madals Profile Blog Joined June 2011 United Kingdom 623 Posts Last Edited: 2014-10-16 22:14:28 #1



As what has become the norm for any events that accept crowd funding, I have put together a little financial overview as well as review of the event! Before I get into the report, I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who tuned in – I hope you enjoyed it. As always, any feedback is very welcome! Also, must say a huge thanks to all those who have donated / subscribed to my channel to allow things like this to happen, as well as the event sponsors Let’s Kung Fu, Plantronics Gaming & Aggro.gg!



The people who donated on indigogo have received most of their perks (apart from the wallpaper) and all players and staff were paid immediately after the event finished





The Stats



Firstly, let’s look at viewership! I have only counted the Twitch stats as YouTube had negligible numbers compared!

Qualifier: 21k views, 18k unique



Day 1: 42k views, 25k unique



Day 2: 52k views, 28k unique



Day 3: 20k views, 13k unique



Finals: 15k views, 9k unique

TOTAL: 151k views, 92k unique





Overall, I am extremely happy with the viewership as a whole. Obviously day 3 was a bit of a disappointment for viewership – unfortunately after I had announced my dates, another event announced a clash. This massively hurt the viewership.

Importantly, the event sponsors were very happy with the viewership figures as a whole!



Financial



I have this broken down in lot of a detail, but for the purposes of this write up I am going to keep things a bit more simple (both for privacy & ease of reading)! All incomes are after fees from PayPal etc.

Sponsor Income: $2050



Donations: $121.08



IndieGoGo: $155.56



Stream Revenue: $467.33

TOTAL INCOME: $2793.97





Admin Payment: $40



Other Caster payment: $330



Prize pool: $2400



TOTAL EXPENSES: $2770





TOTAL PROFIT: $23.97



So, a grand total of $24 in profit for the event. On the one hand, I am extremely happy that the event broke even and that I was able to pay all the people who worked on the event with me. On the other, I am slightly disappointed – I put in a LOT of hours to arrange sponsorship, promote, organise and run the event, so it would have been fantastic if there was a bit more profit to be able to put on more events in the future without being reliant on sponsors!



Conclusion



I view the event as a success – primarily, it all went off without any problems (aside from a few in the open qualifier). The fact the event broke even was also fantastic.

The event will also hopefully lead onto doing some more stuff in the future – I already have ideas for the follow up event(s) and am trying to work on getting the finances together to be able to run it. One of my biggest concerns though is the amount of time I put into this event (24 hours of just broadcast, probably around the same in organisation) – while I didn't notice at the time, I was massively over working myself considering my athlete training commitments during the day and other work commitments to be able to afford to do this. I need to work on balancing this more, for sure!



As what has become the norm for any events that accept crowd funding, I have put together a little financial overview as well as review of the event! Before I get into the report, I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who tuned in – I hope you enjoyed it. As always, any feedback is very welcome! Also, must say a huge thanks to all those who have donated / subscribed to my channel to allow things like this to happen, as well as the event sponsors Let’s Kung Fu, Plantronics Gaming & Aggro.gg!The people who donated on indigogo have received most of their perks (apart from the wallpaper) and all players and staff were paid immediately after the event finishedFirstly, let’s look at viewership! I have only counted the Twitch stats as YouTube had negligible numbers compared!Overall, I am extremely happy with the viewership as a whole. Obviously day 3 was a bit of a disappointment for viewership – unfortunately after I had announced my dates, another event announced a clash. This massively hurt the viewership.Importantly, the event sponsors were very happy with the viewership figures as a whole!I have this broken down in lot of a detail, but for the purposes of this write up I am going to keep things a bit more simple (both for privacy & ease of reading)! All incomes are after fees from PayPal etc.So, a grand total of $24 in profit for the event. On the one hand, I am extremely happy that the event broke even and that I was able to pay all the people who worked on the event with me. On the other, I am slightly disappointed – I put in a LOT of hours to arrange sponsorship, promote, organise and run the event, so it would have been fantastic if there was a bit more profit to be able to put on more events in the future without being reliant on sponsors!I view the event as a success – primarily, it all went off without any problems (aside from a few in the open qualifier). The fact the event broke even was also fantastic.The event will also hopefully lead onto doing some more stuff in the future – I already have ideas for the follow up event(s) and am trying to work on getting the finances together to be able to run it. One of my biggest concerns though is the amount of time I put into this event (24 hours of just broadcast, probably around the same in organisation) – while I didn't notice at the time, I was massively over working myself considering my athlete training commitments during the day and other work commitments to be able to afford to do this. I need to work on balancing this more, for sure! Ultimately though, it is up to the viewers to conclude how the event went – so tell me, what did you think of The Foreign Hope?



Madals



p.s If you would like to help future events happen, any support you can offer via a Donation (

Remember, all VODs are on Madalsp.s If you would like to help future events happen, any support you can offer via a Donation ( Click here ) or Subscribing to my Twitch channel ( click here! ) would be fantastic!Remember, all VODs are on YouTube and all my casts go out on Twitch Caster: @Madals91 http://www.youtube.com/Madals91 <--

madals Profile Blog Joined June 2011 United Kingdom 623 Posts #2 As some people mentioned on twitter, if I factored in even minimum wage for the around 48 hours of work I put into it all, that would work out at $500 with the UK minimum wage!



Obviously I don't do these events for the money haha! Caster: @Madals91 http://www.youtube.com/Madals91 <--

SetGuitarsToKill Profile Blog Joined December 2013 Canada 28391 Posts Last Edited: 2014-10-16 21:49:54 #3 The tournament itself was very nice, but I can't help but feel very bad for you when I see that you JUST broke even on it. When you bring together and even with almost all of the top non korean players, you'd think it'd do a little better. I guess that's just the ded gaem thing showing though. If the finals had been on a better day it would have helped a lot though (and if they had been longer, blame the players on that one). Community News "As long as you have a warp prism you can't be bad at harassment" - Maru | @SetGuitars2Kill

feardragon Profile Blog Joined October 2010 United States 923 Posts #4 That's awesome to hear you made a very slight profit on the event! Of course it doesn't factor in the fact that you yourself are doing an absurd amount of work and aren't really paying yourself for your own time, but breaking even is definitely good. I'm sure the event overall had good enough numbers for you to approach some more sponsorrs with hopefully?



As a side note, I think it's not quite accurate to add up the number of uniques across all the days to total 92k uniques. The idea behind uniques is that you're not counting someone twice. But when you add them up across multiple days, you're going to be counting a lot of people multiple times. This may not be what you're intending to do but it's the way it appears when you say "92k uniques". Garbage Starcraft 2 Commentator

tomastaz Profile Joined January 2013 United States 973 Posts #5 Thanks Madals! No church in the wild --- @tzhang0126

GlideStarcraft Profile Joined September 2013 Israel 11 Posts #6 it was so nice to see the players playing, had some sick games - and i really loved the format . just with 6 players , we managed to get alot of games which dosent happen alot .

was also fun admining . Great tournament madals , can't wait for the next one ! Innovation smells flowers

robih Profile Joined September 2010 Austria 1070 Posts #7 tbh the reason I didn't watch was because my race was underrepresented. (Protoss in my case)

no offense to DMC, but to wait for 4 ZvZs to finish so I can finally watch a PvZ of a player I don't really know that well just didn't bring me to watch it.

Strela Profile Joined October 2011 Netherlands 1893 Posts #8 I managed to watch on 2 of the days and really enjoyed your tournament, also nice that you had a cocaster on those days. I don't have much to add beside that I really hope you will do more events like this in the future and that you can find a way to make it a bit more profitable for yourself too. $24 for all the work you put in sounds very sad and I can imagine it must be somehwat demotivational.

Ayrkrane Profile Joined June 2013 Canada 15 Posts #9 I loved the idea of the rebroadcast with no downtime before the games started. I actually watched most of the games that way

Circumstance Profile Blog Joined March 2014 United States 11123 Posts #10 Your first go at a tournament, it was completely online, had no Koreans, an unusual format, a small prize pool, and no big-name outside casters. All of those factors, especially it being your first go-round, combine on paper to look like a financial disaster. And you actually wound up in the black. Medals, for that, I applaud you. I hope any and every future SC2 endeavor you take part in has ever-increasing levels of success. The world is better when every background has a chance.

royalroadweed Profile Joined April 2013 United States 8113 Posts Last Edited: 2014-10-17 00:00:15 #11 I liked the format you used. Though they can lead to iffy tie breakers, the round robin format presented a different structure from what we usually see. Do you think that the conflicting schedules with naruto's tournament affected your ad revenue a lot? "Nerfing Toss can just make them stronger"

Biedrik Profile Joined May 2014 United States 73 Posts #12 Overall I loved the idea of this tournament. However, I wish you had given more players a chance to qualify so as to provide more racial diversity. That much of any single matchup, not just ZvZ, is tiring. With one or two more non-zergs the tournament might have been much more fun to watch. Still, I enjoyed it greatly! Keep up the good work.

Legio Profile Joined December 2008 Sweden 235 Posts #13 The second caster had horrible, canny mono audio over the days of casting. No attempt to improve on that. The finals just disappeared, and was cast on an unknown day on a second week. Then the finals itself was a 4-0 blowout that was too short to have time to catch live. The format was also unclear, as Scarlett played a lot more games the first day, so there was no way to know who was ahead or behind.



I'm not sure what standards to compare it to, but is that what we call a successful tournament these days?

WombaT Profile Blog Joined May 2010 Northern Ireland 14275 Posts #14 The stream revenue is lower than I would have thought.



I feel bad that viewing figures weren't higher, indeed I wish my schedule had allowed me to catch more. However I applaud the financial sense and transparency you've shown, nobody has been fucked over and for a first go I thought it was pretty damn well done! 'You'll always be the cuddly marsupial of my heart, despite the inherent flaws of your ancestry' - Squat

madals Profile Blog Joined June 2011 United Kingdom 623 Posts #15 On October 17 2014 08:59 royalroadweed wrote:

Do you think that the conflicting schedules with naruto's tournament affected your ad revenue a lot?

Unfortunately yes, revenue was about 30% of what it was on day 2! Unfortunately yes, revenue was about 30% of what it was on day 2! Caster: @Madals91 http://www.youtube.com/Madals91 <--

Cascade Profile Blog Joined March 2006 Australia 5405 Posts #16



So I don't know anything about organising things like this, but I get the impression that the main organiser often takes too much on himself, and gets super busy. Wouldn't it be a good idea to get more people involved higher up in the organisation, delegate more and have the work load more distributed. Ideally the main organiser shouldn't have to do anything (or very little) on the actual tournament, so that he is free to jump onto anything that goes wrong.



I get the impression that there are plenty of people that would be happy to help, specially if you spend small fraction of the money to token salaries to the volunteers/staff.



Well, just my thoughts. Gl with next tournament! Congratulations on breaking even!!So I don't know anything about organising things like this, but I get the impression that the main organiser often takes too much on himself, and gets super busy. Wouldn't it be a good idea to get more people involved higher up in the organisation, delegate more and have the work load more distributed. Ideally the main organiser shouldn't have to do anything (or very little) on the actual tournament, so that he is free to jump onto anything that goes wrong.I get the impression that there are plenty of people that would be happy to help, specially if you spend small fraction of the money to token salaries to the volunteers/staff.Well, just my thoughts. Gl with next tournament!

Gwavajuice Profile Joined June 2014 France 1810 Posts #17 For having worked with event's organization (real life events though, like concerts, festivals and stuff) getting good benefits from the first edition can happen but is not necessarily a primarily goal.



You didn't loose money on the event, that 's the main point , now you just have to work on improving to get bigger (sponsor should come faster too if they see you have managed a good first edition) and eventually get revenue from it. That's how all big festivals/events have started.



If for some reason, it doesn't work (audience not climbing up, sponsors not coming, ...) just stop it before you loose money and everything will be fine. Dear INno and all the former STX boys.

Thax Profile Joined July 2014 Belgium 1060 Posts #18 I liked the tournament overall. I missed the first day and the finals. There were some good games and the casting was overall good. The scheduling conflicts with WCS America were a bit unfortunate and probably should have been avoided to get a better tournament. The hype of the final had a lot of wind taken out of its sails this way. The way the tie-breaker was handled was very unclear at the start, though I like the way how it actually was done. The poll, though a good idea in theory, was a bit of a disaster IMO. I'm not saying this because my favourites weren't selected, they actually were, but it would've been much better to use some 3rd party polling site that lets people select more than one pick. Letting people select their top 3 would've lead to better results IMO.

True_Spike Profile Joined July 2004 Poland 3248 Posts Last Edited: 2014-10-17 07:54:10 #19 I think breaking even on your first try is actually very, very good. I have never heard about this tournament before - I got to watch some of it only because it was listed in streams section on TL. I had no idea who you were prior to it, so you got some exposure, which is what you need at this point. The casting could have been a tad better on occassions I did tune in. The racial diversity was poor, the finals were played on a completely different day - not ok as well, although I understand the reason. Also, prepare some filler content for the downtime - that's someting almost nobody does and it does a world of difference to the viewer.



Despite all of the above, it can be considered a success - and one that I am more than certian you'll build on with future installments.

PoisonTV Profile Joined July 2013 United Kingdom 31 Posts #20 My two cents on this was also the fact that this was done around exactly at the same point that BasetradeTV did something very similar in the EU scene.



For something to catch my personal eye, it has to have a little more spice than something you would see three times a weekly in the GO4SC2 cup.



Also as someone mentioned above the sound quality was a little lack luster and ZvZ never makes for good watching. There really needs to be more than 'hey ive got 32 guys and a prize pool' now.



p.s. One final last point, these massive black and red waiting screens really are a massive turn off. For community streams, people enjoy community interaction. I expect if you checked the bounce rate on those

you be shocked



Dom



http://www.twitch.tv/poisontvde - Everything but German

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