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Penny Arcade Sells Out

kickstarter.com

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Re: Penny Arcade Sells Out

#51

Post by gerts »

jere wrote: post #42
cube13 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At the risk of sounding like Scrooge: I would assume most people think of Penny Arcade as the thrice weekly "content drops" (while viewing the rest as peripheral) and it certainly doesn't take 14 people to draw a comic. I get the feeling that they want to change this perception, especially with the recent hire of Ben Kuchera to write full time news and commentary for the Penny Arcade Reports site.

Crap. I don't know if I'm just blind or lazy or both, but I don't think I noticed the top navigation bar that has the PA Report until now (it's really subtle). Anyway, I think you're probably right.

It's bizarrely under-promoted now, but PA made a big deal when they launched PA Report a while back.

http://penny-arcade.com/report/about

Re: Penny Arcade Sells Out

#52

Post by gerts »

Zimahl wrote: post #16
portmanteaufu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From 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.

> 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 scholar…

Raise the price of a PAX ticket $15 to take a bite out of the scalpers, and boom, $1 million.

Re: Penny Arcade Sells Out

#53

Post by matasar »

_delirium wrote: post #34

This 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" experi…

I think of this as a Kickstarter to pay for a year's worth of comics. These guys keep a schedule of three comics a week, and they're offering to do that in a novel way. They also have some stretch goals as well of things they'll do instead of dealing with advertisers.

Re: Penny Arcade Sells Out

#54

Post by lparry »

orenmazor wrote: post #35
isnotchicago wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it once was, but it is not the current password (tried a moment ago).

I'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.

I 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

Re: Penny Arcade Sells Out

#55

Post by Zimahl »

Jach wrote: post #44
Zimahl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately 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.

What's a site that only offers "no ads" as their paid-upgrade benefit? I haven't seen one offer just that, it usually comes with a grab-bag of other features that can't be replaced with a client-side script/extension. (DeviantArt's premium account is the upgrade I thought of. ( http://sta.sh/047k5sokcr2 ) The two major client-side features of no ads and more thumbnails are solved with NoScript and AutoPager respectiv…

Off the top of my head, Wowhead offers an ad-free version for premium customers. I guess you also get custom forum avatars for being a premium customer.

The point is, free site that is ad-supported but those go away with a membership - whether you get extras or not.

Re: Penny Arcade Sells Out

#56

Post by pseudonym »

gfosco wrote: post #10
wkdown wrote: post #3

For $500, they will retweet one of your tweets "within reason". Wow, put me down for TWO!

The 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.

From the top of the Kickstarter page:

>"People often want to know how they can support the site in a way that doesn't involve t-shirts or looking at advertising, and I think we may have a way."

The kickstarter rewards aren't something you're buying, per se. You're donating money and getting a wink and a nod from the PA guys.

Re: Penny Arcade Sells Out

#58

Post by lnanek2 »

Weird, 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...

Re: Penny Arcade Sells Out

#59

Post by morsch »

jobu wrote: post #50
dunstenmoss wrote: post #32

I already get it ad free - thanks to AdBlock.

Their 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.

Seems 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.

Re: Penny Arcade Sells Out

#60

Post by javert »

Somebody 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.

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