Second Life News & Events & Guides

How much money is there to be made in Second Life?

The amount of money you can make is directly tied to real world skills - texturing skills, programming, etc. An established clothing designer I know makes around US$80,000 a year on a catalogue with more than 1,000 items. There's very little in the way of hourly contract jobs outside of a few small groups - but there's plenty of room for entrepreneurial activity if you can stand the hours.

How does your Second Life job compare with a standard 9-5 job?

It's not your average desk job - that's for certain, the great side is you get to work with a lot of interesting people from all over the globe; and there really is nothing else like the Second Life platform - you get to work on the cutting edge of Internet applications in a creative way. The downside is it's risky; at any moment everything could explode; Linden Labs could go bankrupt, and you would be out with nothing.

The best part of the job is we get to be really creative: we get to build entire worlds from scratch, and we have people going crazy over them. Pretty much everything we build gets a really great positive reaction from people. We have people lined up waiting for us to finish projects and let them in.

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I don't think we've had any particularly bad incidents ... the worst I can think of is the odd bit of harassment to our residents we have to clean up after.

What first attracted you to the job?

I started using Second Life as a recreational activity - [drawn by] the lure of being able to program and see your results in a 3D environment 'live' - I had come over from a similar but older environment in January 2004. Back then, there weren't any moneymaking opportunities as the in-world currency was worthless.

Around early 2005, the currency picked up real tangible value. It took us awhile to realise it; but we started several projects mid-way through the year, including the Azure Islands; which has grown at an exponential rate ever since. My business partner, Alex, has been in since 2002 as an alpha tester.

Do you know of many other people who make money from Second Life?

There's around 200 people in Second Life who make more than US$1,000 a month, of that I would estimate around 20 of them make enough for a full time living, and of that around five who make more than US$200,000/year in revenue. There are a lot of creative people who are being noticed and hired by big businesses to build them a presence inside of Second Life; there's been a fantastic amount of growth this year. Second Life is on track for 2 million accounts by Christmas.