What’s the Porn Business like in Second Life?

She short answer to this one is: There is no such thing as porn business in Second Life, as yet. There is however a quite active porn community in Second Life.

Ok, let me explain the difference. A professional porn business is somebody producing porn to make money with it. In fact, getting paid for what you do is essentially the definition of „professional“ and earning money as a company or as a professional is essentially the definition of a „business“.

I was do some  investigation on Google about this and I found some sites, which actually portray in-world porn producers. The best one being this one here:

http://secondlifeporn.blogspot.de/

On this website you also find a list of Second Life porn producers. I did check their profiles, blogs, website, the lot. Almost all of them have actually profiles on sites like this:

http://www.naughtymachinima.com

In addition most have a blogger and flickr account and so do most porn models. I have not seen anyone of those porn producer who owns his own porn site, own domain, or the likes. On their blogs is no advertising to see either, which I believe would not be allowed anyway on the blogger service.

In short: They do not monetize their productions at all. They simply do it for the fun of it, pretending to be or role playing a professional producer, company, studio or whatever fancy name they have chosen for what really should be called „amateur porn filmmaker“.

That describes it best actually.

This is no reference to, or judgment of the quality of their productions. We know that great things have been build and produced in Second Life from non-professional users.

The amateur porn community seems to be pretty active. There are groups for porn stars to be, producers, porn star parties to be held on a regular basis (a lot fucking going on there). Interviews are set up including life castings. I suspect many of those castings never will actually lead to anything else, but the “porn producer” having a fuck with the potential “porn star”, bit like in real life I guess.

But wait a minute. Somebody must be making money with this!

It is not the models, that’s for sure. In fact there are much more people who want to become a porn star in Second Life than actual available positions. I guess, it is like many things in Second Life: A simulation of the fantasy of being a porn star.

Do the producers make money? Maybe, but not the ones I have read about so far. Ok, here is what it is all about:

Producers need exposure. Its not fun to produce a movie nobody is watching. There is also no point in staring in a movie, when nobody will ever see it. Most producers use tube sites for that, such as the above mentioned, but there ar quite a few around where you can upload your videos.

Those tube site, are free to use, and free to upload your videos. In fact I have an account on naughtymachinima.com . I uploaded videos you can see here: Second Life porn machinima. I use their free service to save my own disk space (for now that is, more about that later).

You might have guessed by now who is the real winner in this game. Its the tube sites. Whenever you watch a video on their site, you are getting exposed to a lot of advertising for related porn sites. Some of them are actually affiliate programs who pay very good commission, if those sites refer a buyer for any of their products.

Now we are talking business!

I am myself an affiliate of two such programs. One is 3DXChat and the other is the thrixxx Chathouse 3D. Those are multi-player online sex games. Basically small virtual worlds made for people who wants to “simulate what stimulates” (slogan of the Thrixxx Chathouse 3D).

The way it works in numbers: Anytime somebody clicks on the adverts and signs up for a subscription of one or the other sex game, I earn money. I am not talking about the 2.000 or 3.000 Linden I charge as an escort girl. I am talking about 10 US$ per month for each subscriber, as long as he keeps his subscription. That makes 120 US$ per year for each one. I am making a couple of hundred US$ already with this each month, getting more every day! I estimate as of next year we are talking about a 4 digit number each month.

In other words, my monthly income from this, also called MRR (monthly recurring revenues), is increasing with every new subscriber. A tube site, like naughtymachinima.com,  receives a lot of traffic, which they achieve with other peoples content: Porn videos produced free of charge to them. I am sure their MRR is several thousand Dollar, using the exact same advertisers than I do.

That is a very cool business model!

I am going to write a new series of articles about the porn community in Second Life. I want to find out, how it all works, how they tick, who are the main producers and so on. The intention is to eventually copy the business model of those sites and make money with it.

What is the best way to research and understand the porn community in Second Life? You might have guessed it: I will go under cover yet again and become a porn actress!

I did have my first interview already. It was with the guy you see in the featured image of this post. But more about that one in the next article of this new story.  Stay tuned this is to be continued. Until then, please feel free to comment.

/me points to the comment section!