make them the latest “boyz bands”

But, real money, over real time, to put real people in housing, food, and the family raising business. SL hasnt done this, and won’t. The ones who run the lab, like to talk “better worlds” and “tangerine dreams”.

Im an old flash dude, I bought it and make money using it. Simple. An no one will make me move/delete/ or TOS change my or my clients work with a blog post of “changes” every 3 months.

Alot make a living using Adobe or old Macromedia products we bought. I like many of you want a growing 3d metaverse like internet with all sorts of stuff being made and sold. I just don’t believe that SL can be it, and that anyone telling you it is, isn’t being very truthful. The same goes to any of the hyped “virtual worlds” with those ever changing TOS’s.

Show me the future where 50% of us can make a “middle class” living just in systems that run like Second Life? If you can I’ve got some swamp land for you on the mainland.

I’m guessing the most successful people are busy doing more profitable things than reading blog comments and hanging out in forums Seriously, who’s your favorite designer? How often do you see them post?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a product to release today…

Not to rain on your fluffer day parade, Jahar, but here, again, is what Hamlet said:

“with the top earner grossing an estimated $1.7 million”

As in …

Top.

Earner.

Earner as in one who earns. Money, I presume.

As in confusion of earnings with revenues.

But please do keep spinning. Maybe you can drill your way to the center of the earth.

Good question Cashout. I’ve heard a few people say that this has been discussed. Shutting down SL and LL working on the corporate direction future tense. Not sure if it’s accurate, but it’s been said a few times here lately.

As far as “alot” of people making a living in SL, it’s just not happening. Sure, there are some, but let’s not get overly optimistic about paychecks of 50-100K. Let alone a million cashout. I had two sims in SL, a furniture store, and sold content. I hardly made a living at it. And between rentals and selling goods, you were doing good to pay tier.

I sold my half of the two sims, got out of doing any selling in SL. There are a few making okay money in SL, but you are talking a handful. Not many. And those making money are spending shit loads including the advertisement. Most in SL that I’ve talked to over 3 years told me that they are completely satisfied if they can just make the tier on the sims and have one paid for for themselves with the proceeds of the others.

Good thing the Herald doesn’t have a business section. You might actually manage to make CNBC look like they know what they’re talking about in comparison.

You’d be amazed at what types of things you can capitalize on. I know that I am consistently amazed. In the past 365 days, I have capitalized on my reputation as a griefer and earned more than $100,000 outside of Second Life and virtual worlds. I never intended it to be this way, it just sort of happened. BTW that figure includes profits not only from newspaper articles that I wrote, but other projects that I have been involved in that actually have nothing to do with Second Life at all.

In fact, in September of 2008 I was even offered work as a civilian consultant with the FBI when I was to meet with agents in Atlanta in the company of one of the nation’s leading cyber-security experts whom I was interviewing for an unrelated news article involving a political scandal here in Georgia. Because of my notoriety, I was able to capture the interest of individuals who otherwise would not have given me the time of day before then. And I did all of this with a GED that I got in the 9th grade.

Now people actually pay me to write. I think I just got lucky but the simple fact is that my car is paid off and my bills are taken care of and I don’t have to work if I don’t want to because I have a steady stream of royalties…all of this because I dropped some self-replicating dicks on some virtual land. Sweetness.

Don’t discount the possibilities.