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Penny Arcade Sells Out
- thatusertwo 14y agoAn internet without ads would be amazing.
- adventureful 14y agoA $45 billion kickstarter for 2013 should do the trick for the US market.
- ben0x539 14y agoI'll link you to adblock for $44 billion and 50 cent. In fact, let me write up a kickstarter proposal.
- eupharis 14y agoI lol'ed ;) But in seriousness, an internet without ads is about way more than just not seeing banner ads. Penny Arcade puts it very well: "Not having ads would create a chain reaction that would lead to a bunch of other interesting stuff. Without the almighty 'pageview' to consider, why not populate the RSS with full comics and posts? Why not enable and even encourage apps, first and third party, for people to read it however they damn well please?"
- ben0x539 14y agoI recognize that and I think it's an interesting question (and translates well to all the "twitter is screwing its app ecosystem again" drama), but the way Penny Arcade are going at it is a kickstarter project where they're effectively selling the privilege of not seeing ads for $250k a year. There is competition for that niche, and I think PA would have done well to actually over a product for what they're asking.
- intended 14y agoThe penny arcade guys aren't exactly here as business men. Hack when they finally got someone on board to mange their site he was shocked that they nearly got bought twice, and that they still barely had an idea of how their income worked. I think they are appealing to their community, and people who find stuff like child's play, pax and the rest to be great.
- scott_s 14y agoI want the online content I like to be able to pull revenue.
- wkdown 14y agoFor $500, they will retweet one of your tweets "within reason". Wow, put me down for TWO!
- gfosco 14y agoThe rewards are totally lame, and insanely priced. I love the comic, and really it's not worth a dollar of mine to remove the ads I don't even look at. The Kickstarter goal doesn't even remove the ad from the Comic page.
- ascendant 14y agoMost people are going to donate less than $200 and the people that will donate will do it because they love the site, not because they're looking for swag. I've been reading PA since 2001 and aside from buying a t-shirt, have been entertained 3 times a week for over a decade for free, aside from the inherent value of my eyeballs. If I toss them some cash it will be because I love the site and because I want to support what I regard as a really awesome company, not because I demand they give me more stuff.
- jerf 14y agoYou aren't really paying to remove the ads. There's a couple of comics I'd like to see on Kickstarter this way, because I wouldn't mind tossing them some bucks, but all they have are merchandise (which I've already bought) and PayPal links. Sorry, no, no PayPal. I wouldn't really care about the rewards, I've already received them.
- girasquid 14y agoI'm curious: why no PayPal? Unless I'm misreading your tone it sounds like you're pretty adamant about NOT supporting a comic through PayPal. Why?
- saraid216 14y agoWith a somewhat large number of people, PayPal has a bad reputation as being somewhat unscrupulous, especially when the person being screwed over isn't famous. You could find horror stories fairly easily with the Google. Myself, I use it because people use it, and stick to the practice of never keeping any money in my account, or never expecting that money to actually make it to my bank account.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoInteresting take on the crowd funding issue. I expect to see more of these sorts of creative things. Advertising debt is annoying. And sadly people like PA with their 2 ads get nailed because people have been so massively inundated with ads all day that even one more is painful. Another experiment they haven't tried, but would be good to run, would be to make the site subscriber only with the long tail free. So imagine a site where if you subscribed it was ad free and every few days you got a new comic. There is the 'free' site which is content that is a year old and has advertising on it, and there is a totally free site which has the two years old or later and its got no ads on it. Of course its not as useful for topical content but its an interesting experiment.
- Zimahl 14y agoUnfortunately for PA, their content is probably 90% games/pop culture topical. After a month it'd be completely stale and irrelevant (with exceptions of course). I think the better move would be to have pay users not have to see any ads. Simple web re-design to remove that for pay users, otherwise free users still have to look at the ads. There are a ton of sites that do this and are quite successful.
- gilrain 14y agoTheir goal is to redirect the people they have handling advertisers into projects for creating new content. Also, Mike tweeted (http://twitter.com/cwgabriel/status/222718794798350336 http://twitter.com/cwgabriel/status/222718794798350336) "I don't want to spoil some of the un-lockables but if we aren't making projects for advertisers we are free to make projects for you." They clearly want to stop spending effort on ads altogether and spend it on new content for their readers, instead.
- scott_s 14y agoI recently went through the comics archive from about 2004 until now. The comics still resonated, and I found myself frequently checking the blog posts to see what Tycho had said that day. While it was often about old events, it certainly wasn't stale or irrelevant to me.
- 14y ago
- Zimahl 14y agoI enjoy Penny Arcade. That said, it seems like an awful lot of money for an ad-free website. Aren't they making enough off of merchandise, their expo, their games, etc., to make the site ad free? From what I understand they are wildly successful (monetarily as well as publicly) so why do they need the public to literally give them money?
- portmanteaufu 14y agoFrom the FAQ: Advertising paid for rent, wages, health insurance, utilities, all the normal stuff that you pay for when you have fourteen souls working together. That money keeps the lights on while we do the things people expect from us: thrice weekly content drops, two annual shows, the scholarships, Child's Play, etc.
- Zimahl 14y ago> two annual shows, the scholarships, Child's Play The shows make money, otherwise they wouldn't do them. By most accounts they make a lot of money. PAX Prime 2011 had 70k attendees (according to Wikipedia) and at $65 a pop that's a hefty (~$4.5 million) in revenue not to mention what exhibitors pay (which can't be cheap for the target audience). They make more than enough money off of this to go ad free. The scholarships are their problem, the comic reader gets nothing out of those except warm fuzzies. Child's Play should be able to maintain itself on low overhead and a non-profit status. It should cost them a minimal amount of money and any it does the company can directly write off.
- mkaltenecker 14y agoTim Schafer said “That much money for Pax Prime?” when discussing the budget (more specifically, which non-wage stuff to cut or leave in) for the Double Fine Adventure in the latest episode of the documentary.
- gerts 14y agoRaise the price of a PAX ticket $15 to take a bite out of the scalpers, and boom, $1 million.
- orenmazor 14y agois that the Penny Arcade mailchimp.com password on the whiteboard at 3:10?
- isnotchicago 14y agoMaybe it once was, but it is not the current password (tried a moment ago).
- orenmazor 14y agoI'm not surprised. if I noticed it while snickering, I'm sure they noticed it before posting and changed it back then. easier to do that than refilm.
- lparry 14y agoI tried to log in with it too and got a "too many bad signins" error. I'd assume people all over the place will be trying, even if it's not their password they've effectively locked themselves out of that account for a while from the stream of people trying. Should have refilmed or blurred it
- dunstenmoss 14y agoI already get it ad free - thanks to AdBlock.
- jobu 14y agoTheir site is one of the few where I disable AdBlock. First, it supports a comic and a site which I love, and second I actually like their ads. They have stated they play every game that is shown in an ad, and don't allow terrible games or terrible ads for a game at any price.
- morsch 14y agoSeems like the exact opposite of the standard practice in old-school journalism of strictly separating editorial and advertising staff in order minimize conflicts of interest. The fact that they are seem eager to get rid of ads makes it seem like worrying about these kinds of thing are at least a constant nuisance.
- Woost 14y agoIt read to me more like it was annoying for them. They want to get rid of ads so they can quit spending time writing reports for advertisers/vetting ads, and spend that time working on new content instead.
- _delirium 14y agoThis is interesting territory for Kickstarter. They've been clear throughout that they'd like to fund specific, time-limited projects, e.g. someone producing a book, and don't allow general fundraising to operate a business, e.g. raising funds to pay a year of salaries and rent for an ongoing business. There's a way you can squint and call this a specific project, a time-limited "remove ads from PA for a year" experiment. But it sure looks like it's getting close to that raise-general-funds line that Kickstarter claims to not want to cross. In particular, the "costs" of the project that are being funded are entirely notional opportunity costs (foregone revenue), not actual expenses, whereas KS claims to be oriented towards raising funds for actual expenses that are needed to complete projects. I doubt they'll pull this particular one, even if they determine it does violate their ToS, because PA is too high-profile (and, perhaps, because PA has fans known for being somewhat vindictive). But it seems like they'll have to either do something to prevent more of these kinds of Kickstarters going forward, or else just drop that language in the ToS and agree that anyone can use KS to raise a year of operating funds for their business.
- eridius 14y agoIf you need costs to justify it, they need to pay the salaries of their employees and all the other costs involved in running a business. Only real difference I can see between this and, say, the Double Fine Adventure, is that Penny Arcade is a pre-existing product and the Double Fine Adventure isn't.
- kalleboo 14y agoI really really wish the flattr model would take off for stuff like this. Each and every site having a huge fundraiser once a year like this seems unsustainable.
- stephengillie 14y agoIt works for public television.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mortenjorck 14y agoIt works because you have only one public television organization in your town.
- alttab 14y agoConversely, only one public television organization was worth continual year after year funding.
- mchanson 14y agoThere are many listener supported radio stations in single markets. e.g. WBUR, WGBH, and WBAI in Boston.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoI live in a town with 4 separate listener supported radio stations.
- jacques_chester 14y agoFlattr won't work for the same reason as every other tipjar system has failed. It imposes a transaction cost on the tipper -- "is this work the click?" -- that users simply don't like. My current startup work is aimed at avoiding that cost entirely.
- drucken 14y agoHow is this a "project"? This sounds like crowdfunding on-going business costs.
- el_don_almighty 14y agoI don't understand what is wrong with advertisement? Nobody pays attention to them anyway, so WTF?
- Semiapies 14y agoIt takes time and effort _for them_ to keep on top of, as they _don't_ just push any random ads. They'd rather use that time and effort on other things.
- lnanek2 14y agoWeird, I never minded the ads on PennyArcade. They were usually cool games or at least gaming related merch. It was clear they didn't let just anything on there...
- javert 14y agoSomebody really needs to make a startup where, when you visit a page, you can either view ads, or opt out by paying a really teeny tiny amount of money. (And where you can set it to "always opt out and just pay for my damned content.") Problem? You can't really charge people tiny fractions of a cent effectively. Solution? Bit... wait for it... coin.
- oinksoft 14y agoDoes that then make somebody with an ad blocker a thief? Because I don't like the sound of that at all.
- diminoten 14y agoWhy not? It'd be even less thievery than stealing, say, a toothpick from a restaurant, but what's the effective difference?
- alttab 14y agoThese days you could simply cover the right side of your monitor with a small piece of cardboard and never see ads again. OR - simply don't look. A part of me thinks non-adword based advertising is going to implode because we are creating a generation of internet users that have been trained through high-use to simply ignore ads.
- kaybe 14y agoA solution (e.g. used in newspapers) is to make the ads like normal content (just saying "ad" above in fine print). (On the other hand, I have trouble reading the webpage of a big electronics store because their whole site looks like an obnoxious ad and is filtered by my brain.. )
- javert 14y agoYes. I don't like it either, but you can't have your pie and eat it, too.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
- zachinglis 14y agoHonestly, those I know who read PA don't find it annoying. Those who do, have an AdBlocker. (While I am anti-AdBlocking software, that is a conversation for another time.)
- thechut 14y agoUhhhh....Ad Block Plus anyone??
- vacri 14y agoWhat's wrong with the lwn model of subscription? Don't subscribe and you get info a week old (lwn is a 'current affairs' site like PA is, hence time-dependent), subscribe a small amount and get your benefits. https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info The kickstarter thing for a year's business costs are basically an old-fashioned subscription drive - who wants to see brand-name websites doing this every year? Welcome to a new form of spam.
- Oxryly 14y agoCan anyone describe the types of people who bid+pay 5 and 10 thousand dollars for these projects? I can't imagine devoting that much money to a playdate at PAHQ or to hang out for the day with the designer of the OUYA. It doesn't seem like real money at that point but I know these peoples' credit cards will be charged. I don't get it...
- runevault 14y agoWell one of the OUYA ones is Notch who's famous for liking to help projects he finds interesting thanks to his own success from minecraft, so for him 10 grand to help something he likes isn't as crazy as for some of us. And I'd assume anyone doing it for PA are hardcore fans who've loved the site for years and have serious disposable income to hand.
- DanielOcean 14y agoI guess the people funding this project haven't heard of a free browser extension called AdBlock Plus?
- ars 14y agoLooks like the arts patronage is back. People often ask what there could be instead of copyright, and patronage is one of the options. Besides targeted donations like this, you could have a general fund (restricted geographically, or worldwide), and pay a portion of it out based on viewership. Anyone who donated anything at all to the fund gets to go to the performance/movie/play/circus, etc. They count how many viewers they had, then they get a proportional amount. In exchange they don't claim copyright, only moral rights. To encourage donations people above certain funding levels get extras, like backstage visits, lunches, public thanks, etc.
- michaelt 14y agoSo under the pay-proportional-to-viewship model, artist A runs an intimate orchestral music performance and 10 people donate $100 each (because hey, orchestras are expensive to run); and artist B runs a punk performance in a warehouse where 1000 people pay £1 each. Under your model, the punk performers would make $1980 and the classical performers would make $20 - right?
- ars 14y agoUnder this model yes, but no one said this was the only possible model. It's an idea, not a fully fleshed out proposal. First, people can give directed donations if they like. There would be multiple funds, so presumably the funds would differentiate based on genre. And people would sign up for the funds that have the type of entertainment and art (or even lectures) they prefer. Everything here is completely voluntary. The funds would act as agents, and advertisers. A fund would attract a performer based on how good a job the fund does on getting that performer an audience. A performer would attract a fund based on how happy people are with the performer. People would sign up with a fund based on the quality of the performers. So if a performer is not happy with his cut of the donations they would find a different fund. If a fund is not happy with how many people are donating they would try to find better performers. And if the donors are not happy with the types of shows they would find a different fund. So the incentives are all aligned properly. (As long as people are actually willing to donate.) It would probably require some fine tuning to get it right. In particular there is a strong network effect, and positive feedback (the larger you are the larger you get), so this will have to be toned down somehow. This is sort of like a subscription model, but for live events. This could of course be done while maintaining copyright, but the whole idea is to find an alternative to that.
- lifeguard 14y agoI love PA. I hate kickstarter because it is operated in a disorganized manner so I feel like I have been bait & switched. See comment by "Joseph P. - PLEDGE THIS. " Penny Arcade's violations of Kickstarter guidelines: 1) This is for an open-ended project 2) The funding covers business expenses 3) The rewards are not produced by the creators