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sound business model

Thanks for setting all this up guys, really nice. Should deffinately help the community.

awesome stuff

Quoted from Fluffy Meowington

[…]

That’s all there is though when it comes to videos- actual gameplay. If you look at other games there are hundreds of casters doing VODs and casts explaining for example why player X did Z, sheding some light on the bigger picture, etc.
There is no such thing for TF2. The mindset behind aggression rather than just pushing into a point because you got nothing else to do, and so on.

Oh yeah…good luck with the site.

Yup, vods on youtube are also the easiest way to show someone what competitive tf2 looks like, unfortunately only extv does those.

CB promoted and arranged cash prizes for a tf2lobby champion recently and is considered one of the better invite medics who calls for his team. He isn’t looking to make a profit.

Gl with this project, it will be interesting to see the course it takes.

Quoted from GibbZ

I’m now charging for mentoring. Contact GibbZ on irc in the pickup channels or tf.wars. Cheers.

Lesson 1: How to lag around the screen like a bellend :>

Looks like a good idea CB, would be good if the website can bridge the gap of euroamerican players and it be a central place to discuss tf2 in general.

Quoted from infussle

interested to see what the results of the market research because im not sure i know alot of people who would be willing to pay montly premiums in order to have a chance of getting better at tf2. If the players writing the articles are soley there for writing, which i hope they aren’t, im sure this website is too high of a risk to run successfully and is likely to be another ten steps backwards. But good luck!

It’s often hard enough to get players in teams to stump up £1-2 towards a server, let alone a monthly subscription fee for “tips” on how to improve. I agree with you entirely mate :)

———-
The concept is not new and has been done to death in many industries, gaming being the delicious new target it seems. I’m not convinced that TF2 is ready for this or that it will even be successful in the long-term. The idea doesn’t really scream out to people “You need to be part of this for a long time”. And that right there, is where you will make your money – long-term subscriptions from loyal subscribers.

Anyway, I’m going to go with you for the moment and use an example that assumes this project will be a moderate success:

There are currently 16,000 ish people playing TF2 around the world. Let’s imagine that 3% (480 people) decide to join your website and pay you $4.99 per month – 480x$4.99 = $2395.20. I know some would pay for 6 months, but for this example it’s impossible to calculate that.

Purchasing content is always fun, I do it a lot in my business and I’m well aware that prices can fluctuate a little, so the following numbers might be a couple of dollars out at the time of reading. Let’s imagine that the typical article is around 1000 words, in the content-writing industry that would generally be $15-20 per article (if we’re paying nice Western first-world writers, maybe $5-8 if we get someone from the Philippines to ghost-write it).

Now obviously video is much better than text, so let’s get people to make us videos instead. Video creation, editing etc for a project like this could be reasonably charged out at $40 per hour, with multiple hours being $35 per hour. Most videos are more likely to be shorter than this, perhaps 15 minutes. So how about we just have a flat rate of $20 per video in our example.

OK so now we have some content prices and 480 hearts that need fulfilling, what will we provide them this month?

* 12 Articles – Let’s give them 12 tasty new articles from their favourite players, for which we’ll pay – $240

* 20 Videos – We’re going huge with the videos this month, let’s give them 5 videos every week! – $400

* Other Content – Let’s imagine we have some news/interviews/mp3s/casts/whatever and we need to pay some sort of fee for it. No idea why we would, but it’s good to budget right? :) – $250

Fixed Costs each month:
* Website Hosting – $15 (More than reasonable price for the above, especially if the videos are hosted externally like YouTube. If you decide to keep the videos hosted by yourselves, consider using Amazon AWS as they offer a pricing on demand service with phenomenal performance.)

* Website Maintenance – $100 (Let’s imagine you have a company to maintain your website and help you out for a couple of hours per month)

Yearly Costs:
* Domain Name – $10

Total Income in Example: $2395.20 (for 480 users)
Total Monthly Costs in Example: $1005
Monthly “Profit” in Example: $1390.20 (tax to be deducted)

Not a bad wage for a website where you outsource the content creation and have less to manage, right? The business model above is used by thousands of people across the world already. It’s easy, it makes money and it generates consistent revenue (as long as you provide good content).

I’m sure there are some things I’ve missed out in working out the TF2 content, or perhaps you want to pay your content creators double the industry standard or something, who knows? :p Would certainly be interested to hear your thoughts.

Finally, best of luck! It’ll be a very tough market to crack as TF2 is not a “buyer’s market”. Gamers are not people who are easily sold to and subscription sites tend to have a large turnover of people (i.e. they subscribe for a month or two and then vanish).

If you would like to talk further, you’re welcome to find me in #vertex or #etf2l on IRC (Quakenet). I run two UK businesses and I also run a number of smaller websites (in niches well away from gaming), using a similar model to the one I’ve described above. Thus I have full experience and knowledge in what I’m talking about!

Hope it helps :)

CB isn’t looking to make a profit, but the people who are doing the content are (probably both darn and byte are gonna get paid, and the americans)

Either way, it’s a business, and they’re selling a product. If you value it, then pay for it.

As for me – I don’t think what they are selling is worth 60 bucks a year. And if you need something like this to get good at TF2, then you probably aren’t cut out for div1 to begin with.