SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

Hi, this is Glenn Linden. I work on business programs at Linden Lab, and I’d like to talk with you about an aspect of Second Life that I work with, our Solution Providers.

We define Solution Providers as professional businesses and individuals who work in Second Life with real-world businesses, creating immersive experiences that aim to invite, engage, educate and entertain fellow Residents, as well as their employees and internal audiences.

Solution Providers have played an important role in the growth Second Life has enjoyed over the last few years. Two years ago, there were about 20 companies listed in Linden Lab’s fledgling Solution Provider program; today I’m pleased to say that number has grown to over 200. They range from Resident-developed businesses to departments of major agencies and web development firms, and they work with a wide-range of clients.

Solution Providers’ projects range from fantastical to formal, including a popular promotional gift that requires exploring a giant’s home, to prosaic events, conventions, meeting spaces, recruiting and training locations, tech support provision, as well as brand marketing and promotions.

Some examples:

• IMAX Harry Potter - ‘buzz agents’ simply hung out in SL and talked to Residents, giving out coupons for free tickets (and they gave out more tickets than did the web site promotion.)

• 7Days Bread - an inworld factory where you play baker, making and sharing pastries

• Cisco’s tour of router products.

• L’Oreal’s promotions include sponsorship of a beauty pageant, and gifts of skins and make-up in popular Resident-owned locations, linking the association of the brand to beautification of one’s avatar.

• Kelly, Manpower and TMP, who recruit for traditional, not-in-Second Life jobs, do so inside Second Life.  Kelly and Manpower both offer in-SL job listings as well.  Manpower offers help with preparation and even style tips on dressing the avatar’s human for that upcoming interview.

• Birmingham has a project in Second Life to engage her citizens to participate in urban planning

• The World Bank, impressed by the savings on travel and carbon that can be gained by hosting presentations and events in Second Life, engaged a Solution Provider to create an inworld conference where they will launch an important report on the state of global work.

• Herman Miller has a location in Second Life where you can design your own office with their furniture, and when you’re satisfied with the rearranging, easily place an order online for your real-world office.

• Global Condo Corp offers tours of their real-world condos, inworld, to curious homebuyers.

• Trend Micro employees get security training inside Second Life.

• Language Lab uses the immersive environment of Second Life as part of the learning experience for their unique language classes.

• InformationWeek had an inworld version of their real-life conference exhibit hall where attendees visited booths, viewed exhibits and talked with exhibitors.

• The Tech Museum of San Jose, a pro bono Solution Provider project, has a virtual exhibit program where anyone can create a museum exhibit. The most successful exhibits are then built outside of Second Life, in real-life.

• Geek Squad staffs real-time tech support, inside Second Life.

Quarterly surveys let us extrapolate that Solution Providers work on over 600 projects per quarter. We estimate that the Solution Provider ecosystem is roughly a US$70M business, engaging more than a thousand people.

Solution Providers are important to Linden Lab and Second Life, not only for the content development resource they provide in Second Life, but also for the enormous outreach and experience they provide to organizations and audiences that Linden Lab could never hope to reach.

We are developing extensions to the Solution Provider Program, to better support and recognize the work Solution Providers do, as well as to identify and promote applications developed for the Second Life Grid.

If you are interested in becoming a Solution Provider, we urge you to first explore a variety of inworld projects, and the Solution Provider Directory , to learn more about the different aspects of the business.  The Second Life Wiki, is also a valuable resource, also including the marketing information we’ve put together for Solution Providers and the entire Second Life community.

Note: Please join the Resident discussion thread on Solution Providers in the Second Life Forums.

Key links:
Solution Provider Program info

Second Life Wiki - Marketing your business in SL

Solution Provider Success Studies

M Linden here. Many thanks to everyone who responded constructively with their concerns and suggestions about our Openspaces announcement. We’ve listened carefully and your feedback has led to some amendments to our original plan.

Before I jump to the policy amendments, I’d like to provide some insight into our decision and then recap what we’ve heard from you. When the Openspaces product was originally launched, Linden Lab offered Island owners the opportunity to add Openspaces to their land for light use only –- such as ocean or park land. But we didn’t build in and enforce specific, quantifiable performance limits on the Openspaces. Why? For two simple reasons:

1. As you know all too well, many things affect performance of a Sim in complex inter-related ways (i.e., scripts, prims, avatars, media). We were reluctant to limit the overall experience and your creativity by posing specific limits on all these variables – partly because Linden Lab has always been pretty free-form and believes in the innate goodness of Second Life Residents and partly because imposing limits require that we hire staff to enforce them.

2. We wanted to get this product to market quickly. Openspaces was wildly popular. Some Island owners added ocean and park land, as intended but many built empires – glorious builds, beautiful rental properties and other great things. Since land-owners co-habitate on CPUs, if one owner adds an ocean and one builds a carnival, the shared CPU gets overloaded. The ocean-loving Resident who followed the original intent suffers and we are called in to resolve the conflict. Second Life is much too large to do that.

When we sorted through the good and bad in the many conversations, comment cards, emails, and calls, you shared many things but there were three consistent themes we can work with:

1. Those of you who used the Openspaces as originally intended — for ocean or park land — want that product at the original price point and are willing to accept clear restrictions on usage.

2. Some of you have built businesses on the Openspaces product, set your rental rates or built your groups and although you acknowledge you built more than was intended for Openspaces, a large and rapid price change is too much for you to absorb.

3. Some of you created builds that were between an ocean and a carnival and want some kind of “normal region lite” product – a lower price point than a normal region but with the ability to build a certain amount of content.

We’ve launched three land products in the company’s history: Mainland, Islands and now Openspaces. Because we have complexity everywhere else, we’re loath to add a highly complex pricing structure. Nevertheless, it’s clear we have to build a product mix and pricing structure that offers more flexibility.

Here is how we are amending the price change:

1. We are going to retain the Openspaces product at its original price point and its original intended use (forest, water, etc.). We will have technical limitations to help regulate their use, initially avatar and prim limit restrictions, eventually event, classified and script limits. Those of you who chose to use the Openspaces as intended may stay at the US$75 rate, but will need to contact the concierge team to do so.

2. If you want more than an Openspace, we will offer you the choice of moving to a new product called Homesteads that is intended for light use such as low density rentals. For existing Openspace owners we will phase in the price increase for this new product over the next 6 months. Homesteads will also have technical limits for avatars and prims, and eventually script limits as well.

* January 5, 2009 – non-compliant Openspaces will transition to Homesteads and the maintenance fees will go from $75 to $95 per month.  We will offer an educational discount to qualified educators on the new Homestead product. The discount amount will be the same as Private Regions, roughly 30%.

* July 2009 — the maintenance fees for Homesteads will go from $95 to $125 per month

For detailed information on these changes, please go to the Knowledge Base.

We believe this is fair. Jack and I will join you in the forums throughout the day today to discuss this. Comments are closed on the blog, not because we want to limit dialog or free expression but because this is a conversation with Residents and the forums require log-in. This is a policy we are going to follow moving forward with all major announcements. Blog the announcement, express and discuss in the Forums.

One thing I learned and others were reminded about in this process is that we have a very connected, passionate Resident base and we need to bring you into the dialog earlier, before putting forward these decisions. The input we received after Jack’s announcement was prolific and by-and-large very, very constructive. Second Life is at a size where 1:1 conversations are difficult and the forums are inadequate for full dialog. Office hours come up short, too. We have some thoughts on how to bring Residents into the dialog earlier which we will cover in a future blog post and Forum discussion.

I’d like to close on this thought: An area of concern for Residents over the past year has been platform stability. Through the hard work of many, many people, including Residents, we have made great strides that are very well documented. Crash rates are down. Substantially. Period. And until this price change, we were riding high in user satisfaction so we know you have recognized and appreciated the improvements we’ve been making. Our breakthroughs in stability improvement are particularly noteworthy because our land mass increased enormously this year. And, a good part of that increase was from Openspaces. However, the original plan was to expand land mass but expand load at a much lower rate. But, Openspaces — in many cases — have been overloaded with content, scripts and avatars so our very substantial stability gains have come even with the unplanned load increase. We are deeply committed to making this the best virtual world platform in the world and we are making great strides. We’ve also demonstrated we can deliver on our promise of continual stability improvements – even in the face of unanticipated growth.

I look forward to hearing from you in the Forum. Thank you for your candor, patience, restraint and willingness to work with Linden Lab and the Second Life community at large. Second Life is the wonder that it is because Linden Lab has always worked together – albeit sometimes imperfectly – with Residents to build this magnificent, bigger than life world we all love so much.
Thank you.