I still potter about in Second Life, seeing the whole thing as a cross between monumental Lego set, graphical chat room and sociology field trip. Last you heard, I was trying to build Star Wars: Galaxies style musical instruments. I managed one instrument, which proved to be quite easy, but ground to a halt making it work with any others, so in typical fashion, got bored and wandered off. I still pick away at the Thresher now and then, but mostly my time in SL is spent peering under rocks and seeing what kind of a place this much vaunted ‘Metaverse’ is actually going to be.

I’m still getting used to the concept of complete real-money linkage to be honest, and while having very few needs myself, and so having not bought currency, seeing the heady whirl of mercantile life all around me is fascinating, particularly with this sort of thing happening:

Wired News: Making a living in Second Life (via Slashdot)

And since I’m great, I’ve done the maths so you don’t have to! Let see how realistic this is…

Delivery Dispatcher average salary: around $31,000 (from www.salaryexpert.com) After tax: $26,675 or so. (http://www.savewealth.com/taxes/rates/single/)

This works out at about $500 a week, take home pay, and around $14 an hour, based on a 7.5 hour working day.

Current Linden Dollar exchange rate is about 280L = $1, so $500 a week is around 145,000 Lindens a week.

Multiply by four – she’s earning four times her old salary, remember: she’s apparently earning 580,000 Lindens a week, in game. How?

Well, the article describes her as a clothing and skin designer – essentially she uses Photoshop, or similar to make avatar textures. A typical price for a set of clothes is about 200 Lindens, and skins tend to go for around 1500 Lindens, so she is selling either around 725 outfits, or about 96 skins, every week, to maintain that kind of income.

It’s possible I’ve got a decimal place wrong there somewhere, or that someone somewhere is lying about her old salary, so I won’t call shenanigans just yet, that does seem somewhat on the steep side. Perhaps mainting her original income might be more doable: 182 outfits and/or 24 skins.

On the one hand, once an outfit or skin is made, and put on sale, that’s it…an infinite number of purchases can happen from then on, with no further outlay in time or resources. On the other hand, sooner or later, everyone will have that outfit, and in any event, the SL market for clothing, and by extension, skins, is a both busy and competitive.

Maybe this young lady is a whiz with the marketing side of it all, but one thing is for sure; she’s hardly the only person using SL as a primary income, by any stretch, and there really is quite staggering the amount of Real Money flying around in there. It’s a braver man than I that would jack in their real job to try their hand at this full time, but it does seem an interesting way to earn a bit of beer money doing something you’d be doing for fun anyway…