Inside VRChat's Informal Economy: An Estimated 350+ People Make Real Money from that Metaverse -- Many Likely Earning a Full-Time Income! UPDATE: More Like Over 1000

Above: One of nearly 1,000 VRChat-tagged items being sold on Gumroad

UPDATE, 9/29: There are over 33,000 items for sale on Booth, a Japan-based content selling platform like Gumroad. Hat tip: A snarky anonymous reader who's cued me to update my estimate of people who make money from VRChat. Conservatively estimated, that's over 650 individual creators, bringing our total tally to roughly over 1,000.

VRChat the company has yet to roll out its long-promised monetization options for creators -- but VRChat the community has went ahead and created an informal, unofficial economy of its own across many platforms. By my rough but conservative estimate, over 350 are making at least a side income from their VRChat content -- and of that number, likely over 30 are making a full-time living from VRChat. 

That's in addition to notable examples like StudioCyFy, a company started on the strength of the developers' VRChat game worlds, and "Jar", who recently announced she was creating VRChat worlds on a full-time basis.

"Over 350" is an educated guess based on a tally of top content creation platforms:

• On Patreon, over 160 creators are creating VRChat content (worlds, avatars, etc.) and have at least one patron.
• On Gumroad, nearly 1,000 VRChat-tagged items are being sold on the platform; primarily avatars, many selling for $50 or more. Assuming individual creators sell an average of 10 VRChat items, that's about 100 creators on Gumroad.
• On YouTube, over 90 channels are devoted to YouTube content and have 10,000 or subscribers. (Indicating a dedicated YouTuber with a large enough subscriber base to monetize through advertising and direct sponsorships.)

So that's at least 350 VRChat content creators earning some kind of income from their VRChat content!

But how many of them are making a full-time living? That's a controversial (and interesting!) question, but here's some back-of-envelope tallies to help us reach a safe base number:

• On Patreon, four VRChat content creators have 700 or more patrons: Hobbert, bluekunVRC, and the aforementioned Jar; and far above all of them is Poiyomi, with over 3,300 Patrons!
• On Gumroad, ten VRChat content creators have 100 or more product reviews for their items. As a rule of thumb, about 1 in 50 customers review game content they purchase, so we can estimate those ten Gumroad sellers are probably selling 5000+ copies each of their VRChat content.
• On YouTube, twenty channels devoted to VRChat content have subscribers in the six figure range or higher -- roughly speaking, a target range for being able to earn a good full-time living (i.e. $50,000+/year) via YouTube ads and direct subscriptions. That includes the two VRChat YouTube gods with over 1 million subscribers: Drumsy and local New World Notes favorite Syrmor. (Read my profile of Syrmor here.)

So rounding down, it's safe to say over 30 people make a full-time living from VRChat content. That's almost as many people who work for VRChat the actual ass company.

And again this is a conservative guess based on searches across the platforms, which often miss many creators, and doesn't count VRChat earnings via NFT and other cryptocurrency. And so on! What we see in this is an incredibly health ecosystem of content, serving an avid market demand. It will be fascinating to see what happens when VRChat the company itself finally gets into this game.

Thanks to Adeon for help researching this!

Comments

[Kaylee West]

Just my personal opinion, but I believe VRChat is going to be one of the major platforms that forms the backbone of the social and creative metaverse.

[Lol]

Hamlet, you didn't count the creators on Booth. It's VRChat's biggest content site. Do your homework better.