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Comment by Zimahl | Hacker News Reader

I 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?

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They have over a dozen employees, do the math it doesn't work out to a killing for them to have this kickstarter succeed at 250k a year. They could survive without any ad revenue at all just on their other sources of revenue alone, but that's a hard sell when they have so many visitors and doing so might limit what they could do. Make no mistake, almost certainly they are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table by doing this campaign.

This is an experiment. Ultimately the money changes hands the same way regardless, this is just a test to see if it's possible to do it without all the indirection and middle men. Also, for PA this is a fairly low risk activity, but if they prove the model works it could open things up for a lot of smaller web comics and art sites.

On the webcomics front, the Keenspot Twokinds strip just recently did a successful drive for 8x the asking rate :

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/twokinds/twokinds-book-p...

The artist is now quitting his job and doing the comic full time with the kickstarter money, and is making a book. There is a lot of potential in crowdfunding!

My initial reaction was that $1 million seemed low to replace their advertising revenue for a year.

I don't know the site statistics, but they have a large staff, and are a very popular site. Gaming/entertainment is a solid area of advertising.

Looking at their site though, they don't have a ton of ads, so I guess that helps explains it. And their primary source of revenue seems non-ads (expo, etc...), and probably see their site as their advertising/lead generation.

In my mind, Penny Arcade was as it started out - two guys drawing comics. $500k each sounded like a lot. I don't know if Childs Play and PAX are a big money sink for them?

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 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.

Tim 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.

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

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.

Asking the community for $1 million every single year to draw a comic seems a bit steep.

I'm not saying it's not worth it. I probably will contribute, but it feels like a lot of for a small thing.

>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

"Asking the community for $1 million every single year to draw a comic seems a bit steep."

Here's the important part though, they're already paying it, and more. That's how advertising works. People buy stuff that's advertised and they pay a higher markup which goes to pay for the advertising which goes to pay for the content.

The only difference is that today it's very indirect. What's wrong with direct support?

If they say that's what they need to fund the site, then fine. From my own selfish consumer perspective, though, the amount of money they're asking for and what I would gain from it just aren't proportionate.

But you aren't being asked to front the full $1 million. The lowest amount is $1.

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