Earning Income Online

[bangkokStranger]

Hi,

Just looking for ideas from people who make a living online whcih allows them to live in LOS. This is what i want to be able to earn a living online and stay in LOS because the cost of living in LOS is considerably cheaper than Europe around $1,000 a month would be great. Any ideas on what i could do considering i dont have any other talents other than web design.

Dont know if anyone has great experience in web design but the freelance web design work looks very competitive because of designers from India etc willing to work for very low fees, because i have a full time job in Europe i have not had the time to try web design freelance and to be successful on these freelance sites you need to put alot of work into it i would imagine.

So i would be very grateful if people who do make a living online in LOS or anywhere that dosent tie them geographically, would share their experiences and maybe give me some ideas. Ideally it would be something not requiring alot of capital as if i had enough capital i wouldnt be going back home id be staying here.

I also have someone in Thailand that i trust so maybe that could be another alternative i.e buying materials,toys etc in Thailand and cheap prices and selling them online, obviously i would just setup the online store and my contact in Thailand would buy and post the item to the seller after a sale was made. Would just need something that would be very popular in Europe and the U.S, any ideas lads for a desperate Farang to be able to move to Thailand full time rather than work for months to come to Thailand for a short time.

p.s i dont want any job like a teachers job etc has to be something online

Cheers

[TRIPxCORE]

You're asking a question that has been asked a million times over by many people with the same idea. No one here, if they have this great idea, are going to tell you what it is. Why would they want to increase their competition? If you have a good money-making idea, keep it to yourself like everyone else does. Sorry but I dont see you getting much help here.

[rishi]

Step 1)

Figure out some item, service or whatever, that quite a few people would want to spend money on - and which you'd be able to provide cheaper and easier than those 3 million other guys that have also figured out that item, service or whatever.

Step 2), 3)....

Piece of cake (relatively)...

[bangkokStranger]

Step 1)

Figure out some item, service or whatever, that quite a few people would want to spend money on - and which you'd be able to provide cheaper and easier than those 3 million other guys that have also figured out that item, service or whatever.

Step 2), 3)....

Piece of cake (relatively)...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

You have me all wrong, im not looking for a get quick scheme or looking to spam people to make money or anything like that, just taught someone might share their experiences in ligitimate ways to earn a living online and to find out what other peoples experiences is, just like the example i gave i.e Web Design, i wouldnt mind sharing my experiences if they were relevant to anyone, maybe someone has tried freelance web design, would be nice to know how they got on, was it slow to start, what experience did they have, what pitfalls did they come across, that kind of thing. Sharing that kind of thing online would not be counter productive to another web designer just like alot of guys on tv share their experiences on opening beer bars etc

By all means if you have a great niche your not going to share it with me, i wouldnt expect that but surely some people make a living online providing translation services, consultancy, graphic design, horse tipping service, selling products etc and maybe they wont discuss the specific product but maybe the process of setting up and marketing the product and then i would just need to find the product.

I see so far ive only got negetive responses so rather than making further negitive responses just ignore the thread instead and anyone that would like to share their experiences or idea's would be very welcome.

Thanks

Paul

[solo siam]

Everyone and their mother seems to be a freelance web designer, cant see you pulling in any jobs without good contacts or strong advertising out here.

Selling on ebay you may make enough to scrape by if you have a good product, My girlfriend is a wholesaler / producer of spa products and we tried it for a while. Its a lot of work and in the end just wasn't worth it, and thats with us having a very good product available at rock-bottom prices.

Your best bet would be to find a job in teh UK that you could do remotely, and then move out here.

[Baal]

a now the new improved virtual pet rock...

http://www.virtualpetrock.nl/

Come up with something like that and you too can grow Rich like Tommy Vu!

http://infomercial.tvheaven.com/videos/tom_vu_babes.wmv

[Pudgimelon]

p.s i dont want any job like a teachers job etc has to be something online

Cheers

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Good luck.

A. You don't have any experience doing freelance work or running a freelance company in your home country. What makes you think it will be easier over here? It's not.

B. How will you get PAID? People aren't going to be comfortable sending money to some faceless guy, especially if he lives in some far-off place on the back-end of the world. Even if they do, how are they going to send it? Western Union? Phftt... Paypal? Good luck finding enough tech-saavy customers to bring in $1000 a month... Check? How you going to cash it?....

I did the web design thing for a while when I first moved here and it's not easy. You can't just pop off a few pages on your laptop while sipping mai tais on the beach. Nope, because while your here, your competitors are THERE. Pressing flesh customers and making face-to-face connections. So you have to work twice as hard as they do.

Guess what I found out... I make more money tutoring English.

Granted, it takes a while to get a reputation as a dedicated and caring teacher who gets results, but once you do, you can command rates up to $20 to $25 an hour. That's real money! Even starting out you can still get between $7 to $10 an hour, which certainly beats what you can make at Burger King back home.

If I were you, I'd give up on the dreams of easy money online. Unless you're selling porn, there is no such thing as easy money online.

Edited December 2, 2005 by Pudgimelon

[simon43]

No one here, if they have this great idea, are going to tell you what it is. Why would they want to increase their competition

Not always true, especially if the market is big enough! I've mentioned many times before how I make my money whilst sitting on the beach in Thailand - promoting premium rate text message services back in the UK, such as horoscopes, jokes, chat etc. Usually turns in a million baht or more each month... - Simon

[db1tau]

Unless you're selling porn, there is no such thing as easy money online.

what's wrong with it? If you don't like to design "hardcore" pages, you still can promote online dating.

This can be combined with premium SMS (some years ago dialer worked well too).

You don't have to invest a lot of money, you just need an own server or webspace, some skills in webdesign, script coding and SEO. If you lack some of these, you have to invest a bit more, since you must buy the services from someone else.

And of course you have to be patient, because it can take some weeks or months for get a webpage "running" with good position in the search engines.

Unfortunately I lack the skill of good webdesign, I am more into software development and SEO. But there are enough people out there who can fill this gap.

Ah I forget to mention, don't target the thai market of course...

Marco.

[GuestHouse]

I run and online business, and no I'm not going to give you details. It's legal, it's making money, but it is never going to make me enough money to live on. This year it will pay for a holiday.

What it does do though is teach me a hel_l of a lot about online business, marketting, managing, customer needs and expectations.

It is a hel_l of a lot of work for the income. But it might be a good foundation if I come across something else I want to do.

And there is a big tip - If you are going to try an online business, try something you have an interest in, something you enjoy doing. If it doesn't make money you will at least enjoy the learning experience, and if it does take off, your enthusiasm will shine through to your customers.

I think the truth is, unless you were almost unbelievably lucky, trying to establish an online business is very very difficult. My business is a self supporting hobby, to expect an online business to make you a living is hoping too much.

I think the sucessful online business has to come first, then you can dream about life in Thailand one the business is making money.

My best wishes for what ever it is you want to have a go at, hard work, frustration, fun are garuanteed. Money is something that comes if it comes and sucess... well... I can't advise on that yet.

GH

[bangkokStranger]

Thanks for all the replies, i have reasonable web design skills in that i can set-up and maintain a full ecommerce store which is in demand these days but theres just too much supply at cheap prices.

B. How will you get PAID? People aren't going to be comfortable sending money to some faceless guy, especially if he lives in some far-off place on the back-end of the world. Even if they do, how are they going to send it? Western Union? Phftt... Paypal? Good luck finding enough tech-saavy customers to bring in $1000 a month... Check? How you going to cash it?....

As for customers paying a faceless person there are many freelance websites that keep the money in escrow until the job is done and then release the fee when the customer is happy and after you build a reputation on such a site people will see from your feedback or reviews if youve done a good job or not. This is why i said before that alot of time needs to be invested because the more good reviews and the bigger your portfolio is the more work you can get on these sites and the higher a fee you can command similar to what pudgimelon said with english teaching. There are many free sites such as freelance.com and pay sites such as elance.com, ive done some small jobs on scriptlance.com and built up a small few excellent reviews but i feel its something that would need to be worked hard at and full time, i dont expect to "sit on the beach sucking coctails" as someone suggested, i dont mind spending 6-8 hours a day working hard if i got the rewards, ive said in my last email im not looking for a get rich quick scheme. Also when i get paid through the freelance site the money is transfered into my paypal account and i can directly transfer that money into my bank account which ive done before, think it takes about 5 working days and then i can access that money here in Thailand with my bank card.

Some of you have said that web design is just not worth the rewards and i think maybe youre correct, but what skills have you got and what skills have you not got that are in demand, i dont have much Flash skills which are in demand and also how did you go about marketing your company, on a freelance site, local advertising, google (cant imagine this would be effective because it would be near impossible to get a good position because of the overcrowded market) etc, it would nice to hear how someone people failed or succeded, everyone has a different approach and ideas.

From the advice youve given i agree that i should go with something i have a passion for i.e Web Design, maybe i should save enough first to last me for 3 months and come and live and have a go at the web design, if i dont have the web design thing making enough money within 3 months i guess ive loss nothing and if it goes well then i can continue to live in Thailand and support myself with the web design otherwise id have to go home and continue working, btw i can go back to my job back home if things didnt work out so nothing would be lost.

Thanks for all the advice, even the advice i dont want to hear.

Cheers

[autonomous_unit]

I want to echo some of the advice given above. You seem to want a telecommuter job, i.e. not providing product or services in the Thai market. As such, the question has little to do with Thailand except: what is the timezone difference; is the Internet infrastructure good enough for your needs; can you afford (time, money, and stress) to travel out of Thailand as often as needed?

Once you consider those factors, the question is what business can you successfully operate in any market of the world? If you cannot do this in a particular market to gross your target income (discounting the local cost of living), you certainly will not find it easier to do from far away in Thailand.

Ask yourself: if you could live for free with someone and eat for a few dollars a day, where in the world could you market yourself successfully (and doing what)? Then, how would you build up enough customer base and trust to continue the work on a somewhat absentee basis? If you can figure those parts out, then you can probably work from anywhere... Thailand included.

[solo siam]

Want to do web design projects then in my mind there is 2 ways to do it.

i) build up an excellent network of contacts over a number of years, work hard to produce great sites that look and feel good, brand all your websites.

ii) build an excellent website, spend some serious time doing SEO and do some advertising - and make all your contacts online.

Both take time, I couldnt imagine you being able to make even 30-40k baht a month for at least 18 months either way.

Edited December 3, 2005 by Ben@H3-Digital

[bangkokStranger]

Want to do web design projects then in my mind there is 2 ways to do it.

i) build up an excellent network of contacts over a number of years, work hard to produce great sites that look and feel good, brand all your websites.

ii) build an excellent website, spend some serious time doing SEO and do some advertising - and make all your contacts online.

Both take time, I couldnt imagine you being able to make even 30-40k baht a month for at least 18 months either way.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ok i think you have a good point Ben, well at least it might supplement my income when i come here on one of my extended holidays and maybe i just might have to live with working in hel_l for a few months to save enough to live in heaven for a few months, not so bad

Cheers

[rishi]

... no cleverer advice to add to the clever advices already added --- just my own conclusion after having spend two years on developing an (in my own opinion) superprofessionional, generic online-store - to the point where all technical issues (including secure payments) were/are ready and set for launching

Having the technical developer skills, is the easy part. Actually making money on those skills is the hard part. You'll have to find a partner with the right businesswise ideas - and somebody will have to put up a substantial amount of money for marketing, etc.

[pmoores]

Heres a amusing option im not willing to follow up on as I have 7 more years in the military before retiring and have some additional online ideas that are less repeatative.

Did you know kids, teenagers and adults make money selling items in some online games. They play games all day and sell what they find.

A case in point, world of warcraft, there are teenagers that sit there with the right character and dont actually play the game. They sit up in a virtual mountain mining virtual gold. These kids sell this virtual gold online, making about $8-12 a hour.

Its not fake cause though as i know of 3 people at work that buy gold for that game. Apparently for a newbie it can take months to make lets say 400 gold. But you can pay about $50 usd for it (one usd to 8 fake gold), allowing you to enjoy the game and do less tedious stuff.

A know one that even spent a few hundred real usd's.

Im figuring over the next few years the online 3d virtual worlds and video games will start forming entire cottage industries. Key of course is you can do this anywhere in the world. Right now for those games we are in the equivalent of the early 90s of the internet.

Just a thought, I do have 7 more years before I retire at 47 with a decent pension and investments.

Course I am learning how to blow glass. That too could be sold worldwide. And then theres the 3d modeling which is starting to make modeling in those virtual worlds. Either way, if you want to do glass or 3d modelling youll need the years of learning and experience.

Not like you can just set up shop and go to it.

But mind numbing stuff like sitting there mining 'gold' mouse clicking till your fingers go dead does work even today. Funny this is, its the present 10-15 year olds that know and are exploiting this. They will be the ones that really expand into that internet gaming niche.

Heres a link showing what I say:

http://www.mysupersales.com/mg/?gid=37

Yep lots of options for selling online out there, if you got the skill already. If your starting today to learn it though, dont count on income for sometime.

[girlx]

people will always take the most negative view of a concept like working online from afar. but don't let them get you down. i am a self-taught web professional. i work for an american company from my house in thailand. i have never met the people i work with or even seen what they look like, but we work very well together and have done so for the last 6 months. it is a full time, 40 hours a week job. they pay me directly into my american account so i can access all my funds via ATM. at the time i accepted this job, i turned down 3 others who were also interested in working with me this way. outsourcing is sort of trendy now- so if you offer to work for just a bit less than you would in your own country, and you do good work, it is worth it to a company set up for telecommuters to try you out.

being a basic web designer isn't going to help you, though there are a lot of freelance jobs working for media agencies who need people to code html and do basic design (check on craigslist if you are american). generally though you will need to specialize in something. go to all of the job boards and collect a list of jobs that you can do. create a good online portfolio with samples of your work, pictures of you, and a nice introduction. email the link with a cover letter and resume to everyone on your list. be persistent, and flexible. tell them you will work on a trial basis for cheaper until they trust you. make sure you are set up with a good internet connection, voice chat software (i just use Yahoo Messenger), and phone cards in case you need to call in for a meeting. draw up a freelance contract for yourself. then just keep trying until someone bites. it took me 3 weeks from the time i decided to try this to get a position. depends on you.

other things you can do are to run an ebay store, create a website on thailand and fund it with ads, or come up with some silly, trendy thing and sell it online. i read an article recently about a guy who set up a site that let a company buy space on it per pixels square and advertise. ie. a company would buy 100 pixels square for $1 per pixel. he is a millionaire now because it was such a unique idea that it advertised itself and of course people who bought space on it cashed in too. be creative, there is always something you can do.

[rishi]

... i read an article recently about a guy who set up a site that let a company buy space on it per pixels square and advertise. ie. a company would buy 100 pixels square for $1 per pixel. he is a millionaire now because it was such a unique idea that it advertised itself and of course people who bought space on it cashed in too...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I think there's a thread about that one somewhere here on TV. Try to experiment with keywords on the search

[Gary A]

I personally know four web site designers. None of the four make any money worth talking about. One of them is Thai and he doesn't make enough to pay his Internet fees.

[MilkPlus]

other things you can do are to run an ebay store, create a website on thailand and fund it with ads, or come up with some silly, trendy thing and sell it online. i read an article recently about a guy who set up a site that let a company buy space on it per pixels square and advertise. ie. a company would buy 100 pixels square for $1 per pixel. he is a millionaire now because it was such a unique idea that it advertised itself and of course people who bought space on it cashed in too. be creative, there is always something you can do.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yep he did,

http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

but thats a been there done that concept, you will have to come up with your own.

You can do it, but just dont expect to find a 12 step program telling you how to do it.

Its kind of like what Bill Gates did by getting $1 per license.

[LivinLOS]

Here is a odd alternative.. Last time I posted it people groaned and said scam and rip off (cause I linked to the sale pages which reads like a promo) so if you choose not to believe just skip the post and think what you like..

I recently started with an email alert gambling service approx 2 - 3 months ago.. Looking at making well over 1k GBP this month and I do almost nothing (they send me email.. I place the bet) I started with a small stake pot and have let it grow.. I think I have had 7 straight winning bets now.. The spiel that sells this service claims the past performance last year turned 100 GBP into 20k..

The same people provide an online spread betting service that I intend to join when this bank rolls up to about 5k GBP (I have doubled my bank this month) and I am placing much higher stake bets..

Both of these are betting financial markets so its kind of a trading alert service.. Sure beat any broker or system I have ever come accross (20 - 30% weekly)..

Also look at sport4profit and check the performance of some of thier packages.. I am thinking of dropping 1k on thier rugby singles package which has had pretty amazing performance, plus I like rugby !! You can read some pieces by a journalist investigating tipster services (and being impressed) on progambler.co.uk..

I should say I have never been a gambler or a person that visited the bookies, I felt the bookie or casino always had the odds in his favour and wins, these have made me aware thats not always the case (and not even relevant in the financials side of gambling).. I started to look at sports arb trading (not gambling) but felt the workload was high for minimal returns.. These subscription services I am now using are consitant winners based on past performance..

I am not in any way staking my lifestyle on these systems as I have performing investments but started it as an interesting hobby for beer tokens.. Already this has become real money and I can see that a few hours a day could add a few k GBP per month to my balance sheet, which is basically my cost of living (very well) out here !!!

[girlx]

I personally know four web site designers. None of the four make any money worth talking about. 

hmmm. my immediate reaction is that they must not be good designers. web design generally pays really well. but then again being just a web designer doesn't help much in getting a job these days. everyone and their brother can do it. you have to have a more well-rounded skillset, or specialize in something. i don't know any web designers working for themselves who even manage to break even, because they can't do the coding etc. for their own sites and have to hire someone.

[Neeranam]

I recently started with an email alert gambling service approx 2 - 3 months ago.. Looking at making well over 1k GBP this month and I do almost nothing (they send me email.. I place the bet) I started with a small stake pot and have let it grow.. I think I have had 7 straight winning bets now.. The spiel that sells this service claims the past performance last year turned 100 GBP into 20k..

That's sounds good to me.

LivinLOS, could you please give more details about this - what is the web-site.

Can you actually get the money from the stake, or do they keep it in the pot?

How much have you actually given tot them and how much have they actually given to you?

[Heng]

I know several webdesigners. It's about half and half, those doing well, and those living paycheck to paycheck. One is doing better than the rest, but you guessed it... runs porn websites (a few hundred of them). Upper 5's lower 6's in figures US per month.

[Heng]

Heres a amusing option im not willing to follow up on as I have 7 more years in the military before retiring and have some additional online ideas that are less repeatative.

Did you know kids, teenagers and adults make money selling items in some online games. They play games all day and sell what they find.

A case in point, world of warcraft, there are teenagers that sit there with the right character and dont actually play the game. They sit up in a virtual mountain mining virtual gold. These kids sell this virtual gold online, making about $8-12 a hour.

I remember reading an article on the subject about a year ago. Definitely applicable to Thailand. There are click-sweat shops in Mexico doing the same thing. Local kids buy and sell stuff for Ragnarok in real life Baht as it is.

Wouldn't be hard to set up a warehouse with say 100+ terminals, ADSL, with tutorials on how to play various "western" role playing games with things to sell. I'd do it myself if I hadn't found better things to do years ago.

**

GAME THEORIES

On-line fantasy games have booming economies and citizens who love their

political systems. Are these virtual worlds the best place to study the real

one?

By Clive Thompson

Edward Castronova had hit bottom. Three years ago, the

thirty-eight-year-old economist was, by his own account, an academic

failure. He had chosen an unpopular field — welfare research — and

published only a handful of papers that, as far as he could tell, "had

never influenced anybody." He'd scraped together a professorship at the

Fullerton campus of California State University, a school that did not

even grant Ph.D.s. He lived in a lunar, vacant suburb. He'd once dreamed

of being a major economics thinker, but now faced the grim sense that he

might already have hit his plateau. "I'm a schmo at a state school," he

thought. And since his wife worked in another city, he was, on top of it

all, lonely.

To fill his evenings, Castronova did what he'd always done: he played

video games. In April, 2001, he paid a $10 monthly fee to a multiplayer

on-line game called EverQuest. More than 450,000 players worldwide log

into EverQuest's "virtual world." They each pick a medieval character to

play, such as a warrior or a blacksmith or a "healer," then band together

in errant quests to slay magical beasts; their avatars appear as tiny,

inch-tall characters striding across a Tolkienesque land. Soon, Castronova

was playing EverQuest several hours a night.

Then he noticed something curious: EverQuest had its own economy, a

bustling trade in virtual goods. Players generate goods as they play,

often by killing creatures for their treasure and trading it. The longer

they play, the more powerful they get — but everyone starts the game at

Level 1, barely strong enough to kill rats or bunnies and harvest their

fur. Castronova would sell his fur to other characters who'd pay him with

"platinum pieces," the artificial currency inside the game. It was a tough

slog, so he was always stunned by the opulence of the richest players.

EverQuest had been launched in 1999, and some veteran players now owned

entire castles filled with treasures from their quests.

Things got even more interesting when Castronova learned about the "player

auctions." EverQuest players would sometimes tire of the game, and decide

to sell off their characters orvirtual possessions at an on-line auction

site such as eBay. When Castronova checked the auction sites, he saw that

a Belt of the Great Turtle or a Robe of Primordial Waters might fetch

forty dollars; powerful characters would go for several hundred or more.

And sometimes people would sell off 500,000-fold bags of platinum pieces

for as much as $1,000.

As Castronova stared at the auction listings, he recognized with a shock

what he was looking at. It was a form of currency trading. Each item had a

value in virtual "platinum pieces"; when it was sold on eBay, someone was

paying cold hard American cash for it. That meant the platinum piece was

worth something in real currency. EverQuest's economy actually had

real-world value.

He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions,

observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged

the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece

was worth about one cent U.S. — higher than the Japanese yen or the

Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the

EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or

skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth.

Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was

generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game — the

equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage

in most countries," he marvelled. Then he performed one final analysis:

The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all

the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned

out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made

EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as

Russia.

It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't

even exist.

Castronova sat back in his chair in his cramped home office, and the weird

enormity of his findings dawned on him. Many economists define their

careers by studying a country. He had discovered one.

I first met Castronova at a piano lounge last summer at the Caesar's

Palace casino in Las Vegas, where he was attending a high-tech conference.

We talked over a few drinks, though our conversation was soon drowned out

by the bar's syrupy Frank Sinatra impersonator, belting out a version of

"New York, New York." Castronova winced. "Where better in the world to

talk about virtual worlds than Las Vegas?" he said. "This place invented

the idea of virtual life."

Castronova is a natural role-player. He's a short, nebbishy guy with a

neat goatee and horn-rimmed glasses. When he lectures he radiates

charisma; he is the cool professor you wish you'd had when you were trying

to grasp the dry mechanics of price theory. Until recently, he acted in a

Shakespearean troupe, and in his spare time he explores the world of

"multiple-user domains" — Internet chat environments where people assume

different personae as they hang out together.

Castronova suspects his eclectic background is why he never made the

powerful connections necessary to secure a good academic job. "I've always

been an outsider. I've just been floating around outside communities, sort

of flitting from topic to topic," he said.

With virtual worlds, he had finally hit upon a subject that was exploding

into the mainstream. Experimental online worlds had been kicking around

for years, but they took a leap forward in 1997, when Ultima Online — a

medieval fantasy world similar to EverQuest — launched, and quickly

amassed a hundred thousand users. The idea of having a second life on-line

suddenly didn't seem so geeky, or, at the very least, it seemed a

profitable niche; companies like Sony and Microsoft swarmed on-line. Today

there are more than fifty active games worldwide, and anywhere from two to

three million people playing regularly in the U.S. The games range from

Star Wars Galaxies (where you can wander around as a Wookie and fight the

Dark Side) to There.com (where you can wander around Disneyfied islands as

an attractive Gap-style model and admire your hot new body). In Korea, a

single game called Lineage claims more than four million players.

To figure out precisely who was playing EverQuest, Castronova persuaded

thirty-five hundred users to fill out a survey. As one might expect, the

average age turned out to be twenty-four, and the players were

overwhelmingly male. The amount of time spent "in game" was staggering:

over twenty hours a week, with the most devoted players logging six hours

daily. Twenty percent of players agreed with the cheeky (if alarming)

statement "I live in Norrath but I travel outside of it regularly"; on

average, each of these "residents" possessed virtual goods worth about

$3,000 U.S. "When you consider that the average real-life income in

America is only, like, thirty-seven thousand," Castronova tells me, "you

realize these people have a non-trivial amount of wealth locked up inside

the games."

When he finished his research, Castronova assembled it in a paper called

"Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the

Cyberian Frontier." He submitted it to an academic Web site, the Social

Science Research Network, that distributes working papers, free for anyone

to read. The site has 43,982 papers, by more than 37,000 authors. He

didn't expect too much. "I thought maybe seventy-five people would read

it," he recalls, "and that'd be great."

He was wrong. The paper sent a shock wave through the on-line world.

EverQuest players pounced on it and wrote up excited descriptions on

game-discussion boards. That led to a flurry of posts on popular blog

sites. Soon, academics and pundits in Washington were rushing to read it.

Barely a few months later, Castronova's paper became the most downloaded

paper in the entire database — beating out works by dozens of Nobel

laureates. Today, it's still in the top three.

Why the rush of interest? What can a game filled with elves and warrior

dwarves tell us about the real world?

Quite a lot, if you believe the economist Edward Chamberlin. In 1948,

Chamberlin admitted that all economists face a critical problem: they have

no clean "laboratory" in which to study behaviour. "The social scientist .

. . cannot observe the actual operation of a real model under controlled

circumstances," he wrote. "Economics is limited by the fact that resort

cannot be had to the laboratory techniques of the natural sciences."

Instead, classical economics tries to predict economic behaviour by

theorizing about a completely fair marketplace in which people are

rational actors and all things are equal.

The problem with this — as plenty of left-wing critics have pointed out —

is that all things aren't equal. Some people are born into rich families,

and blessed with great opportunities. Others are born into dirt-poor

neighbourhoods where even the most brilliant mind coupled with hard work

may not forge success. As a result, economists have warred for centuries

over two diverging visions. Adam Smith argued that people inherently

prefer a free market and the ability to rise above others; Karl Marx

countered that capital was inherently unfair and those with power would

abuse it. But no pristine world exists in which to test these theories —

there is no country with a truly level playing field.

Except, possibly, for EverQuest, the world's first truly egalitarian

polity. Everyone begins the same way: with nothing. You enter with

pathetic skills, no money, and only the clothes on your back. Wealth comes

from working hard, honing your skills, and clever trading. It is a genuine

meritocracy, which is precisely why players love the game, Castronova

argues. "It undoes all the inequities in society. They're wiped away. Sir

Thomas More would have dreamt about that possibility, that kind of

utopia," he says.

Virtual worlds have produced some surreal rags-to-riches stories. When the

on-line world Second Life launched, the players were impressed to see a

female avatar industriously building a sprawling monster home. An in-game

neighbour stopped by to say hello only to discover she was a homeless

person in British Columbia, logging on using her single remaining

possession, a laptop. Penniless in the real world, she belonged to a

social elite in the fake one.

Not all social inequities are absent, of course. For instance, Castronova

discovered that women in the game are worth less than men, in a very

measurable way: when he compared the sale of male and female avatars, he

found than female characters sold for 10 percent less than male ones at

precisely the same power level. Players with female avatars also say it's

harder to advance in the game, at least initially — even though the female

characters are often being played, in real life, by men. (A study by the

game academic Nick Yee found that male players "cross-dress" as female

characters at least one-third of the time.) Men play as women characters

partly for the kinky thrill, but also because female characters are given

random presents of free stuff by other players, a chivalric custom known

as "gifting." "Personally, you receive a lot more stuff when you start out

as a female," as one male cross-dresser wrote to Yee.

Ultimately, Castronova says, EverQuest supports one of Adam Smith's main

points, which is that people actually prefer unequal outcomes. In fact,

EverQuest eerily mirrors the state of modern free-market societies: only a

small minority of players attain Level 65 power and own castles; most

remain quite poor. When game companies offer socialist alternatives,

players reject them. "They've tried to make games where you can't amass

more property than someone else," says Castronova, "but everybody hated

it. It seems that we definitely do not want everybody to have the same

stuff all the time; people find it boring." It is a result that would warm

the heart of a conservative.

Yet progressives, too, have been drawn to Castronova's research. Robert

Shapiro, formerly an undersecretary of commerce for Bill Clinton, views

the economist's findings as nothing less than a liberal call-to-arms.

EverQuest players tolerate the massive split between the virtual rich and

the poor, Shapiro tells me, only because they know that this is a level

playing field. If you work hard enough, you'll eventually grow wealthy. In

Shapiro's view, Castronova's research proves that the only way to create a

truly free market is to support programs that give everyone a fair chance

at success, such as good education and health care. "This may provide the

most important lesson of all from the EverQuest experiment," he wrote in

an essay. "Real equality can obviate much of a democratic government's

intervention in a modern economy. . . . If EverQuest is any guide, the

liberal dream of genuine equality would usher in the conservative vision

of truly limited government." In other words, maybe the best way to save

the real world is to make it more like EverQuest.

A few months ago, a powerful warrior showed up on EverQuest. He was at

Level 50, an indication that he was an experienced player. But when he

tried to join a group of other similarly powerful players on a quest to

kill a dragon, they quickly realized he had no idea what the hel_l he was

doing. He didn't understand teamwork or even the basic language of the

game. Then they discovered his secret: he was a thirteen-year-old kid

whose parents had gone to PlayerAuctions.com and bought him the character

for $500.

"He kept getting killed over and over and over again. People were like,

Who is this idiot?" says Sean Stalzer, a thirty-three-year-old who is a

five-year veteran of EverQuest. Stalzer runs The Syndicate, one of the

game's most respected "guilds." Guilds are groups of powerful characters

who co-operate to defeat the deadliest monsters (which provide the richest

loot). The most elite guilds generally have a no-buying ethic. They accept

only players who have "levelled up" their characters the old-fashioned

way. "They put hours and hours into it," Stalzer says. "So when someone

comes along to make a profit or buy a character, it makes a mockery of

what they do. Why should you be better than me because you have more

money?" His disdain is like that of a hardscrabble kid from the projects

who works for years to get into Yale — only to watch George W. Bush sail

in because his daddy is a rich donor.

This culture war underscores the big irony of EverQuest politics. Sure,

most players love a level playing field — but they love a leg up even

more. Adam Smith might smile at EverQuest's booming marketplace, but

beneath the surface, Marx's bleaker vision of capital might be winning the

day.

Of course, many people buy "pre-levelled" characters not to cheat at the

game, but to save time. They're usually busy professionals who can't waste

six numbing hours a day killing bunnies to make their warrior elf more

powerful. Game companies frown on the selling of characters because they

feel it destroys the meritocratic feel of their worlds. But because so

many millions of players clearly want to buy their way to power, the

companies have mostly turned a blind eye to the on-line auctions. Last

year, Ultima Online caved in and began to sell "pre-levelled" characters

to new players; demand was so high on the first day that their phone banks

crashed.

Even the most stoic guild members are tempted by the booming market.

Stalzer's guild was once offered $50,000 for all of its characters and

loot. The members declined. But, sometimes, when individual guild members

run into financial difficulties in the real world, they quietly pawn off

virtual goods on the side. "One guy had an 'Enchanter' and he sold it for

two thousand dollars," Stalzer tells me. "That happens a lot. You get a

guy who says, 'Dude, I just graduated and I can't find a job, so I gotta

sell this thing.' But I don't mind it when it's real financial need."

Guild members hesitate to sell their goods in part because they do not

feel they are the sole owners. When a guild vanquishes a monster, it

divides the loot among the members. Each player's booty winds up feeling

more like a piece of communal property. At the Las Vegas computer

conference, Castronova and I ran into a blue-haired nineteen-year-old who

plays EverQuest as a Level 55 "cleric" in a powerful guild. "I've got

dozens of reagents, these magical potions," she said. "And some of them

are probably worth, like, a hundred bucks apiece. I could totally sell

them. But I always think, ######, I only have this stuff because of how

other people helped me get it. So they sort of own it, too. It's not my

right to sell it." In EverQuest, even socialism finds a home.

Within months of Ultima Online's launch, in 1997, the game spiralled into

a currency crisis. The developers woke up one morning to discover that the

value of their gold currency was plummeting. Why? A handful of sneaky

players had discovered a bug in the code that allowed them to artificially

duplicate gold pieces (called "duping"). The economy had been hit by a

counterfeiting ring. Inflation soared, and for weeks, players would log in

each day to find their assets worth less and less. Ultima programmers soon

fixed the bug. But then they had a new problem: How do you drain all the

excess gold out of the economy and bring prices back to normal? They hit

upon the idea of creating a rare type of red hair dye and offering it for

sale in small quantities. It had no real use, but, because it was rare, it

became instantly popular and commanded an enormous price — which leached

so much gold out of the system that inflation subsided. But the

programmers had to meditate for hours on what possible side effects their

"fix" might have.

Game designers are, in a sense, the government of their worlds,

continually tweaking the system to try and keep it from ruining the lives

of their "citizens." In essence, they face the political question that

bedevils real-life politicians everywhere: How much should a government

meddle in the marketplace?

In Ultima Online, players pick jobs and produce goods: blacksmiths make

iron tools; tailors make shirts. In the early days, the players were

forced to find other players to buy the stuff. They had to act like

entrepreneurs and, as it turned out, few people really wanted to do that;

they just wanted to do their jobs and get paid. So the game designers

created "shopkeepers," robot characters that would automatically buy

whatever goods the players made. This forced the designers to behave like

Soviet central planners, micromanaging every aspect of the marketplace

with arcane algorithms of supply and demand. How much would a chair be

worth, compared to a rabbit skin? If horseshoes were suddenly in low

supply, how would that affect the price of magical healing potions? How

much inflation is too little, or too much?

Citizens, too, began to complain that the economic system was bafflingly

arbitrary. One irate player pointed out that a spool of thread could be

bought for two gold pieces, then instantly transformed by a tailor into a

shirt worth twenty gold pieces — a profit margin that massively overshot

any other activity, for no apparent reason. Eventually the game designers

mostly gave up, and built a system in which players could trade more

easily among themselves.The Berlin Wall fell, and capitalism rushed in.

The free market made things more fluid, but also more unfair. Soon, rich

players drove the price of basic goods so high that poor players became

much poorer. Once again, the designers had to step in. They would "drop"

objects in places where new players could easily scavenge them, giving

them a chance to amass a bit of wealth. The designers also set up programs

to buy the otherwise useless items generated by poor players (such as

animal skins) to give them a chance to make money. In essence, they

created handouts for the disadvantaged. Ultima Online had morphed into a

modern welfare state, where a free market coexists uneasily with an

activist government. "As a developer, I would love to leave it all as a

free market," says Anthony Castoro, one of Ultima Online's first

designers. "But people who are new to the game would have nothing, and the

big players would have everything."

A year after Castronova began his writings on the field, on-line games

were sufficiently mainstream that he was a media celebrity, with CNN,

National Public Radio, and endless newspapers calling him for comment. But

economists at universities still weren't impressed. Castronova submitted

his original EverQuest paper to a few economics journals. They rejected it

instantly. One reviewer wrote a snippy note saying he preferred "to stick

with things that are real rather than virtual." One can appreciate the

economists' confusion. Even the most highly valued virtual goods do not

seem, in some essential way, real. An Axe of the Heavens may be great for

killing virtual orcs, but it cannot be enjoyed in the physical world. You

can't eat virtual food to stay alive. But that distinction shouldn't

matter — at least not in economics, which is, as Castronova never tires of

pointing out, the study of the entirely arbitrary values that people

ascribe to things. "Most of a diamond's value is virtual, too," he adds.

The ultimate proof of this idea is in the game world's emerging merchant

class — people who make their real-world income purely by "flipping"

virtual goods. Much of their everyday jobs is conducted within the game.

One of these merchants is Robert Kiblinger, a thirty-three-year-old West

Virginian. A commercial chemist by training, he worked for Febreze, the

company that invented the popular cleaning agent, for which he still holds

a couple of patents. ("I was basically selling perfumed water," he jokes.)

But then he started playing Ultima Online, where he ran into a player who

was tired of the game and wanted to sell his entire account. The player

owned two houses and towers and oodles of rare items, and only wanted

$500, which Kiblinger figured was a steal. He drove to Cincinnati to close

the deal. "I met him in a Taco Bell parking lot and I gave him a cheque,"

he recalls. The next day, they met inside the game, and the seller handed

over the virtual goods. Kiblinger turned around and resold the whole

shebang a few days later to another player on eBay for $8,000, producing a

tidy profit.

He was hooked. He began buying up items from anyone who was willing to

sell, and set up a Web site — UOTreasures — to advertise his inventory.

Today the site gets thirty-five thousand visitors a week. Kiblinger

employs five hundred people inside the game, paying them a small stipend

(in Ultima Gold and cash) to act as virtual couriers, scurrying around

inside the game to deliver the goods to the players who've paid for them.

A few elite customers have bought more than $20,000 of stuff from him. A

couple of years ago, business was so good that Kiblinger quit his job as a

research associate at Procter & Gamble to work full-time as a virtual

vendor, though he won't tell me his exact income. "It's in the six

figures," he says. "It's a decent living."

Kiblinger introduced me to one of his clients, Becky Ruttenbur, a

thirty-seven-year-old woman in Montana. Outside the game she's a single

mother; inside she is "married" to another virtual character, played by a

soldier who is currently stationed in Iraq. Ruttenbur and the soldier have

a joint house and property in the game, even though the soldier is married

in real life. Such in-game polygamy is common; Ruttenbur has even met her

cyberhusband's real-life wife, and says, "She thinks we're nuttier than

you could imagine." After playing Ultima Online for five years, Ruttenbur

has a huge estate of in-game property, including a set of potted plants

that goes for an average of $75 in real U.S. dollars on an auction board.

Her stash of on-line goods would fetch $15,000 if she sold it.

Now there's a company rich enough to buy the entire lot. Three years ago,

a company called IGE, whose sole function is to buy and sell virtual

goods, launched. I met one of the company's founders, Brock Pierce, at a

gaming conference in New York. A fresh-faced, blond twenty-three-year-old

who is based in Boca Raton, Florida, he said IGE has "thousands of

suppliers" who scout the games all day long to find cut-rate goods. He has

a hundred full-time staff members at an office in Hong Kong to handle

customer service. On any given day, he says, they handle "several million

dollars'" worth of virtual inventory. Several million? "We're ten times

the size of anyone else," Pierce bragged. Many players call IGE the

Wal-Mart of virtual games. But it is more like a Morgan Stanley or a Long

Term Capital Management, a company whose holdings are significant enough

to singlehandedly affect the cash flow of the markets.

Of course, every booming economy has not only its white-shoe financiers

but also its lowly offshore workers. A few years ago, a company called

Black Snow Interactive opened up a "levelling" service for the game Dark

Age of Camelot. It had a digital sweatshop in Mexico; there,

ultra-low-wage workers would click away at computers, playing the

characters twenty-four hours a day to level them up. Mythic, the company

that runs Dark Age of Camelot, got wind of the scheme and closed down

Black Snow's accounts and auctions. The operators vanished, and have not

been heard of since.

An even more intriguing financial institution opened for business a few

months ago: the Gaming Open Market. Based in Toronto, it is an on-line

service that exists solely for trading the currencies of virtual games —

Gold/Silver from Horizons, Linden Dollars from Second Life, Therebucks

from There.com. If you're a player who wants some quick virtual currency

for your favourite game, you can buy it there using real-world U.S. cash.

Sometimes people who play several different virtual games use the market

to transfer money from one world to another, like travellers at an airport

exchanging currencies. As on Wall Street, the value of each game currency

fluctuates wildly depending on how badly it's needed. "It's just supply

and demand. If somebody really wants a currency, it can drive the price

sky-high," says Jamie Hale, the thirty-year-old founder of the Gaming Open

Market. The day I spoke to him, a single player had bought every Linden

Dollar on the market, about $500 (U.S.) worth. It cleaned out the Market's

entire stock and produced a sudden spike in the Linden Dollar's value.

Sometimes Hale himself will jump in to do some quick currency trading if

he spots a profitable spread. He admits he has no official training in

finance; in fact, he's a programmer by trade, and his co-founder — who

helped write the Market's software — is an astrophysicist. "We keep a

bunch of economics texts on my shelf to appear smart," he jokes. Hale's

operation is still small, with only nine hundred users. But, as it grows,

it could conceivably produce a virtual George Soros — someone who amasses

so many billions of units of a currency that he could provoke a crisis in

that game's economy for the purposes of profiting off it, much as Soros

destroyed the British pound in September, 1992. "The value of the currency

would drop through the floor," Hale notes. "But that's the game company's

problem."

As virtual worlds increasingly mirror the real one, game companies are

already dealing with another problem: crime. Indeed, there's even

organized crime in The Sims Online, the cyberspace version of the

top-selling computer hit. In the game, players assume control of tiny

suburbanites, build houses, and work at jobs to earn "Simoleans," the

in-game currency. The Sim Mafia was founded by Jeremy Chase, a

twenty-six-year-old in Sacramento. Players who want to destroy another

character's reputation turn to the mob. The game has a system of black

marks for punishing bad behaviour. If Chase is paid to "tag" someone, he

gets his crime family — a loose collection of a hundred players — to place

dozens and dozens of red tags on the victim. When they're done, other

players will assume the character must have done something awful, and

refuse to speak or trade with him. Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy

at the University of Michigan, became fascinated by The Sims Online last

year and founded a blog — "The Alphaville Herald" — that reports on

interesting social situations inside the world. Last November, he

discovered something truly strange: The game had a chain of

cyber-brothels, run by a family of avatars, all played by a character

named "Evangeline." Evangeline had organized a handful of Sim women to

perform hot-sex chat inside the game for customers, who paid in Simoleans.

"Girls set their own prices," she told Ludlow. "Bj's" were 20,000

Simoleans, the equivalent of roughly $4.50 (U.S.); Evangeline reserved the

richest customers for herself, making up to $40 or $50 (U.S.) a trick.

Ludlow later discovered that some of Evangeline's "girls" were underage

girls in real life, and that Evangeline herself was a seventeen-year-old

boy living in Florida. When he blogged about his findings, reporters

nationwide snapped to attention, and soon The Sims Online was on the front

page of The New York Times.

Maxis — the company that runs the game — struck back. They cancelled

Ludlow's account, claiming he had broken the game's rules by advertising

his blog inside the world. (Maxis prohibits anyone from advertising

real-world services or goods inside the game.) Ludlow insists he never

made a dime off "The Alphaville Herald," and that he was booted out solely

because his research had embarrassed the game company.

Either way, Ludlow lost most of his goods. When game owners cancel your

account, it's like having your house instantly destroyed in a fire: your

property winks out of existence. Ludlow figures he had about two hundred

dollars' worth of virtual goods deleted, including a pet cheetah ("which

is like a fifteen-dollar animal") that he'd bought from a vendor on-line.

Yet Maxis could not entirely delete his virtual wealth. A week before his

account was deleted, Ludlow had deposited eight hundred thousand Simoleans

into an account at the Gaming Open Market. And Maxis has no power over the

Market; it cannot forcibly demand that Hale, the owner of the exchange,

delete that money. In effect, Ludlow had parked his money in the

virtual-world equivalent of an overseas bank, where no game government

could touch it.

Ludlow's case points to the ultimate question, with enormous legal

implications for the real world: What, precisely, is the legal status of

virtual property? Does anyone actually "own" it?

Last November, I accompanied Castronova to a legal conference in New York

devoted to this subject. There game-company executives argued that when a

player joins a world such as Ultima Online, he or she agrees to a user

licence that explicitly says the game company owns everything that happens

on the servers. "It's a game, and what we're doing is inviting you in to

play with the toys. But you don't own the toys. We do," said Richard

Bartle, who pioneered the first virtual world back in the 1980s.

The problem is that people who play the games act as if their virtual

castles were their own private property. And, when it comes to property

issues, courts in the U.S., at least, have traditionally tended to take

the view that if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck. If enough people

treat their Robe of Primordial Waters as though it's genuine personal

property, the law might respect that — no matter what the game companies

say.

This debate may appear rather abstract right now. But, sooner or later,

one of these game companies will start losing money and decide it can't

afford to keep its virtual world. (Many observers expect at least one

major world to go bankrupt this year.) If a game shut down, it would

instantly destroy hundreds of thousands — perhaps even millions — of

dollars. The homeless woman with the virtual mansion, for instance, could

probably sell her goods for several hundred dollars; she would lose her

single most valuable possession.

For now, there is no clear precedent on how to deal with virtual property.

Owning a virtual castle is not like owning other virtual things, such as

stock in a company, because the value is not in an external, tangible

object such as a corporation, but in the work and money invested in

acquiring it.

With stakes like that, said Jack Balkin, a Yale law professor and a host

of the legal conference, players will probably fight back with lawsuits,

or by going right to politicians, demanding legislation to prevent worlds

from closing down. Julian Dibbell, a journalist who began trading virtual

goods himself last summer — he aims to report "revenue from the sale of

virtual goods" as the single biggest line-item on his 2004 tax return —

later suggested an even stranger scenario. He said that players could well

band together and try to buy back the world at the company's bankruptcy

hearing — and then run it themselves as a breakaway republic. "Some

renegade players have done things like that before, actually," he noted.

"They've gotten access to the code of the game and then illicitly created

their own duplicate world."

In a few years, these questions will creep into the mainstream, because

online environments such as EverQuest are likely to become a significant

way that people interact with the Internet. Only a small chunk of the

population will ever go into a brooding medieval-fantasy such as

EverQuest, but virtual worlds have emerged that are much friendlier, and

do not use dungeons-and-dragons themes at all. Indeed, they're not even

games: they have no goals, no "levels" to achieve, no points to score.

There.com, for example, is a 3-D world devoted to nothing but chatting and

socializing, using avatars that look like seductive, attractive models.

You'd probably prefer it to real life, because everything is just so much

prettier in There. As in the real world, one of the main activities in

There is shopping. The company created a currency, Therebucks, and tied it

directly to the value of the American dollar to prevent inflation. Players

spend a lot of time customizing their appearance (often for the purposes

of flirting), so Nike and Levis have virtual clothes that they sell solely

inside the game. Individual players, too, have become designers, creating

outfits they sell to other There citizens. "One of the leading clothes

designers is making $3,000 to $4,000 a month, which is a full-time job,"

says There's founder, Will Harvey. A place like There is not so much a

game as a platform for life. A large chunk of our everyday experiences —

meetings, conversation, music, shopping — could port nicely to a 3-D

space. There Inc. is already talking to companies about licensing "land"

inside the game, so far-flung employees can conduct meetings there instead

of on the old-fashioned Internet. It's not as far-fetched as it sounds.

The U.S. military has already licensed a private chunk of There and

created a simulation of the planet on it. The army is currently using the

virtual Baghdad in There as a training space for American soldiers. The

prospect of life moving into an area such as There both amazes and

terrifies Balkin. "So, what happens when people start doing therapy inside

a virtual world?" he asked. "Or teaching? It's a convenient place to meet,

but literally everything can be recorded. So what do you do when doctors

are meeting to talk with patients in a virtual world?"

Castronova sighs. Though he has made his career out of studying these

economies, he is dismayed by how the real world has bled into the virtual

one. "I liked it better when they were just, you know, games," he says

wistfully. He preferred the meritocratic feel of EverQuest, before all the

duping and the auctions and the bidding wars for powerful avatars. He

liked the idea of on-line worlds as a place you migrated to when, like an

immigrant, you wanted a new lease on life — just as three years ago, when,

depressed and lonely, he first stumbled into EverQuest.

His own voyage had a good ending. A few months ago, the communications

department at Indiana University in Bloomington called. They had read his

work and wanted to talk. Weeks later, they offered him a fully tenured

position in a new department. Castronova had still never published a

single one of his EverQuest papers in print; all his analyses had been

distributed on-line. "It's all PDFs and Web sites," he joked. Like an

avatar in the game, he had levelled up.

Clive Thompson writes about science and technology for The New York Times

Magazine, Wired, and Details, and runs the tech-culture blog

collisiondetection.net.

**

edit: sorry about the spacing... it looks normal in the post edit window, but not when posted.

Edited December 11, 2005 by Heng

[ThaiPauly]

I prefer Subbuteo

[LivinLOS]

I recently started with an email alert gambling service approx 2 - 3 months ago.. Looking at making well over 1k GBP this month and I do almost nothing (they send me email.. I place the bet) I started with a small stake pot and have let it grow.. I think I have had 7 straight winning bets now.. The spiel that sells this service claims the past performance last year turned 100 GBP into 20k..

That's sounds good to me.

LivinLOS, could you please give more details about this - what is the web-site.

Can you actually get the money from the stake, or do they keep it in the pot?

How much have you actually given tot them and how much have they actually given to you?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I am betting on Betonmarkets.com to be honest its more financial futures trading than gambling with sports or similar..

I use this service (I know it reads like over sold spiel but thats the only link I have)..

http://www.fsponline-recommends.co.uk/page...a902&u=fotc0905

Which sends one or two emails a week.. I missed a bet (and lost a few hundred quid) so immediately set a new special email account on my server which SMS's my mobile as soon as an email arrives.. I then simply follow the betting instructions..

At the start I decided to consider about 2k GBP my bankroll (there is a simple staking plan) but only deposited 850 into the account on the first few bets as I was winning from the beggining..

The 850 is now approx 1500 GBP in the cash account and about 850 riding on current open bets..

One of those will pay out 500 GBP at midnight GMT 12th unless the USD / EUR falls out of bed in the next 36 or so hours..

I have had 7 straight wins with an average return between 20 - 40% per bet.. After a few small bets I started placing to win 500 GBP each time and recently upped that to win 750 GBP most times.. I have added >1k GBP to my pot this month and when you consider thats pretty much doubling the pot in a month I am impressed to say the least.. Considering the cost of membership and the money deposited I am still fully clear..

So far I have removed no money from my account (but have done all of the money laundering steps so that the account has ability to pay out larger sums easily) as I am growing the bank.. Once I have a 5k GBP rolling bank I will remove winnings..

I attach last years profit and loss spreadsheet from the service..

If you wish to sign up I think there are other payment options (3 month renewable) and I have the guys email for questions..

Fixed_Odds_Trader_track_record.zip

[LivinLOS]

I would also mention this service..

http://www.fsponline-recommends.co.uk/page...x&u=ftshtml0805

I have heard very positive things about this and intend to take some winnings from my bank in the next weeks to sign up and test this email alert service also..

I figure 2 winning systems has to be better than one even just for the diversification..

The spread betting service (footsie trader) is a higher workload than the fixed odd trader which is simply recieve email, place bet, etc.. Not complex only more options, more brokers, little bit more judgement.

Edited December 11, 2005 by LivinLOS

[jonik]

I know several webdesigners.  It's about half and half, those doing well, and those living paycheck to paycheck.  One is doing better than the rest, but you guessed it... runs porn websites (a few hundred of them).  Upper 5's lower 6's in figures US per month. 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

6 digits income a month............does he act in them himself then or just build them?

[jonik]

Found some links to making money while staying online...........

http://www.worldsecondhand.com/board/viewd...;ษา