CriticKitten said:
And people wanted to claim that the brony documentary was a rip off? HA. Gabe and Tycho to the rescue! Bringing real perspective to people all over the internets by showing them just how greedy two people who are already plenty rich can really be!
Ed130 said:
They want to remove the advertising from their site.
Sounds reasonable enough.
Yeah, seems legit enough. All they're asking for is ONE MILLION DOLLARS.
Now I'm not saying that Penny Arcade is run by Dr. Evil....I'm just heavily implying it.
More seriously, this is a terrible deal. If maintaining their site without ads for ONE YEAR costs them one million dollars (especially when most of their ads appear to be PA-related ads and thus cost them NOTHING), perhaps it's time to start looking into your company finances.
And it's fairly clear that most of the offers are worth practically nothing. You don't even get a physical object until the $125 mark. You can get followed by one of the PA guys for only $300? Wowie! Or I can just talk to celebrities on Twitter for free! Tough call.
Well, let's break this down a bit then shall we?
First off, I just went on PA to look at their page. The
ONLY ad I saw was one banner at the top for one of their seasons. This really isn't advertising for anything. Checking out two other sites, both for movie reviews, Red Letter Media and That Guy With The Glasses, I found their sides and banners to each have several ads on them, with TGWTG also including ones before the start of videos. Compared to this, again, Penny Arcade has a SINGLE banner one for their own shows, and nothing before the start of their videos. The amount of profit they generate from this is... $0.00
Second off, let's look at some of their costs. For the size of Penny Arcade, I've seen a few figures thrown around in this thread, but the one that caught my eye 14. Now, with 14 on salary, let's say you pay them $50,000.
Cost: $700,000
That's just employee wages here, nothing more. While the figures are speculation, they aren't out of line I believe. Now, let's look at some other costs they have.
PA Scholarship: $10,000
Server Costs: ???
Show Costs:
- Blamimations
- Check Point
- Extra Credits
- Shut Up & Sit Down
- The Adventures of Ledo and Ix
- Mega 64
All those shows (I believe, could be wrong either way by including one that isn't, or not including one that is) are done by people outside of Penny Arcade. That means that they need to pay them something for those shows.
And this is just skimming the surface as for costs they'd likely encounter. These are the things that you can pick up on the surface. There are plenty of other costs that are associated with running a business that I'm sure could also be tacked onto this.
Now what are PA's sources of revenue? Well, you can buy a shirt from them, a game, some merchandise... And that's about it right now. They do run Child's Play but that's a charity so it's not for profit, and they do have PAX, which I'm not sure how much they
might generate from that, but aside from that, there really isn't any method of earning money from it.
If you think just because something is well known that it automatically generates money, you are wrong. The way it generates money from a name is by allowing others to use that name to get traffic from them (advertising). A great example of this would be XKCD. No advertising at all, ever, the only thing sold is a few pieces of merchandise on their store page. That's it. The difference between XKCD and PA though is that PA has a staff that it needs to pay, more content, and is far bigger than just a lone guy doing comics. That means that going with a model that is advertising free is much harder.
If I were PA though, I'd also add subscription services to the website to help generate revenue. Say $15 semi-annually, $25 annually, something like that. Least that way they'd be generating a more consistent income from their userbase. They've gone the method of using a Kick Starter though, which may make them more money in the end, but is less consistent in how much they'll earn year to year if they rely on it.
So no, trying to reach $1,000,000 as a goal does not seem that much when you actually consider the costs that PA likely goes through annually. In fact, I would probably think they'd go through more.
Edit: Upon review, I forgot that I only viewed thier page for Extra Credits. I went onto their main page shortly after to find they had one additional spot on the side of their front page. If refreshed a few times, the only paid one that seems to come up is for some Magic The Gathering arcade game, which only seems to appear 1/3 of the time.