I've been meaning to make another post like this since Peck 2 dropped a month ago, but then I forgot! But no one was waiting, so who cares!
If you didn't know, I've been trying to fund my new cartoons by selling my source files. They also come with a ton of extra behind-the-scenes crap such as:
- 60 minute talk-about-making-the-cartoon type video
- Original concepts and sketches
- A "readme" text file
All this for 2$ by the way! Next time you eat a shitty six dollar frozen pizza, just remember you could have had THREE of these!
As the sole champion of non-subscription downloadable bonus content, I feel obligated to keep you all up to date on how my sales are doing! This is not to brag, (and I wouldn't about THESE numbers), but because you won't find statistics on this stuff ANYWHERE else. No one else is doing this!*
*To be fair, people are doing similar things with patreon, and subscription bonus content has been around forever, but the real "idea" here is that people can buy just the specific package they want. I'm guessing it's more profitable than subscription services in the long run, as people will have to buy everything individually instead of paying monthly for access to everything. Of course this makes more sense when you have more than two things for sale!
Anyway, here's the raw stats. You probably don't care, so I'll explain in a sec:
Above: Sales surounding peck one, April-May 2016
Above: Sales surounding peck two, Sep-Oct 2016. The pie graph shows the ratio of peck 1 sales (yellow) to peck 2 sales (blue)
It's kinda funny to see all these serious-looking diagrams next to the words "peck 2." You know, the cartoon about the kid getting his leg broken? A lot of people found that part very disturbing, but we thought it was funny!
You'll notice that the first graph (Peck 1 launch) has two large peaks, but the second graph (Peck 2 launch) only has one! Can you guess what the difference was? Believe it or not, the second peak was from me putting out this post! Will this newspost lead to another spike in sales? Up to you, I guess!
You'll also notice the ratio of 'started orders' to 'completed orders' is a lot closer to 1:1 in the second report. This is because we officially launched the store-page in between releases! There's one little spike somewhere between these two graphs where I tweeted about the new store and Lepy bought three more peck bundles!
Before the store, all are sales were done through a link that just went straight to paypal. Now you can get a little better idea of what you're buying, and add things to a "cart." Not a big fan of calling it a "cart," but now you can pay with a credit or debit card!
The other big change is that now you can pay what you want instead of just a flat two dollars - so if you're into donations, you can chip in a little extra! Big thanks to the two guys who dropped me a ten! That rules! You can see the difference in the Average Order Value - $3.19 instead of $2.00. Even though we sold a little less, we still made more money.
Originally I wasn't going to launch the "store" just yet. One of my fears was that after buying the first bundle, the 'novelty' of paying for the source file would wear off, and the sales would be way lower. So to be extra scientific about it, I was going test that first with peck 2, and then add new store features one at a time, coinciding with each new release. But peck 2 took way too long to make for me to justify testing each variable individually like that. Besides, as a newfound greedy money man, I'm a little more into playing all my cards at once! Sorry science!
Peck bundle profits per thousand views vs. youtube CPM
As you can see, I'm making WAY more off these stupid bundles than I ever would off ad money! I wish I knew what ad rates were like before all of this "the algorithm" stuff happened, but I'd imagine it was something like three dollars, which is pretty close to bonus content sales plus current ad rates.
When I went to put that data together just now, I had always assumed the youtube CPM (Cost Per Mthousand) was currently 3 to 5 dollars because that's what it says on my analytics page. BUT that number isn't based off 1000 views or even 1000 ad impressions- it's based off of 1000 "monetized playbacks," a very small fraction of your total views! Probably has something to do with adblock. Pretty sneaky youtube!
Anyway, my point is this idea is genius and if any of these big youtube animators adopted it they'd rake in a whole ton of money. In fact...
"Emroxtv"
Whoa thanks for reading all that! As a last little note, if you bought this package or the last one, PLEASE let me know what you think of them! There's only like 30 of you out there, so really consider leaving some feedback! I want to make it worth buying again!
Also, thanks to all the people who reviewed Peck 2! I didn't respond to all of them or even any of them, but I've read every single one. Your thoughts are always appreciated! And if you want to have a real discussion about the cartoon, I'd be happy to have it here.
Thanks and peace out!
- Big dog
Emrox
I forgot to mention - I think I'm paying like 8$ a month to keep the store up. It's actually negating a lot of the money we're making, but that fee doesn't go up as you sell more, so if I had a larger following it would be negligible.