PayPal Stats

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

Inspired by Cheryl and Scott's energy, I wrote my little analysis program 
that walks all the PayPal e-mails and figures out how many of each thing 
was purchased each month.  I compiled the results here:

http://test.thekrib.com/membership.xls
http://test.thekrib.com/bookstore.xls
http://test.thekrib.com/convention.xls

What does it mean?  Membership since mid-December when we started this was
just over 400 "years".  The raw numbers don't include refunds, so I'm
being a little conservative.  Projecting this out to the whole year, that
would be 600 "years" of PayPal subscriptions.  Let's say that Cheryl's
addition of non-PayPal memberships (about 100) is actually 150 "years", we
could extract that to a little over 200 "years" by the end of the year.  
The two added together means we will get just over 800 years of renewals.  
Let us say that we see $15 of each year, after you count the fees, foreign
shipping, multi-year-discont etc.  That means the projected income from
membership for the year is about $12,000.

The advertising that Kathy is bringing in is about $2500 per issue, or 
$10,000 per year.  

I gather that TAG is still costing $6000 per issue to produce, including 
mailing?  This means we are RIGHT ON THE EDGE.

OK, moving along to the bookstore page.  I apologize for the columns not
being in a good order -- I don't use excel a lot, so I don't know how to
re-order the columns.  I also don't know how much Diana is having to pay
for materials and shipping charges.  But if you wade through just the back
issues columns, it shows that people still want the single issues from
time to time, and a half dozen people buy the PAM combo every month.  
We've taken in maybe $1200 in the big combo, and $240 in single issues.  
Our rock bottom PAM sales that we did in January brought in maybe $500,
but subsequent "deals" have fallen flat (see "summer sale" which brought
in a measly 2 orders).  We're going to end up dumping a lot of PAMs.

The books are interesting.  We learned a few months ago that the AGA was
actually LOSING money on Diana's book because the price she was selling it
to us was right on the border and PayPal's cut took it over.  She has
since adjusted her price she sells it to the AGA down and we've adjusted
the price up a little so we can make a couple bucks on it instead of
losing a couple bucks.  The good news is that since only 23 of these have
sold this year, we've only lost maybe $40... of course it means we're only
MAKING about $40 now. :)

Tropica's book continues to sell a half dozen per month.  I upped the
price on this from $15 to $20 as we had the same problem as with Diana's
book.  Again, not a lot of income -- I'm guessing $150-200.  The Singapore
book is another story.  This was an AGA exclusive (still may be?); I
beleive we got these for a very low price, like $10-15 per copy, and we
quickly sold out of our stock in the first month and a half.  It's now
dropped down to the same level as the Tropica book.  Nonetheless, that's
about $500 income for the AGA, which is nice.

So let's be conservative and say the bookstore brings in $1000 for the AGA
this year after the smoke has cleared.

Finally, there's convention videos, contest fees and the CD, which are, in
my opinion, insignificant... like $350 for the AGA.  I take a bit more
than half of the income on these as reimbursement to cover packaging and
my own expenses of A/V gear to run and tape the conventions.  One could
say that the AGA's income from "media sales" is a little more than enough
to cover the annual $250 to cover the AGA's portion of the website ISP 
charges ($20/month + $12-20/year for domain renewal).

We'll probably also take in $300-350 in contest fees, but these will get
immediately zapped to pay for the ribbons.

Anyway, it seems like cautious good news.  But it's certainly too close
for me to consider the AGA "stable", as something as small as an
advertiser pullout (or more close to home, an advertiser non-payment for
the years' issues) could tip the balance, not to mention a convention that
lost $1000+ but for the grace of a screwup on the hotel's part.  
Likewise, something like an increase in membership by 100 could sure help
a lot.

  - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com

  ------------------
  To unsubscribe from this list, e-mail majordomo@thekrib.com
  with "unsubscribe aga-sc" in the body of the message.
  Old messages are available at http://lists.thekrib.com/aga-sc
  When asked, log in as username is "aga-sc", and password "incorp".