Everyone thinks the road to internet riches runs through YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram. Billions of users, billions of views, fame, brand deals, merch drops — a right circus. But if we’re talking about actual odds of becoming a millionaire, you might want to reconsider your strategy.
Second Life, the 23-year-old virtual world everyone thinks to have “died” around 2009. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Let me flash you with some numbers.
The Cold, Hard Numbers
Straight out of Linden Lab’s 2023 economic stats:
-
21,152 creators made some money in SL.
-
6,446 pulled more than $1,000.
-
1,580 cleared $10,000.
-
139 broke the $100,000 mark.
-
14 walked away with $1 million+ each.
Not impressed? Not yet, but read on:
Let’s do the ratios:
-
1 in 7 creators is making five figures.
-
1 in 150 is six-figures.
-
1 in 1,500? Millionaire.
And all this in a world where the concurrent user base is only about 30–40k people. (Concurrent users is a better metric, because there are FAR more ‘tester’ and ‘alt’ accounts on Second Life than normal. Every creator has like 10 accounts because they need to test things a lot. So, about 60 000 active users, give or take, as opposed to YouTube’s 2.5 billion.) That’s like a mid-sized stadium crowd generating millionaire businesses every year. Imagine if creators started to pull people onto the platform, I mean… Currently, the place is a ghost town, a MASSIVE Second Life creator on YouTube gets maybe 14 likes to their latest product promo, and STILL these are the numbers.
YouTube: The Big Pond With Tiny Fish
Now, YouTube. The empire of eyeballs.
-
~69 million creators total.
-
~2,200 channels with 10M+ subs (the point where ad revenue might hit $1M a year).
-
That’s 0.003% of creators hitting that tier.
-
With 2.5 billion monthly users, the ratio comes out to about 1 millionaire per 1.1 million users, or 1 in ~31,000 creators
Second Life vs YouTube: The Odds
-
Second Life: 14 millionaires / 35k users = 1 per 2,500 users.
-
YouTube: 2,200 millionaires / 2.5B users = 1 per 1,100,000 users.
Do the math: SL has a ~440x higher millionaire density.
In other words, if you’re gunning for that millionaire shot, you’re statistically way better off building pixel houses and virtual shoes and hosting virtual sex parties than chasing YouTube’s algorithm.
What about opening a cafe down the street?
In SL, about 1 in 1,500 creators hit the millionaire mark (≈0.07%).
IRL, only about 1 in ~20,000 small businesses ever cross into seven-figure revenue territory (≈0.005%).
So your odds of becoming a millionaire are way better in Second Life than on Main Street.
How?!
Second Life users LOVE spending money on the platform. It’s ACTUALLY FUN. The feel-good ratio for every Linden you spend is MUCH HIGHER than anywhere else online. You WANT TO throw money at your favorite creators because you love everything they do, and God forbid they’d quit because it’s not profitable for them. That said, you won’t spend a lot AT A TIME, but your purse strings are terribly lose in comparison to YouTube.
Nothing is EASY, of course, the great creators are not amateurs who just rock up out of nowhere to build a million-dollar business, but there are a lot of transferable skills a standard website creator can use on Second Life. If you build mesh or create animations, let alone both, you’ve got every skill you need to make it big on Second Life.
So next time someone on YouTube laughs when you say you’re a Second Life creator? Tell them your odds of becoming a millionaire are 400-something times better than theirs. Then drop the mic.
Like how that sounds? Join Second Life.
