
Of all the metaverse platforms active on the Internet today, Second Life by far offers the best overall revenue share to user creators on the platform. As a whole, the creator community makes about as much revenue from Second Life as the company itself, and 1,600 user creators earn over $10,000 a year -- a higher number than ROBLOX, even though ROBLOX has vastly more users.
Speaking of which, ROBLOX takes an eye-punching 70% cut of revenue from its creators, while recent entry Core boasted that its cut is only... 50%. By contrast, an SL creator could sell goods and services in the virtual world, and only pay the 5% fee for cashing out Linden Dollars into US dollars.
But the story of Second Life's economy is more complicated than that.
To get a clearer picture, I recently surveyed SL content creators on two questions: How much of their revenue is absorbed by Linden Lab through additional costs, for listing products on the web-based Marketplace, for renting virtual storefront land from Linden Lab, and so on -- and how that translated into real dollars.
Here's the results: