Re: PayPal Stats

["S. Hieber" <shieber@yahoo.com>]

Nice job, Erik.  I like the  "year" as a unit of measure
;-)

Now how do we relate the past year to past and future
years? hmmmmm


Morals:

Every *little* bit helps or hurts.

Success is almost all membership and registration -- a
variation on 90% of success is showing up.*

We teeter but teetertotters can be fun.

We won't get written up in in _Fortune_ very soon.

* I'm not forgetting the ads.  The ads depend about half on
the size of membership (who would advertize to if there was
no readership?) -- and about half on the Go Get 'Em Gal
that went and got 'em. I figure she's worth about 250
"years" per year.  

sh

PS: Erik, I wouldn't mind if you forwarded the spreadsheets
to me of gave and ftp link :-)
-- Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com> wrote:
> 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.


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