Part of running a business is monitoring your income streams, it’s difficult in Second Life to make money but it’s even more difficult to do if you aren’t focused and determined. Second Life is very easy to start a business in and like most people I did it without fully understanding the principles I should have been using. One of the things I’ve done to educate myself is read alot. One of the things that people who understand Entrepreneurship say about starting ventures is that you should diversify your income streams, especially if you have a low risk. IDG currently has several income streams, and I’ve decided to share some of them with you.
Currently our main focus is on building, mostly houses with specialties in low prim gothic and castle design. This is what we started with. The passion of many of us is custom design, making sure the customer is happy. However the numbers for this aren’t that great. According to the most recent stats there are 16,781,504 residents in Second Life, however, that number is total signups since they started, and nobody really thinks that number is more then the marketing number it’s meant to be. The 1,440,000 is a slightly better number, that’s the number of residents that have logged in in the last 60 days. But what most people pay attention to as the real number of interest is the concurrent users, which has hovered around 65,000 to a high of 80,000 people. For housing, you need land to put the housing down on, so we are automatically limited to a subset of Second Life users. There is a strong component of the population that enjoys living the ‘hobo’ lifestyle and not buying any land. It isn’t strictly nessecary. Though it’s the part of my endeavours that feeds my creative side most, it’s a limited market. Graphs if you are interested can be found here.
The second income stream we have is as estate owners for our residents on Conatus. This can be a very lucrative income stream if you have the money to really invest in large scale estates, and have the time and value added services needed to take care of your ‘renters.’ Make no mistake, this is a service you are offering, it isn’t a small investment of time. Luckily I rent to some of the best people on the planet and I work very hard to make them happy. This dosen’t really make me any profit but it does allow me to have Conatus without having to pay for more then I’d use.
The website itself is another income stream, selling advertising through adsense and the sponsored links here makes enough that the hosting of the website is paid for, though not enough more to really be considered a money maker yet, hopefully that will change over time. Part of moving to a wordpress site was to improve my ability to communicate and make the site more valuable.
The newest venture for us is clothing, in a hope that we can appeal to more of the mass market of Second Life we have done a few gadgets in the past, our Underwear Tosser for instance, but the tshirts we recently released are something I’m excited about, because you can order one in RL and SL. I’ll talk more about it soon.
So, some of the Income streams I’ve tried. There are others, if you’re interested I recommend the following book, I have it and it’s bee valuable, if a bit basic in some respects:
[...] I talked about some of my income streams in a general way yesterday. Today I’m going to talk about Expenses as they relate to one of those income streams. This [...]