Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Let's do some brutal math.

If this math is wrong, please let me know.

Let's say the Avengers is a billion dollar movie. (Actually, I think it will be much more than that, but to keep the math simple, let's say 1 billion.)

Let's say the average ticket price is 10.00. (Again, it's probably lower than that, but keeping the math simple.)

Let's say that the average Avengers comic sells 50 thousand per month. (High, but math=simple.)

By my estimate, if 100th of 1% of the people who bought a ticket to the Avengers had bought an Avengers comic that month, the sales on that comic would have tripled. (I believe I have been corrected: it would be 1/10th of 1% not 1/100 of 1% to get comics to triple. My mistake.)

Instead, as far as I can see -- they did nothing. Nothing at all.

I bought 30 Avengers related graphic novels in anticipation of the movie, to go along with the several hundred Avengers related books I already had.

I think I may have sold 10 of them, for a net loss.

10.

No extra comics. A couple of back-issue sets, at half price.

My total sales from the Avengers movie was about 200.00. Total expenses? About 200.00 to 250.00. But hey, you gotta try.

5 comments:

Duncan McGeary said...

This at a time when we're having a kind of revival in comics -- a big upsurge.

A big upsurge in comic sales for me is, oh, 30.00 to 50.00 a day.

The overall effect of the New 52, the Avengers movie, the Walking Dead, is that it may be adding a few dozen people to the regular buying rolls.

Hey, I'll take it.

Billion dollar movie? Pfffuufff.

RDC said...

Me thinks your numbers are off.

$1,000,000,000/10=100,000,000
1% of 100,000,000 is 1,000,000
1/100 of that is 10,000

which is a 20% increase of the normal 50,000.

or looking it another way the world population is 7.016 billion, if 100,000,000 have viewed the picture worldwide then 1.4% of the worlds population have seen it. Since the bend metro area has a population of 170,705. The same percentage indicates that approximately 2433 have seen it in the bend area. Now if 1/100 of 1 percent purchased an item you would have sold .24 of an item. So it looks like you are doing better than the 1/100 of 1%

Duncan McGeary said...

So it would take 1/10th of 1% to triple sales. Right?

Funny, that's the math I arrived at year ago with the first X-Men movie, that it would take 1/10th of 1% to double sales of X-Men.

So things haven't changed much.

Anonymous said...

The trouble, and this has always been the problem with this type of fallacious thinking, most done by 'entrepreneurs'.

The problem is there are 100,000 guy's all counting on getting their 1/10 of that 1% discretionary spending. Sure there are winners, but mostly there are 'silent' losers.

Sort of like the Lotto, you can play the same numbers, but the odd's of a real win in your favor isn't going to happen.

The biggest failure in this line of thinking is that your the only person in the game looking at the 1/10 of 1%, when in fact for every 'plan' there are 100's of 1,000's thinking and playing the same expectational game. But you only ever hear about the winners, the losers simply take their loss and move on to the next kluster-fuck.

Anonymous said...

A couple of comments... The majority of people don't read anything, and are not looking to spend any extra effort. The biz of comics is serialized storytelling and that requires some choice of effort by the customer to seek out the material. The industry rewards those people by letting them become "experts" or "geeks." My customers like being that guy.

Also, I think a vast majority of people don't go to specialized sole proprietor shops at all. They buy clothes at dept. stores and food at grocery stores. Roseburg is even more blue collar than Bend. I think they spend their monies on necessities and sins. I just got to work harder at being those things.


Brett
Heroes Haven