Not a fan of my last post in this thread so I thought about it and decided to do better. It was early Saturday, I wasn’t at home and breakfast was being made, so I just typed it off and hit send, disliking it the entire time because it’s the sort of meaningless bullshit instructions a bad boss would give you.
As it’s more than dumb to be making this argument without anything other than some hastily-calculated numbers, I decided to build a simple operations/financial model which can be used to determine the monetary impacts of our posting and subscription efforts. Which took longer than I thought, but then these things usually do.
You can find it here.
This thing is very ad hoc: As I’ve never done a model like this, I just threw it together – if there are actual templates for determining the value of internet activity, I didn’t use them. I would also like to note that it’s easier for me to download Google sheets and work them as Excel files than it is to work in the Google sheets interface, but y’all do what y’all want. (Really, download it. That way you won’t mess up the original.)
Note there are two tabs – one is just to evaluate a single poster, the other is to compare two posters. Let’s get into the single poster tab to see how this works:
There are two major sections – “Poster Data and Assumptions” and “Revenue Generating Activities”. Following the RGA section are some notes about limitations of the calculator, as well as notes about loss generating activities which would be impossible to quantify… without the quantifiable data this tool brings.
The cells are color-coded for their nature: Calculations, Entered Data, and References, allowing the user to know… upon sight… which cell is which. (I’ve used my standard RGB color-blindness tones – if you have trouble seeing the differences, let me know and I’ll apply a new palette.)
Column A is data labels
Column B is for data
Column C is the data, annualized
Columns D&E contains descriptions for the items you need to enter.
Poster data is information taken from the posters User CP – total posts, date registered, price of subscription, more. (You can find your start date for subscriptions by clicking UserCP>>Paid Subscriptions.)
Assumptions allow you to modify some global references for which I have no information. These values include:
Interest Rate: For NPV calculations
# years for Projected NPV: If you are looking at a single year’s worth of data and want to know what that years’ worth of data would annuitize to if continued for X years. Otherwise, don’t use this one. I gave serious thought to taking it out, then decided that would be too much work. Or something.
# Pages Per Post: For purposes of this model, I ignored the “Quick Reply” function and assumed that all posts made were through the long process: Click on Reply/Post (1), the 2nd screen where you type in your post (2), the “Click this link if you’re not redirected” screen (3), and the page with the newly-written post on it (4). In other words, one post in this model results in 4 page views. However, if you wish to modify this to another value, feel free.
CPM: CPM rates for ad views. The STM Reader people have this information, I do not. For references sake, Google averages about $2.80. CPM’s can vary quite wildly though, with many companies (with super niche audiences) able to charge much more.
I then had to think a bit about what a person does to generate revenue here. Subscriptions and donations are an obvious answer, but you also generate revenue just by being here and your activity… and how often people respond to you. I thought about the SDMB experience and for this mode, determined that one generate revenues via:
Posting
Engaging Others
Reading
Private Messaging
Subscribing
As each of these have different functions and assumptions, I created separate smaller models to reflect the earnings brought about by the above activities.
Posting – I started here first because it’s the only hard number I can get – the number of posts made by a poster over their time at the SDMB. Since it takes 4 pages to reply to a post or start a thread, this was a rather easy calculation.
Engagement – Now this one is tricky. If we were able to pull the data from the database, this would give far more accurate figures, but for this model we have little choice but to estimate:
[indent]… Start with your number of posts
… What percentage of those posts do you receive a response to?
… and how many responses do you get per responded-to post?
… multiply by 4 (pages per post, above)
… divide by 1,000
… multiply by CPM rates
= Value of your engagement contribution.
Reading. You have to read the SDMB right? Again, like Engagement, this one could have hard data if pulled from the system, but for now we just estimate by asking “How many pages do you read for every post?” This number must equal or exceed 1 as you can’t post to the SDMB without visiting the SDMB and that visit is a page read.
(Really, not the best way to get this figure.)
Private Messaging. You read 3 pages to read an inbox item. You go through 7 pages to create an outbox item. This assumes that PM’s count for CPM rates, and why shouldn’t they?
Subscriptions. Just takes the subscription information put in the “Posters Data” and calculates it here. (You can find your start date for subscriptions by clicking UserCP>>Paid Subscriptions.)[/indent]
Then at the bottom is a chart summarizing all this.
(Go ahead! Try it! Go to your User CP, enter your # of posts, your starting date, subscription info, and more, to determine your total and annualized financial value to this Board based upon your posting and reading activity.)
When done building the Single Poster tab I copied it to the 2nd tab, “Comparing Posters”, where one could make comparisons between posters with different habits to determine their financial worth vis-à-vis another.
Let’s try tab 2 out with the two subjects of this topic.
HurricaneDitka: A high-engagement, unsubscribed poster who has been at the SDMB since 2012, compiling 14,961 posts (as I type this), an average of 2,052/year, 5.62/day, and has never subscribed.
JohnT: A medium-engagement, subscribed poster, who has been at the SDMB since 2001, compiling 23.885 posts (as I type this), an average of 1,305/year or 3.57/day, and has subscribed since 2004. (Was pay to post that long ago?)
I enter those numbers in page 2, in the Poster Data section. I then make sure the Assumptions match, and then review the posters for their activity, asking the following questions about each:
Engagement: Is this a poster who engages people, and how much? HD is an engagement machine, guys, with a high % of his posts getting responded to and a large number of posts are posted in response to each. For this example, I’m going to assume that 50% of his posts get 4 replies each. That’s way high… but, shit, it might not be when it’s all averaged out. For me, I’m assuming 10% of my posts get 2 replies each, or 1 response every 5 posts. (Again, this is where hard data would be helpful – knowing exactly how many replies a poster is responsible for would be fantastic.)
Reading: Is this person a reader? Again, I have no idea, so we just enter a value for the average number of pages read per post. If you’re the sort of poster who goes immediately to “subscribed threads”, posts your responses, and leaves, then this value will be low. If you’re the sort of poster who browses the boards and posts something on occasion, this value will be high. For this comparison, I put the value down as “8 pages read per post” for both HD and I. It makes us sound all smart and shit.
Private Messaging: I entered 0 for both of us, both boxes. Unless there’s a massive PM community of which I’m not a part (and there could be), this one won’t be material for most posters, and I left it out of this comparison as I have zero idea what HD’s #’s are.
Anyway, so I run the numbers, and holy shit, guys, no wonder the mods keep him around! Check this out:
HD Annualized Revenues: $61.56 (all from Board Activity)
JohnT Annualized Revenues $32.55 ($7.50 is subscription, the remaining $25.05 is Board Activity)
HD Annualized NPV generated by board activity + subscriptions: $362.01
JohnT Annualized NPV generated by board activity + subscriptions: $274.54
Long and short of it is that HD brings in about $36/year more in revenue than I do, and his contribution to the long-term value of this place exceeds my own by about $90/year.
No doubt about it, on the face of it, at projected CPM’s of $1.50, HD can run off two posters like myself or iiandyiiii or whomever, and his presence will remain profitable for the SDMB (though the value of the place will decrease in excess of his contribution). In addition, he can cost this place 7-9 Charter Member subscriptions, every year… and it will remain profitable for the SDMB to keep him around as long as those lost subscribers keep posting. And this will remain so long as he remains who he is because this profitability is largely due to his high engagement metrics at the stated CPM’s (which, again, is guesswork in this model).
However, once a negative influencer runs off 3 or more long-term posters, both value and revenue metrics turn negative. Of that, there is also no doubt – one can only post so much, one can only be so engaging, etc, all of which sets an upper boundary to the value of one’s activity and engagement metrics when people start getting sick of you. We’ve had a number of notable flounces in the past 20 years, but I doubt anyone has charted who pissed off who enough to make them leave.
So, there it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Economics of Trolling.