See ya, Erfworld

[msb]

Not sure why what I said is being interpreted as "squash the dissenter".

If you'll take a look at my post history you'll see that I started a whiney thread and cancelled my membership several months ago, because of updates being ridiculously slow and Rob not appearing to have (to me) enough of a commitment to feel like my donation made any sort of difference to him keeping that commitment. I still show up and post occasionally, and I have no idea why my tool icon hasn't been taken away yet (I've asked for it to).

My point in this thread was that that criticism is not the same as thinking that the pacing of the story is wrong. I don't even think we can know for a fact whether the story pacing is wrong yet or not, but I doubt it. I don't like book 2 as much as I liked book 1, but it's still really good, and Rob has definitely earned his storyteller chops with book 1.

So even if you disagree with me and are 100% sure that the pacing is bad and that the pacing of book 1 also didn't earn Rob anything, it's still a totally different criticism than saying updates are too slow.

*Of course* updates are too slow. That doesn't mean anything about the story.

If you think the updates are too slow, of course you're going to complain, you want more. But if you think the story sucks, I don't understand why you complain and don't just drop the comic. I really, really don't.

[Sixty]

I love Erfworld, though I can see where the people losing their patience are coming from. I think the triple con thing might have pushed some people over the edge.

[foog]

Hi there folks. First time caller, long time listener. Like some others posting here, I too get frustrated at the pace of the comic.

...then I remember the absolute, mind-blowing double dipped awesomeness that was Book 1. Gawd-DAMN that was heady stuff! Whenever I think of Book 1, I can forgive Rob anything: slow updates, slow plot - anything. I have hella faith in the creative forces behind Erfworld. Let them spin their craft as they see fit. Hell, the fact that the updates are so slow coming shows that they care about what they're putting out. It's when Rob starts crapping out daily updates that I'll get worried.

[BLANDCorporatio]

Wasn't there a blog post like a year ago wher Rob said he was quitting his day job to focus on Erfworld? I'm pretty sure that this IS his primary source of income, however the problem remains is yes, it does seem like Rob puts in about 2 hours worth of work on the comic a week.

This is getting a bit off-topic, but I remember vaguely that Rob once hosted/just plain was on a panel about how to monetize creative ventures like webcomics.

OTOH, I commented once in the Tool forum that the Tool subscriptions mean diddly-squat. Uninformed wanna-be accounting rant following.

At the time of that comment, there were close to 1000 registered Tools. That makes 3000$ pouring in monthly. Which needs to be shared at least among 3 people (2 are obvious, but I'm not sure who among harknell, Mal and President_Allosaurus has a finger in that pie; of course there's also Jamie to think of, as he's the artist for Book 1).

Still sounds good? Where I live, yeah, 1000 bucks a month is decent. But I know countries where you could barely afford rent on that money. Even if one of the "3" takes 2000$, that's still, as far as I can tell, just about making a living in the USA.

Plus there's the fact that Tool subscriptions can be converted to merch. Which is probably sold to us more expensively than Erfworld buys it (duh), but still some of the Tool money gets lost on making the merch in the first place.

Then there's taxes.

Oh yeah, advertising. I remember seeing something from "harkavagrant": "your add here for 0.8$ a day". Or some sum like that, close to a dollar. It fluctuated around that amount. Harkavagrant is by no means the most popular thing out there but it beat mfing xkcd in a popularity contest and came second to mfing Penny Arcade. (Then again, Erfworld implausibly beat all other webcomics in some roundup a while ago so anyway.)

The point is, advertising would cover the site's upkeep, and nothing else.

Selling merch (and especially books) is a likely source of income, but my guess, it's not that huge either.

Bottom line, it's obvious that Rob and Xin (and some mysterious 3rd person) can make a living off this venture, but my guess is they're not getting that rich to host their own convention any time soon.

[ProfessorBoOtY]

Even if Rob isn't getting rich off what he makes from Erfworld, I can hardly believe he's working full time. Or if he is, it's working on stuff like scheduling convention appearances to live his dream rather than focusing on what gives him the ability to do that in the first place: This comic. The pacing has been terrible for years now. How long in real time has it been since Parson announced he was going to run through that tunnel? It's frankly absurd. I find it hard to put any faith into a product when it feels alarmingly like the product is an afterthought.

I would agree here. If this really is Rob's source of income, it would be in his best interest to keep people interested. There is of course a sweet spot for production. Produce too much and your costs become unbearable. Produce too little, and unlike in the real world, scarcity does not make webcomics more valuable. If you produce too little, you loose viewers.

Since Rob does appear to go to quite a few cons, I assume he must be selling a decent amount of mercandise to support it. I'm sure some cons are paying for his travel and expenses, and others are not. Without new content, such a business is unsustainable. You won't get eyeballs viewing ads, nor will you have additional content to sell at a convention.

I have a hard time believing that Rob is doing this full time. If that was the case, surely there would be multiple text updates a week and the story would be laid out for more than just the next few comics. He certainly does not owe us, the reader, subscriber, or customer anything. He does owe himself if he wants to continue doing Erfworld full time. I am a small business owner, and this is not at all how I would run a business.

[Steve-D]

I don't want to judge Rob; from the sounds of things he's having the time of his life. Nor do I think my subscription entitles me to make any demands of him, or his time.

But at the end of the day I come here because I deeply enjoy reading the webcomic. I don't subscribe for the toolbox; I don't remember looking twice at it since I first gained access, I subscribe to support the comic.

But the less and less frequent updates is a problem to me. I'd understand if Rob was new to this, but we faced the same situation towards the end of book 1. What I'd like to see is more regular updates, even if it means less frequent ones.

[Swodaems]

Wasn't there a blog post like a year ago wher Rob said he was quitting his day job to focus on Erfworld? I'm pretty sure that this IS his primary source of income, however the problem remains is yes, it does seem like Rob puts in about 2 hours worth of work on the comic a week.

This is getting a bit off-topic, but I remember vaguely that Rob once hosted/just plain was on a panel about how to monetize creative ventures like webcomics.

OTOH, I commented once in the Tool forum that the Tool subscriptions mean diddly-squat. Uninformed wanna-be accounting rant following.

At the time of that comment, there were close to 1000 registered Tools. That makes 3000$ pouring in monthly. Which needs to be shared at least among 3 people (2 are obvious, but I'm not sure who among harknell, Mal and President_Allosaurus has a finger in that pie; of course there's also Jamie to think of, as he's the artist for Book 1).

Still sounds good? Where I live, yeah, 1000 bucks a month is decent. But I know countries where you could barely afford rent on that money. Even if one of the "3" takes 2000$, that's still, as far as I can tell, just about making a living in the USA.

Plus there's the fact that Tool subscriptions can be converted to merch. Which is probably sold to us more expensively than Erfworld buys it (duh), but still some of the Tool money gets lost on making the merch in the first place.

Then there's taxes.

Oh yeah, advertising. I remember seeing something from "harkavagrant": "your add here for 0.8$ a day". Or some sum like that, close to a dollar. It fluctuated around that amount. Harkavagrant is by no means the most popular thing out there but it beat mfing xkcd in a popularity contest and came second to mfing Penny Arcade. (Then again, Erfworld implausibly beat all other webcomics in some roundup a while ago so anyway.)

The point is, advertising would cover the site's upkeep, and nothing else.

Selling merch (and especially books) is a likely source of income, but my guess, it's not that huge either.

Bottom line, it's obvious that Rob and Xin (and some mysterious 3rd person) can make a living off this venture, but my guess is they're not getting that rich to host their own convention any time soon.

I'm just to add a bit of detail to those numbers and try to clarify the difficult nature of the problem of calculating Erfworld's income from the fan's viewpoint. (Simply asking Rob for the numbers would take all the fun out of trying to be quietly intrusive.)

Going to the list of members and clicking on the rank heading twice gives you the memberlist tools first. At the time of this writing, there are exactly 52 pages worth of tools with 25 tools per page for a grand total of 1300 tools. (Fun forum facts: Tools make up about 2/9ths of the whole forum. Of those 1300 tools, only 429 have at least a single post to their name. BLAND, you have more than 3 times the number of posts of any other tool.)

ideally this would work out to an even $3900 coming from toolbox subcribers every month, but with the yearly recurring, 1-month free, payment option available things get a bit more complicated. For starters, that $3900 coming in monthly could potentially be $3575 average. And when I say 'average' there, I mean there is serious potential for serious swinging behavior in Erfworld's revenue stream even without factoring in Tool membership gains and losses. Those yearly subcribers probably didn't distribute themselves evenly between the months. Given human nature, I would not be startled if one month 7000 came in and the next was 2000, no doubt causing no end of problems for Rob.

Also, you're forgetting one other party who also takes a cut from those subscriptions: Paypal. I'm not sure exactly what their cut is, but last time I checked Paypal's policy, they were charging per transaction with a minimum of a $.30 charge with 2-3% tacked on. That means that, even with the 1-month free deal, it is actually in Rob's best interests, ( in terms of pure monetary gain,) to have his subcribers be yearly subscribers, despite any problems it may cause.
(Oh, and by the way, just to make things more complicated, Paypal offers decreased % rate charges based on the site's income from last month. So depending on product sales, Rob could be charged more per transaction on his high volume months and less on his low volume months, an annoying situation however you look at it.)

[BLANDCorporatio]

(Fun forum facts: Tools make up about 2/9ths of the whole forum. Of those 1300 tools, only 429 have at least a single post to their name. BLAND, you have more than 3 times the number of posts of any other tool.)

Oh SNAP.



But hmm indeed, forgot about PayPal. You sure they charge both parties? I'm not sure which option makes more sense, but I kinda lean to "donor pays Paypal tax" (even if I'm the donor here).

[Swodaems]

But hmm indeed, forgot about PayPal. You sure they charge both parties? I'm not sure which option makes more sense, but I kinda lean to "donor pays Paypal tax" (even if I'm the donor here).

Given the circumstances, I'm pretty sure Rob has a merchant account setup, which means he pays all the fees or that they are taken directly out of the transaction. (A few years ago, I came across a site that told me not to donate less than $.30 to them or else the site would actually lose money.)

Of course he could have things set up so that he's getting charged the micropayment rate for transactions as well. (Just saw this option on Paypal's site.) It's 5% +$.05 per transaction as opposed to 2.9% + $.30, making it a good rate for standard Tool memberships paid monthly, but horrible for yearly memberships and certain items brought from the store by someone without Tool credit. (This is assuming Rob had a less than $3000 month last month. If he made more than $3000 last month, but less than $10000, the rate is 2.5% + $.30. Greater than $10000 last month would be 2.2%+$.30.) Setting up a seperate Paypal account specifically for monthly tool memberships may be an option, but I'm not going to put the effort into checking Paypal's terms and conditions to see if that's a valid option.

All in all, Paypal's policies require a complex balancing act from merchants trying to figure out what the the best way is for them to get a profit. Past market behavior limiting your options and projected sales attributes shifting from month to month create a problem that needs to solved over and over.

[kagato23]

I do think Rob is currently doing this fulltime, if only because most jobs I know of that aren't self employed wouldn't allow for all the convention breaks he'd have to take, whereas if he's doing this for a living, it actually behooves him to goto these things and make money.

I think that's what people are missing here, this venture has been in the red and profits are necessary. Rob's living the dream, but I'm quite sure that dream includes sustaining the dream, which means putting in work at the booth. As he calculates which con's made money and which didn't justify the expense, I expect he'll trim some off his schedule in the future.

But, for those of you not in America, I can assure you that very few people in America could comfortably survive on an average 3900 in American split two or three ways after fee's and taxes. Miserably survive, perhaps. But I'm guessing that's not an ideal for anybody involved. The significant thing to remember is that this money isn't profit. They don't have 3900 at the end of a given month to distribute, they have that much money BEFORE paying business relevant expenses. The books don't print themselves, the server isn't run and maintained for free, dwagon puppets don't stitch themselves, etc. etc. And that disaster with the shipping of some of the books has no doubt hurt, even if the money is refunded it's not profit made. when you factor in all of that, then the money left over is going to be far, far less then 3900 (and it wasn't really 3900 to begin with, as people have already explained above me). Additional income is needed, and it's likely store purchases ol alone aren't enough to make that up, especially because there are as many tools as they are being able to buy a few things for shipping cost. While very generous, the tool option subsequently isn't the greatest profit maker, since that 3 bucks a month likely is just used to buy merchandise by many.

So yeah, con's are probably necessary. Maybe Rob's drifting too far in the balancing act of making/selling a product, maybe he's not. But his going to cons is part of his work. If he's having fun with it, good for him. But there's no doubt he needs it.

[President_Allosaurus]

Patience and understanding.

[the_tick_rules]

Hey everyone is allowed to make their own decisions. Personally I think a two-page thread about something we all know is an erf issue is a bit much though.

[Beeskee]

I'm afraid of where this might be going...

TVTropes, about VG Cats:
Schedule Slip:
The main comic seems to update, at its most frequent pace, about once a month, mostly because of Scott's busy con schedule, which he only has because of VG Cats, the comic he barely updates anymore. Ow.

See also, this.

[MoredanKantose]

My complete support to "Mourn" here.

I am still not going out. I will probably do it silently. I am still a Tool, but I do not know how long. The price-per-page is horrible with such a path, and I slowly start to be really angry towards the authors. I feel cheated, abused, exploited.

[Sixty]

I also have drawn parallels to VG Cats over the past few months, especially after the triple con thing. I still have VG Cats in my favorites, but I hope Erfworld doesn't go that way.

[Zathyr]

In an odd way, complaints about the schedule are a good thing, since they show how much fans are enjoying the story and want more of it. You may have a few who wander away from the comic for a while, but almost all of them wander back in time. And the thing about an ongoing story like this is it builds a solid core of fans who will, for the most part, stick with the comic through the feast and famine.

Me? I'm just some guy who likes the story and came to the forums because, yes, the updates seem to be coming unusually slow and I wanted to see if there was any reason beyond a busy convention month. If it's just that, well that's enough of a reason, really. It takes a lot of work to put a page of good-quality art together, and if Xin's traveling and whatnot, it'll take even longer. I understand that, and I think plenty of others do too. I'm no tool, I've only briefly looked at the wiki - I'm a fan, but not a die-hard one, but yet I'm not going anywhere. It takes hardly any effort at all to read a webcomic - by comparison, coming on to the forums and writing this post is like crazy amounts of work - a lot of folks won't bother. I don't want to speak for all of those folks, but I'm sure at least some of them share my opinions. Erfworld is a good comic and is worth reading, and if the updates are slow then I just don't read it as often. I suppose that does mean less ad revenue for them, but hopefully the convention sales make up for it.

[Godsire]

So, what the hell is causing the delay this time?

It's getting way too frustrating. I'm really close to giving up on this comic alltogether.

[drachefly]

Yes. Waiting 8+ days for an update is something you expect from a medium-low commitment hobbyist.

[Jorin]

With the Intervention conference does this mean we're going to have to wait even longer?

[Godsire]

Yes. Waiting 8+ days for an update is something you expect from a medium-low commitment hobbyist.

What is this I don't even....