tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6070972110446697029.post5894834945233791082..comments2021-09-10T23:38:21.337-07:00Comments on Virtual Jungle: Funny MoneyDanton Sidewayshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08592611193635208286noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6070972110446697029.post-14936482351079783752008-02-19T14:03:00.000-08:002008-02-19T14:03:00.000-08:00Yes it is still possible to make money in SL. But ...Yes it is still possible to make money in SL. But to do you it must make a product or provide a service that solves a problem for SL residents<BR/><BR/>As a real life product designer, I have seen a very common malady in SL that does not exist in RL because the cost of producting a useless product in RL prohibits much of the schlock that we see being purveyed in SL where the cost is next to nothing. <BR/><BR/>If you want a successful business in SL, do some market research, hang out a while and look for a REAL need among the inhabitants, create your product and test it thoroughly. Debug it till you are sick of it! Make sure it really does what you want it to do and beta test it with friends. Listen to them carefully - if they don't care about your product, no one else will either.<BR/><BR/>When you sell the product, stand behind it: upgrade it as necessary, improve it, listen to your customers - (they are afterall paying your bills). Be there to support it. Treat your customers with respect and take their suggestions. Stand by a fair price and do not give in to selling it for less than it is worth. Answer your IM's and e-mails - <BR/><BR/>In short, you cannot shortcut the path to creating wealth if you want to have wealth. Solutions to non-problems are not worth anything to anyone except as a curiosity, which don't pay a plug Linden. Product design in SL is no less work than in RL. It took me several months to release my first product - to make it perfect and useful and it has been worth every minute of that effort as a steady stream of income.<BR/><BR/>Real solutions to real problems will always be worth paying for.Valradica Valehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05595763281399560381noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6070972110446697029.post-20187494067329276532008-01-20T02:56:00.000-08:002008-01-20T02:56:00.000-08:00Danton, you have to study SL history and economics...Danton, you have to study SL history and economics way more than you have, and avoid making facile and erroneous statements to the effect that there is now an "oligarchy" that is closed with everyone frozen out, and that Prokofy is somehow suspected of being at the top of this heap, and that I have no reason to protest it -- all false premises and conclusions.<BR/><BR/>Second Life is conceived of a pyramid even by its makers, with 10 percent or so at the top making the content for the other 90 percent. If you include "content" rearranging the content of others (houses, landscaping) and providing services (rentals) then perahsp it's 15-20 percent, but most are consumers. <BR/><BR/>This small percentage of active prosumers, if you will, in relation to Linden Lab, are divided roughly into content creators -- designers, programmers, scripters, builders, animators, etc. -- and land barons.<BR/><BR/>You're completely forgetting that the land barons, while famous for having Anshe Chung supposedly making a real-life million, are collectively, much lower wage-earners than the content creators. Read the press from 2003-2005 and you'll find figures like Craig Altman, Owen Khan, Cristiano Midnight who made RL fortunes of $50,000 US or more in animations. Then there are dress designers like Simone who told the Washington Post she made about $60,000 US last year. This is a small grouping of perhaps a few thousand at most, but these people are all making authentic living wages even by New York standards.<BR/><BR/>Land barons, however, have to work way more hours doing customer service, and have far greater costs (tier, prefabs, etc). Those who do best are those like Desmond Shang who have their own building and scripting skills to add to their business without having to hire others.<BR/><BR/>On this pyramid, I'm quite low down -- any island dealer with 20-30 islands probably makes double what I do, because islands simply sell better and are more fully occupied. I can easily lose half a month's income from 2 weeks of solid griefing driving customers out of 4 of my sims -- that never happens to islands.<BR/><BR/>I'm the largest mainland rentals agent just because I have a lot of customers, around 1300-1500 or so I think now, but these range from $25 stalls to lowly $150 newbie cabins in Lindens, not the $25 and $40 *US* per parcel that Desmond can gain, or many others with more holdings than he, i.e. D'alliez. <BR/><BR/>I'm not in any oligarchy in SL, because on the mainland, your income is more sparse, and I plough some of my income back into supporting newbie communities and the SL Public Land Preserve. So your conclusions are way off.<BR/><BR/>Gambling, casinos, banks, prostitution -- these businesses were all coining money too, far more than anything I'd even approximate.<BR/><BR/>What can be said about all these businesses in SL is that except for a few of these high-end designers, most people, including myself, cannot be said to be billing for our hours. If we did, we'd break even or lose.<BR/><BR/>What happened as the telehubs began to fold were several other events, also largely driven by Anshe which I should write in more detail on my own blog some day, but these included the summer/fall 2005 cornering of beachfront property, which she jacked up to a very high price not so much to sell it, but to make the sticker shock drive people to her burgeoning island collection. So she cornered the market, but then put portals on each parcel which when touched, pulled up a map and brought you to Dreamland, where you could find less laggy and blighty land in zone d areas. Both Anshe and Desmond and others actively played on the fears of sign extortion, begun by the "Bush Guy" in 2005, which drove many to the islands.<BR/><BR/>Some of the ad extortion was done by alts or even mains of those selling island villas, to help force people off the mainland to more high-priced private islands.<BR/><BR/>Meanwhile, clubs took the place left void by most of the telehubs (some telehubs persisted, like Ross and even Brownlee, but most died). Clubs increasingly used camping schemes to get eyeballs which they dragged in front of numerous vendors of clothing and attachments, and thus turned the clubs into malls. Some clubs became wall-to-wall vendors with zombies and slot machines.<BR/><BR/>For me, it wasn't very beneficial to have offices in Anshe's mall -- the point was merely to gain visibility. I had 3 offices on 3 of her telehub malls, and they hardly produced any sales, but they helped create logo familiarity like an ad and helped people see in the Anshe context that there was an alternative rentals company that specialized in mainland and in providing prefabs to people for free. Anshe got out of the mainland land rental business very early, it wasn't worth her time, she moved to islands after 2 planned communities on the mainland failed due to griefing and blight on the edges and lack of sufficient sales.<BR/><BR/>I disagree that there is no place to open up a business anymore in SL. While Americans are wringing their hands and whining, Brazilians and Dutch and Russians are streaming in and opening up competing rental, services, widget businesses all over. They lowered the prices to compete and added better service -- the mistake certain Americans, Australians, British did among the early adapters is over-script everything -- which means the scripts broke on Linden patches and poor performance and exasperated people who couldn't reach no-show landlords or vendors when payments failed.<BR/><BR/>The people who do the best are those who log on and stand behind their store counter day and night with the "we dose but never close" and "time to lean, time to clean" mentality that created the successful early General Stores and then the franchised 7-11s all over America.<BR/><BR/>Content creators are making money from prefabs, furniture, animations, clothing, inventions to do various things (these are really amazing when you study them on sites like Slexchange.com).<BR/><BR/>ProkofyUnknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17462957723334149373noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6070972110446697029.post-64236693468306796332008-01-12T06:07:00.000-08:002008-01-12T06:07:00.000-08:00I see that you're a bit pessimistic on "launching ...I see that you're a bit pessimistic on "launching a new business" in SL, or perhaps just realistic. There is an historical reason for the early landbarons to have risen to the top of the pyramid: in 2003, when they started, SL was <I>tiny</I>. Even when I joined SL, with its 12,000 registered accounts (almost all pretty much active), people blogged that SL was "so big that walking from one end to the other took about 3 days" (avatars walk at about the same speed as real humans, ie. 5-6 km/hour).<BR/><BR/>Under such conditions, in a tiny place, it's easy to get an edge pretty soon. Almost everybody will have seen "most of SL". You'll at least have known all the "cool places" and could start launching your business there.<BR/><BR/>As SL grew, the telehubs were indeed the aggregation points for new businesses to be launched. When LL removed them, SL was at a stage where the mainland was as big as all private islands put together, so the natural change for commercial activities was to move to the private islands (which might be, after all, what LL had in mind...). Today, the mainland is perhaps about 20-25% of the total landmass. The rest is a plethora of unconnected islands.<BR/><BR/>So how can you start your business in SL and be successful? In my RL lectures I tend to use the metaphor of the person who just bought a tiny restaurant up in the Highlands, on a village with a few dozen inhabitants. You remodel your restaurant and now face the population of the whole world, which is these days bigger than New York City or countries like Portugal, Austria, or Sweden, and will very likely surpass Australia by the end of 2008. How can your tiny restaurant, up in the mountains, address patrons that come from all over the place?<BR/><BR/>The answer is, of course, you can't. Just like in RL, you cannot expect that just because you have done a good deal and bought your shop somewhere, you're now going to get enough customers "because you exist". You need to seriously advertise your business to be able to slowly crawl up to the top. And that's way more costly in 2008 than it was on the tiny world of 2003 when "everybody knew everybody else".<BR/><BR/>So it's obvious that the 2003 landbarons will obviously have a huge lead on the rest of us. Anshe is widely known, she was on the cover of Time magazine, but these days Azure Islands have a larger landmass than Dreamland. Even "newcomers" like Prokofy or Desmond's Caledon boast at least a thousand customers each. But they're "less known" (at least as land barons).<BR/><BR/>But there are several avenues for being successful — it depends on how <I>mature</I> your business model is. Three examples come to mind, one of which, sadly, will be gone by January 22. The first is fashion. Fashion has its own culture, its own blogs (more than any other area!), its own critics and newspapers, its own venues, contacts, and networks. People like <A HREF="http://analutetia.blogspot.com/" REL="nofollow">Ana Lutetia</A> came to SL only in 2007, established themselves as one of the major fashion setters in SL (after being a successful model), and is now one of the top references in the fashion world — no one starting their business is able to ignore her if they wish to be widely known. And she constantly introduces new, talented designers to the fashion subculture in SL. In effect, she creates this huge floating sign on top of the restaurant up in the hills and says: "This is the place to shop for clothes". And thus a new brand gets launched and quickly becomes as widely known as the ones back in 2003.<BR/><BR/>The second group are the educators. These got a boost very early on from Linden Lab — the SL:Campus project, Pathfinder Linden's constant support, cheaper islands, etc. They come from thousands and thousands of universities; they group together at their local or national level and then hierarchically get together at the international level as well. The education mailing list has well over 6,000 members, but this is just a small fraction of all educators in SL. They span a thousand sims with their projects. They organise huge venues (like NMC does), sponsor thousands of projects, do RL conferences all the time, and write hundreds of papers and even some books, that are widespread among their community. If you wish to set up an academic or research facility in SL, nothing could be more easier — there will always be someone around to help. (I also claim that this group is so huge, and their community so mature and interconnected, that even if everybody else would leave SL, they have "critical mass" to keep SL "alive" for the next few decades. Educators tend to stick together and also stick to a specific technology for a long time. They're all long runners.)<BR/><BR/>The last one is finance. Similar to fashion, they have their own blogosphere, magazines, and venues. All "bankers" used to know and invest in each other; they generated together enough PR and media splash to create a whole subculture around SL's financial world. There is a "Wall Street" for SL (even if it is not a single place, but scattered around the world) where everybody knows everybody else — and even newcomers are widely announced.<BR/><BR/>Sadly, as said, LL is throwing this subculture out of SL.<BR/><BR/>There are also good runner-ups, however. The art scene in SL was a bit unorganised, with too many amateurs in 2004/5 who were simply clueless and had no idea on how the artists in RL network — gallery owners, curators, critics, museums, and conferences, none of these things existed back then. Now they're fully organised — perhaps not at the scale of the fashion and financial world, but they're getting there. Be part of the network, and even tiny museums like the Neufreistadt Museum of Contemporary Art gets into the "important to visit" lists pretty quickly and become a hotspot for the artistic movement in SL.<BR/><BR/>A subset of that group which has a huge mainstream support are the live musicians. Although not so organised overall — they have no "reference website" or a focus point for their work. Still, their agents roam the grid in search of venues for offering their live shows. They're pretty organised, even if not at the level of the other artistic groups.<BR/><BR/>And there are also the lawyer groups — some of them, like Benjamin Duranske or Jessica Holyoke or even Ashcroft Burnham, have escaped out of the closely-knit legal subculture and come into the mainstream with their opinions and thoughts. They are less organised yet, but getting there quickly — they're natural networkers, from a professional point of view, and band together quickly. They are also incredibly argumentative :) and this might explain why their "subculture" is not so tightly-knit (yet...) as the others.<BR/><BR/>And finally, there are the sustentability groups — promoting eco-friendly solutions in SL. They also run their own loose organisation, exchange contacts, and arrange conference and exhibition spaces for each other, starting from a network of "core sims" that serve as the focus for their work.<BR/><BR/>So what does this all mean? In a few areas, networking will give you good chances of success, even if you're just starting "with a tiny shop". There is good reason why one of the most popular jobs in SL is fashion design (at least, beyond the mature jobs). They know that if their tiny shop grabs the attention of one of the fashion critics, they'll be "in the loop" pretty quickly, even if they're complete newbies.<BR/><BR/>SL is a strange place, sure, but it works like the real world — networking is one of the most important things to get yourself established. Advertising — and these days it means expending a lot! — will also have an impact, but it's harder. Rezzable, for instance, are relying much more on advertising on <I>all</I> possible blogs and websites in SL, and getting good PR on them too, than on networking — and they're being successful that way too.Gwyneth Llewelynhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03394790308025005462noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6070972110446697029.post-34492730776387593212008-01-09T05:53:00.000-08:002008-01-09T05:53:00.000-08:00Interesting!- Sleazy.Interesting!<BR/>- Sleazy.TGhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02645086681144240356noreply@blogger.com