EPTPrima, we did not aim for conversions. So theres no ouch
FXOpen Invitational Final Analysis - Page 6
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FXOBoSs
337 Posts
Prima, we did not aim for conversions. So theres no ouch | ||
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Trevor.PGT
Canada53 Posts
The prize pool of events are often generated from entrance fees so if you have 100 players paying $20 you could have a $2,000 tournament. The problem with LANs however is the cost of the venue so scaling up the players adds to the cost of space but can also help with advertising and attracting sponsors. As stated in the original post, you need more than one stream of revenue. NASL Season 2 lost Korean players even with $100,000 in prizes. Although prize money is needed to sustain professional gamers it is not the main motivation for gamers. Would you spend 10 hours a day 5 days a week for months practicing to win a $500 prize? Or would you rather have 1,000,000 in attendance watching as you played MMA for $1 prize? | ||
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Primadog
United States4411 Posts
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FXOBoSs
337 Posts
On February 21 2012 03:35 Primadog wrote: Based on the information you gathered from FIS5, do you think that MLG will hit their target PPV numbers? No | ||
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tzagear
United States33 Posts
Emulate Radio Pure audio casting. While working/driving I try to plan to go back and watch a VoD later on, though I rarely do. However I would love to be able to tune my phone to listen in to what is going on during an event. Include old school, prairie home companion'esk Ads in the audio cast. Not at all sure on the details of this being monetized but I know I would listen. Chances are that I am not the only one. Would win my vote over any radio I have had to hear while working. Alternate streaming destinations This is really just taking the first idea further. Offering the information on more platforms. Not sure how it would work but I would love if there was a way to view/hear streams in a way similar to the way Netflix has propagated to game consoles, dvd/tvs, and smart phones. Give a multicast stream that people can put in a channel on their chat client so they can follow the event while they game. ( Tracking listeners may be a challenge here but I am sure there is a way. Bot that checks how many are in the same room/channel or have a phantom there. ) In short, I want to live and breath eSports so please give me options for when I am either not at my computer or occupied with other things. ( Heck, give me some replays and I will throw down some summary mp3s, so you can understand what I mean, that can queue up pandora style with Ads and 'are you still listening?' or just slacker radio style. Like what they here in the audio summary, they can thumbs up to watch the VoD later and skip so not to ruin the result of the match. Then if they skipped no audio is played that is dependent on that match result. All controlled from smart phone or browser. ) | ||
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Thrie
United States24 Posts
1. It was difficult to get bracket updates. This lead to me not knowing when to tune in if I wanted to catch a particular game and didn't help me to understand the impact of each series. A separate website or maybe just quick Liquipedia updates and a queue to visit there could be something worth trying. 2. The subscription option was not very prominent either in its advertisement or in its actual location on the stream page, I know I had to spend a few minutes trying to find it on Twitch's interface. Increasing the visibility of the subscription option might be something worh considering. Your prizes looked really awesome, I'm sure that more people would be likely to sign up if they knew about it. 3. Better timing for US viewers. If they are your primary source for ad revenue, streaming (or maybe restreaming) at that time might be something to consider. I thought that I saw IPL rebroadcasts on the stream list, am I mistaken or is there something else going on there? 4. Storylines/Viewer Engagement. The biggest thing that I thought was actually missing was that I didn't feel connected to the players. Maybe that is just because I don't regularly watch GSL and only know them by their results. I think that working on a storyline for the tournament would help to boost viewer numbers and is something that you could consider. Regardless of these issues, I was pretty happy with the tournament, the matches, the casters, and the production. I was actually really happy with the time slot, but as a late night Alaskan, I know that I am not a typical US viewer. | ||
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GarMan
Canada8 Posts
On February 20 2012 13:37 MrCash wrote: So would it be more appropriate to call this eCPM then? From that we can divulge what the fill rate is, if we know what the twitch is claiming to be their CPM. So if the CPM is say $2 and the eCPM is $0.33, the fill rate would be 16.5%, yes To be fair, that probably isn't even JUST the fill rate, as there are other factors to account for, like ad blockers, but that's always going to be part of the market, so eCPM would be a fair way to call this, I suppose. (Disclaimer, I work for twitch). Fill rate already takes into account adblock, its just the rate at which for every time we request an ad from the adservers, one is successfully served. (I am not a manager, nor do I work in renevue, I am just going to say what I know from here, but it's not the official company view, just mine): The FXOpen ran last month. January is a terrible month for fill. Ad budgets are low after the christmas blitz, plus people don't work much at the end of December so sales people are not selling ads. In Europe it seems to take a bit longer than in the USA for stuff to catch up again. This was true for own3d as well as us from what I noticed as a viewer. So taking all that into account, it is plausible that fill rate for the event was 15.5% I think (I am not sure of this) that if the exact same viewer numbers happened in March the income would be higher. How much higher? I don't know. What is a realistic fill rate to expect? (I have no idea) How many people adblock, how many ads are sold in sweden etc. Taking FXOBoSS's numbers into account, there would need to be a 50% fill rate for him to break even (ish). Is that realistic? | ||
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Torte de Lini
Germany38463 Posts
I don't agree that we should depart from the sponsorship model though, there is a heavy reliance but we're not even really off the ground just yet. | ||
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architecture
United States643 Posts
Is GSL profitable? I think we need to have a sense of what is possible, and what is the baseline, before analyzing different products. Achieving profitability is not only about changing the business model, you might have to adjust the product. Both the model and product play a role. While I understand you put effort and money into this product, you need to realize the quality of the games and the production is at a different level from GSL. Maybe it is not profitable to hold lots of minor events, like organizers have been doing. There's a definite oversaturation of events, and it does cannibalize the mindshare of the customer base. Long story short, like studying a build order, we need to see how other products/business models are performing before evaluating this one. | ||
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StarStruck
25339 Posts
It's the nature of the business and you will need the sponsor money for your promotions. PPV is a deadhorse. We aren't ready to remove the training wheels yet. Torte, I should just hire you to make my posts. You can be my TL publicist. | ||
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Canucklehead
Canada5074 Posts
1. The timeslot because I watched some, but not most live because it starts 12am pst and runs for a long time. You said you didn't want to compete with earlier events, but I guess you would actually have to test whether or not more comp at reasonable hours vs no comp at unreasonable hours gives you more viewers. 2. Lack of foreigners. There's no question, you had the best players in your event, but the truth, which won't shock you is that unless it's GSL, the majority of foreigners like to watch other foreigners. I've seen tourneys with not even great foreigners in it get 10k+ viewers. The KSL and the weeklies don't pull huge numbers either because they're korean only. It's a sad, but true fact. | ||
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TotalBiscuit
United Kingdom5437 Posts
Good post there by Boss and it nicely highlights the main problem with funding Starcraft events right now. Unless you have something to sell, you cannot make a profit. I had to tell this to someone who had a lot of money won through poker and wanted to invest in the SC scene. We talked for a while, trying to find different ways to monetise. Our conclusion was that it was nigh on impossible to generate sufficient revenue to break even, let alone earn a profit, unless you were supported by sponsors who had products to sell. Direct sponsorship, especially well supported with ads and giveaways (in the manner of stuff like Homestory Cup) can provide excellent ROI with a relatively low initial outlay. Putting in money yourself though is a mugs game. SCI4 earned $690 in ad revenue. We had 198k unique viewers the first day, 184k the second (first day was much longer so that's to be expected. Hit 50k concurrent viewers on the second day. 36 commercials ran on Day 1 and 42 on Day 2 according to our statistics. In theory, events could self-fund (with an initial investment) if they could sustain a sufficiently higher viewer base in the right countries (ie. ones that get ads) and if Twitch was able to provide higher eCPM (which also involves ensuring fill-rate is high, which it currently is not). This is in reference to online tournaments. Offline events have additional costs but also additional ways to raise revenue including door tickets, refreshments and merchandise. Our tournament also ran in January, so we got shafted by the January rates as well. SCI is heading in the direction of being entirely crowd-funded and by that I don't mean donations, I mean subscription fees. Since I started streaming my ladder, casts and customs as well as the Showcraft show, I've been able to generate a substantial paying subscriber base. It's not at the level it needs to be to entirely fund an SCI every month yet, but it's getting there and that's a much better situation than having to rely in part on donations or the inconsistency of ad revenue. I'll be honest, I've also been looking at Youtube's livestreaming. It seems basic at the moment but Youtube's fill-rate and my CPM are far better than Twitch's right now, I could potentially generate a lot more revenue with it and it might be worth looking into, especially since Rob Simpson just claimed that they don't take a cut of the revenue from $5k+ tournaments so SCI could go higher than it is in terms of prizepool without suffering for it. Anyway thanks to FxOBoss for his info, it is useful to know the financial realities which we are currently facing. We may hear of the woes of MLG but one should also consider that it can be tricky to properly fund a larger online event too. | ||
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Halcyondaze
United States509 Posts
On February 20 2012 13:27 ReachTheSky wrote: Sounds like your in the wrong business if your trying to make money. Maybe you should try a different market? I would love a suggestion of a business market that is not out for a profit. | ||
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densha
United States797 Posts
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GeorgeForeman
United States1746 Posts
To me the most amazing thing is how little revenue there is to be generated by ads. It seems to me that you had a TON of viewers watching for a very long time, but evidently advertisers just aren't willing to pay for this type of advertising. IMO, the biggest problem with eSports' financial viabiility is that advertisers still aren't willing to invest large sums of money into adds. Until they do, I think a sponsorship model is the best way to go. Having some company's logo on the caster desk and on the screen during the games should frankly be worth a TON to advertisers. I mean, we're talking 400,000 hours worth of your logo in front of people's face, and unlike with adds, they can't just mute it and alt-tab away. | ||
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Halcyondaze
United States509 Posts
On February 20 2012 18:34 FXOpen wrote: Its not so easy to get guest casters. Alot of them require payment and increasing overhead without breaking even is silly. At the same time, our viewership is good. We have very high viewership numbers for the type of tournament it is. There is alot of value in that, the value is just not reaching our pockets (to sound like scrooge). I will see if I can sell the exposure off. Guest Casters are a sign that you are grasping for more viewers while failing. I wouldn't advise it, although it seems you understand that. Your casters are fine, as your brand grows so will they. Keep faith in your casters and stick to them. Everybody will flame on account of minor mistakes because that is who we are. They are doing a great job right now, and I'm sure are working very hard to improve, which I am sure that they will. We as a community appreciate your transparency and will continue to support. Also, this is just a shot in the dark but you may want to look into finding a donation type of program, such as the thing Day9 has going, where you get a nice little star or something in chat showing their generosity. I think a growing company with figureheads that the entire community can respect, such as yourself, this idea will do well. Keep up the good work | ||
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Trevor.PGT
Canada53 Posts
Pay per click campaigns might have really helped. In gaming the low cost of advertising can really benefit organizers. Key words such as StarCraft and eSports often cost as little as 0.2 cents per click. By advertising the tournament through Google Adwords you will be placed on Team Liquid and other StarCraft 2 / eSport sites. The low cost of advertising is a huge advantage for eSport organizers and largely untapped. Team Liquid is great but as a forum site tournaments with larger prize pools fall off the first page just as fast as smaller ones. It would be interesting to see how much difference a bit of advertising makes. | ||
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Titorelli
2492 Posts
About the FIS5 event itself. I think it kinda was not hyped enough. I mean it had probably the very best players in the world, yet I only found out about it once I saw the tourney being streamed on the right TL.net bar after waking up on a Sat or Sun morning. | ||
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jaydee81
Germany119 Posts
On February 20 2012 20:13 FXOpen wrote: The fact that the event was broadcasted over 8 separate broadcast days to reach that 2700 figure. A weekend system would mean we have to cut the prize back to $500 which makes it non-viable. - Unstable Just want to put my personal perspective out there. 1) Reducing the price-pool to $500 it would be kind of non-viable, but if it was at like $3000 or $2500, I wouldn't have cared less. 2) The real problem is probably, that I never really cared to begin with. I'm not trying to sound negative here, that's just how it seemed. An even over such a timespan just doesn't really get me interested it seems. I watched occasionally, but it was never No. 1 on my list. It's like "just another round". It seems like a real dilemma. If it is 4 events/days instead of 8, it would not double your viewership, thus not doubling your ad-income. If it was 2 days it wouldn't quadruple, etc. Also, you do not have a real climax for each broadcasting day, where it gets really really interesting to tune in. So it seems increasing money for ads served is really the only option. Or/And to build up some climax situations. Cheers and wishing all the best, JD | ||
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Atoissen
Norway1737 Posts
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? Its also in the night/morning for EU... | ||
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