Building residences of any kind is a land intensive endeavour. You CAN do it on sandboxes, but when building large things, dealing with other people trying to build and the griefers who show up every so often is a pain that you will most likely get tired of. If you want to build things that take a whole sims worth of area or prims, you’ll need a whole sim to build it on, which sounds obvious, but needs to be stated. So, you can look at what mainland prices for land is here. If you’re running on a private estate it’s going to depend on the charge your estate owner charges you, but if you owned the sim and ordered it recently, you pay $295 a month for the privilage of having a full sim to yourself. This is the most basic charge as a business owner, that of land to run your store or build your stuff. I generally use a 300L to $1 calculation even though this is quite high, it builds in a small profit since the exchange has hovered in the mid 270:1 range for over a year. It also builds in the fees you’ll need to pay to exchange money out of Second Life and into USD and pay the tier fee back to your Landlord or LL. Using the calculation of “price for land USD” * 300 you can determine how much you need to make to break even. If for instance you need to pay for a full sim, like IDG does, you could steal my calculation and use 295 * 300 = 88500L. This is also helpful if you rent, if you’re renting a full sim, 88500 is basically what it costs your Estate Manager to run that sim, anything over that, you’re paying for the service they offer and to make it worth their while to be in business. In actuality, the calculation is (”current exchange rate” * (”sim cost”/”percentage of sim”)) * (1 + “transfer fees”)

Now keep in mind that your land is tied to your prim usage, so if you want to do high prim work you’ll need to have more land, even if it’s just jewelry. For instance I believe the limit on attachments to an avatar are 254 prims, if that’s the case and you’re doing jewelry or hair and want to do that high a level of prim work, you’ll need roughly 1200 sq meters of land in order to build your amazing creations. You may only need a small shack to sell your work, but you have to take into account the design phase and how you’re going to go about that.

So that’s the beginning of the expense discussion. I plan to continue this discussion with vendors and advertising. Hopefully by the end following this sequence will let you set up and go forth as a content creator and business owner.

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:

So with the whole OpenSpaces aka Void Sim debacle I started looking at options, one of the open sim places I looked at was fairly good but I’ll talk about that another time and it’s still not ready for primetime. But in the course of looking for alternative building areas I came across the question we all have… how do I move items back and forth? The only real solution I found was Second Inventory. It has it’s quirks but it does work. For a legitimate use of moving your own creations to other worlds this is a legitimate tool, though it takes a long time to work for each item. More info is available on their site but I managed to move a full copy of my house to my OpenSim sandbox and it looked just like it did in SL. Pretty neat, if you can put up with the headaches. It also has the side benefit of being able to perform batch uploads of textures, something I’ve been wanting in SL client for ages.