Second Life User Creators Were Paid Out $86 Million in 2021! That’s Decent Growth & Compares Well To Metaverse Leader Roblox

When I blogged about J.P. Morgan investing in Linden Lab payments spinoff Tilia last week, I missed this point from Forbes columnist and longtime Metaverse expert Charlie Fink:

Tilia is easy for developers to implement, and it’s simple and convenient for their customers to use. Transactions are instant and cost pennies, some of which go into the developer’s pocket. At Second Life, those pennies amounted to $86M last year.

Emphasis mine, because wow. I checked this with company spokesman Brett Linden who clarified that this $86 million is “the amount that was paid out to creators in 2021.”

Yes: Second Life’s content creator community earned $86 million from their virtual content last year.

This is notable for at least a couple reasons:

Linden Lab’s then-CEO Ebbe Altberg (RIP) announced that the SL creator community cashed out USD $60 million in 2014. So while the active Second Life user base has not significantly grown, the creator economy grew by quite a bit.

As a comparison point, Roblox user creators earned $209 million in 2020. That’s over 2X more money for users than Second Life, but then again, Roblox had about 175 million monthly active users in 2020, compared to Second Life’s 600,000. So as I’ve said many times before, while Second Life has one of the smaller user bases among the well-known metaverse platforms, it still seems to offer the best deal for user creators.

My next question is how much revenue Linden Lab is making from Second Life. In recent years it’s been about equal to what the user community was making, but that’s probably changed as the company shifts steadily toward a subscription-focused model. More on that soon (hopefully).

Thanks to reader Luther Weymann for the catch!