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Dear e-Sports community,
As promised albeit delayed. Below you will find the full analysis of the FXOpen Invitational series of the last month.
I do apologise for the delay there has been a lot going on lately.
Over the course of event, FXOpen e-sports broke its own records for viewership, hours played and monthly income. We are very impressed by the communities support towards our event and thankful to everyone who watched the awesome games.
Our viewership stats are as follows:
Video Plays: 720993
Unique visitors: 434895
Hours watched: 393577
Max Concurrent Viewers: 10875
Average Concurrent during live: 7615
During the entire event we ran 956 commercials.
We had 95 subscribers.
Total income from advertising: 2412.88
Total income from subscribers: 332.50
Total income: 2745.38
Cost to run the event: $8000
As you can see we did not come close to the running cost of the event, even with viewership records and high numbers of advertisements.
If you wish to google the way to calculate CPM eCPM etc feel free to do so. But I will not be doing that in this thread.
My personal analysis of this event is that it was successful for what we are trying to achieve. This was a strong viewer growth. Although breaking even financially would have been great, we managed to grow our product to an all time high for our events. Which adds to the exposure of the brand name.
There is nothing overly interesting about these figures other than the fact that even with 7-10k viewers it is very difficult for an organisation to break even without multiple streams of income. I guess it reinforces the whole facebook/google vs e-sports argument I have run into recently. Without huge viewership, ad revenue from its current sources is not a viable business model for e-sports.
Without re-starting the who PPV debate a sponsorship model is also a non viable model as it becomes a 'reliant' source of income. Basically, if you run a sponsorship model and sponsors go away then you will die.
So my thoughts are a bit mixed on how to go about profitability in the e-Sports market.
A pay per view model is essential but at the same time its a desperate measure.
From our subscription testing in this event I don't even think with a subscription cost of $1 would it help the bottom line. So holding the event with an option subscription is probably going to be as far as we go with a paid model.
Although our production quality has been raised, we will look to raise it again in the next invitational. We have changed the format a little bit to include qualifiers and invites mixed together.
The purpose of the format change is to allow for more up time at no extra cost. That way we have more time to run ads and more time to increase our viewership. Of course, this isn't what the community likes to see, you would rather see an increase in prize pool but that won't happen until the economics become viable to host such an event.
If there is anything you'd like me to answer, feel free to post the question here.
Regards,
FXOBoSs
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Thanks for releasing this stuff, people need to see the numbers like this and actually cope that ESPORTS as a business isn't actually really making money.
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Without getting into the debate of whether or not PPV is necessary, I think we can all agree that something needs to be done about the financial viability of hosting a tournament, especially a major LAN. Thank you for releasing these numbers, but I am sure you can agree that these numbers are a bit troubling (Revenues just over a third of total expenses), and that this situation is probably not uncommon.
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Why is PPV seen as a desperation move instead of a natural transition?
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Your viewer numbers seem really low, like, IdrA streaming the other day had 12k.
Maybe it's a result of the main tournament stream being at like 5 in the morning in the US?
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Great analysis and insight. Thanks for sharing and always being so interactive with the community. I tried to catch as many games as I could but since I'm from the states it wasn't always convenient to stay up late.
Admittingly I didn't make the effort to catch vods, rather, I just went to liquidpedia for results. Is there a financial benefit to watching vods or does the benefit lie mainly in exposure for the tournament and those involved?
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Hello!
I have a few questions.
How are you going to pay for the lost money running the last event?
Will you continue to hold events?
Is e-sports in danger? (nobody has announced that they have made and money)
Thank you man.
+ Show Spoiler +you beat me on stream a few months ago =(
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I tried following this event but, couldn't simply because of the time(3 AM EST). I'm the type of person that will watch something if it's "Live/First Broadcast" but, will rarely go out looking for VOD's after the fact since there is just sooo much content that is Live.
Appreciate you getting down and sharing the nitty gritty. How much do you think it would help you if broadcasted at a better time for both NA and EU since those are the main markets at the moment? Think it would've made a significant dent in making up the costs or basically the same?
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On February 20 2012 13:14 garbodor wrote:
Your viewer numbers seem really low, like, IdrA streaming the other day had 12k.
Maybe it's a result of the main tournament stream being at like 5 in the morning in the US?
While at first glance, this conclusion does make a lot of sense, but most people forget that if we did do it at prime time for US or EU. We also run in conflict with NASL, IPL ect. These events have roughly the same viewers (estimate from what I've seen). So running in this timeslot I feel would provide less results and also hurt the viewer ship of all three events.
- Unstable
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Thanks for posting this. It's nice to see some financial transparency even though nobody asked you to reveal your numbers. Showing actual numbers about how much in the red you are is certainly a much more appropriate way to get people on your side than vague threats about how e-sports is going to die if we don't pony up $20. I'm glad you guys considered the tournament a success in spite of the lack of revenue. Here's to hoping FXOpen iS#6 gets even bigger.
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thanks for releasing information
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On February 20 2012 13:20 FXOpen wrote:Show nested quote +On February 20 2012 13:14 garbodor wrote:
Your viewer numbers seem really low, like, IdrA streaming the other day had 12k.
Maybe it's a result of the main tournament stream being at like 5 in the morning in the US? While at first glance, this conclusion does make a lot of sense, but most people forget that if we did do it at prime time for US or EU. We also run in conflict with NASL, IPL ect. These events have roughly the same viewers (estimate from what I've seen). So running in this timeslot I feel would provide less results and also hurt the viewer ship of all three events. - Unstable
'
In your current time slot isn't there pretty bad overlap with GSL most nights?
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Looks like $1 per 150 viewer-hour is the best eSports have to offer right now. Thanks for sharing FXOBoss.
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You rebroadcasted it, but you ran it right after the first airing ended. Would you not have gotten more ad revenue running it again during a better time for NA/EU viewers? Not that it would have probably made you break even, but still
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I am proud to be part of the ~1%
Very nice to see info like this being broken down for once. I hope that it becomes a trend, I feel like there is too little transparency in eSports at the moment.
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Any chance we can see the breakdown of the cost to run the event? Just want to see where that $8k is coming from.
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Do you have handy how many hours of content did FIS#5 produced?
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Thank you for releasing this information. Specifics make the whole business model discussion easier to understand!
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Sounds like your in the wrong business if your trying to make money. Maybe you should try a different market?
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On February 20 2012 13:22 garbodor wrote:Show nested quote +On February 20 2012 13:20 FXOpen wrote:On February 20 2012 13:14 garbodor wrote:
Your viewer numbers seem really low, like, IdrA streaming the other day had 12k.
Maybe it's a result of the main tournament stream being at like 5 in the morning in the US? While at first glance, this conclusion does make a lot of sense, but most people forget that if we did do it at prime time for US or EU. We also run in conflict with NASL, IPL ect. These events have roughly the same viewers (estimate from what I've seen). So running in this timeslot I feel would provide less results and also hurt the viewer ship of all three events. - Unstable ' In your current time slot isn't there pretty bad overlap with GSL most nights?
For the days that we Broadcasted GSTL would finish at roughly the time we started on the Saturday broadcast and no GSL event on Sunday.
Our initial goal of that timeslot was to avoid all possible overlap with any event. While it does show that people liked the event as I have heard nothing but good things. It will be a difficult experiment to weigh in on running in the same Time zone as other events. As of course it would affect the bottom line. It's an interesting thing to think about and one of the problems I am trying to solve, Will it be better or worse? I am not sure but its a difficult decision to take the risk when our latest event broke all our previous records.
- Unstable
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EPT
