Shock Stat: 1600 Second Life Community Creators Make $10,000+ Per Year from their Virtual Content — Despite Working on a Much Larger Platform, Far Fewer Creators on ROBLOX Make That Rate
From ROBLOX’s 2020 IPO stock filing
This passage from my podcast with Philip Rosedale last week seriously deserves its own post — where Philip is talking about ROBLOX’s S1 stock filing, and a passage there (above) stating that 1,050 community developers earned over $10,000 USD a year from their ROBLOX content.
By comparison, Philip notes this (at around minute 31:30):
I asked the team at Second Life to [research] exactly the same number — how many people in Second Life are making over $10,000 a year year [in 2021] — and the answer was 1600 people. So more than ROBLOX by a good bit.
More than 500 people. Which is notable in itself. It’s even more notable when you compare the active user bases of each platform:
Second Life only has about 600,000 monthly active users, compared to ROBLOX’s 200 million monthly active users. Yet somehow, more of SL’s content creator community are making far more money from the platform in absolute dollar numbers, compared to ROBLOX’s content creators.
And as I’ve noted before, SL has the rare distinction of being a metaverse platform where the community content creators make about as much revenue as the company itself. In this podcast, Philip then goes on to point out that Linden Lab takes about 10% of Second Life’s total virtual world economy as revenue for the company. (And is still quite profitable.)
I have a sense that this economic disparity across different metaverse platforms — how much the community benefits, versus the platform’s company owner — is going to come up more often. Especially now that Philip Rosedale is actively back into that much-needed Metaverse conversation.