Money in Second Life
From Sl Wiki
The Linden Dollar
Second Life has its own currency - the Linden Dollar (L$). This has a variable exchange rate against the US dollar (USD), which at the time of writing (Jan 07) stood at around 265L$ per USD, or 500L$ per UK pound. Residents use their Linden Dollars to pay for goods and services provided by other Residents. Linden Dollars can bought using real world currency, or earned through the provisoin of services.
There are no sub-divisions of the Linden Dollar.
LindeX
The Linden Dollar can also be exchanged for U.S. Dollars and other foreign currencies on a number of different websites, including via the Linden Labs' LindeX exchange.
The LindeX is a currency exchange offering residents of Second Life the ability to either buy or sell currency. Charges are for purchasing currency are placed on the same form of payment you have setup in your account settings for your Second Life account. Prices at this site are set by the market price - I.E. the best price offered by the different sellers of currency.
Making Money in Second Life
The “traditional” ways of making money in SL, as in Real Life (RL), hinge around providing goods and services that people will pay for. And people will pay for things they cannot make for themselves, or have no interest in, or time for, making themselves. In SL this typically covers:
- Architecture & Building work – constructing shops, houses and other property
- Design and Manufacture – furniture, ornaments, tools, vehicles --- anything that can be found in RL
- Fashion and Clothing – constructing clothing for use in-world
- Real Estate – buying and selling (virtual) land; land rental.
- Second Life’s first US dollar millionaire made her fortune in real estate from an initial outlay of $9.95 two and half years ago
- Publishing and broadcasting
- Service provision – eg: virtual DJ etc.
- Gambling – virtual casinos, poker halls, slot arcades etc
- And OK… let’s face it… the “Adult entertainment industry” also exists in SL as in RL
Money-making opportunities that do not have a ready RL equivalent include:
- Animations – gestures, and more complex movement sequences, intended to make an avatar more lifelike
- Textures – graphics that can be used to tailor objects acquired in-world
- Scripting – developing code using LSL (Linden Scripting Language), a Java-like programming language
- Camping - sites, particularly clubs and casinos, will pay small sums to people simply to make their location appear busy, and lure in money-spending punters.
The most successful items in SL will use a combination of animations, textures and scripting to enhance basic objects.
Many of the above are run as small-scale cottage industries. However, there are also companies and contractors specialising in virtual environment design and construction who are providing professional sites for RL commercial organisations.
