Micropayments = Microincome

A proper experiment also has dispassionate scientists conducting it, people who are able to disconnect their personal feelings from the subject matter in the pursuit of unvarnished truth. This experiment had two drunk guys giggling like preschool girls.

Many people have already commented about the validity of our experiment (or lack thereof) in the comments areas of shady blogs out there on the internet. They say that since we offered the paper version of the minicomic at a discount to purchasers of the electronic version, that the results would be skewed in favor of BitPass, misrepresenting how many people would use the system due to the extra carrot involved.

People said that since we already have a huge, throbbing audience that this would not reveal how a small, unknown artist might succeed with a micropayments-based business. Other people noted that the many incoming links we had during the experiment (including links from Penny Arcade, the single biggest webcomic in existence, Scott McCloud, the single biggest proponent of micropayments, and Websnark, the, uh... a blog) would artificially increase our traffic and therefore our revenue. All these people are (theoretically) correct -- this experiment is way skewed in favor of BitPass.

But personally, I don't see this as a huge problem. I wanted this to be skewed in favor of Bitpass, because if it failed, I wanted it to fail definitively. I wanted to be certain that we had done everything possible to make sure it succeeded, because I love the idea of micropayments.

You may be scratching your heads right about now. "Isn't this the same guy that railed against micropayments on several occasions over the last two or three years?" you are probably asking yourselves. And yes, that was me. But I never spoke against them out of some deep-seated hatred of convenient payment systems. Micropayments did not kill my parents. Who wouldn't love a magical way to make money that required almost zero effort and kept the price low enough for thousands of people to take advantage of it? Who wouldn't love a turnkey solution that would allow any artist with a medium-sized following to make a living off of their art? No one, that's who.

So we skewed it. But not really. I would have done nothing differently in a real-world scenario -- I would have offered the extra carrot in an attempt to drive up additional sales. I would have publicized the hell out of it to eke as many sales out of it as possible. I would have asked friendly folks for links. I do the same for any revenue stream we introduce, and this one is no different.

That said, the results we got with our experiment will not apply to everyone out there. They only apply to us, because that's the only thing we tested. Your mileage may vary.

In the interest of full disclosure, there were also complaints from some folks who thought that we had skewed the experiment against BitPass. Scott McCloud had the following valid criticism:

> Gotta say: If I was an average Goats fan, having just read this > morning's post, I'd feel like I'd be letting you down if I *did* buy > 'em. ;-) ... > I just don't know how many burgers you'll sell in the "Meat is > Murder" pavilion if you know what I mean.

Like I said, it's valid. To a point. If anything I said or did had any real effect on your purchasing habits I'd have a lot more money than I do. You're all fully capable of making your own decisions about what you want to spend your $0.25 on and in what fashion you would like to do so and you all certainly know I would like you to spend it on us, regardless of the delivery system. Scott also has a financial interest in BitPass, owning a piece of the action, and he's going to try to poke holes where he can. I would do exactly the same if I were him.

I apologize for rambling on like this, but I thought it was important that I get all of this out of the way before I tell you that the BitPass experiment was a conclusive and absolute failure. It failed on such a tremendous level that I was surprised when we discovered new and previously unimagined ways in which it could have failed. It failed so badly that we actually lost money.

Let's begin with the numbers and work our way from there. From the sale of two separate 17-page comics, over the course of one week, we have made a total of $53.25 (before BitPass gets their cut, that is). Here's a table showing the number of sales of both comics in total over the last week:

You can see why we didn't need to keep the experiment going on any longer to make our determination. The pattern of declining sales is fairly common for almost any offering, though -- most people buy within the first week or two of the introduction of a product, or not at all (with some exceptions -- it's a guideline, not a rule).

There's no way to tell how many people visit a website (anyone who tells you differently is lying), but based on the numbers in our logs it's a safe bet that several tens of thousands of people visited the site during an average day that week. Our biggest day was the 7th, with over 80,000 page views. Traffic declines sharply in the summer months for reasons of Nice Weather and No School, so this is certainly not indicative of traffic for us during the rest of the year, but it wasn't too bad for a weekday in June. We had an extra 6,136 people coming from ScottMcCloud.com, 9,184 from Penny-Arcade.com, and a few thousand more from random blogs linking to our experiment on top of our normal audience of freaks and weirdos.

And with all that, we had 213 total sales of BitPass content. I don't know about where you live, but $53 per week will not feed two families in NYC. It will not pay the rent. It will barely cover our Thursday bar tab. I suspect most of you consider a living wage to be much higher than that.

Now normally, this wouldn't be much of a problem. We have other things for sale. We make dozens of merch sales every day; enough so that Phillip and I can eke out our meager existences with some careful supplementing. BitPass can surely be used as a part of a larger business plan, right? Perhaps Bitpass can be used as new revenue stream that will add on to our existing product lines.

Except that BitPass actually had a negative effect on our other lines of merchandise. We sold less stuff and made less money, even though we had more traffic coming in to the site. Hell, when PA linked to us last June we had our best month ever. Despite a larger regular audience and a link from that same site we are on track to sell approximately 3/10 as much this month over the year before.

We sold two paper copies of A Tale of Two Comics. Two. If you're currently hoping to continue to sell print versions of your comics alongside the electronic ones, that is not promising.

I have a theory that people buy things from webcomics because it is a way to more fully participate in the larger gestalt of the story and community. In our society, making a purchase is tantamount to having a cultural experience. This is why souvenirs exist. This is what the experience-based economy relies on. From what I have seen over the last 8 years of experimenting with these sorts of things, people do not generally worry about how much things cost as long as 1) it is under $20 (one 'Yuppie Food Stamp') and 2) it is reasonably priced compared to other similar objects that could be procured elsewhere.

The real hurdle is not the cost, but the difficulty in convincing you to initiate the transaction. This is one of the reasons why BitPass fails -- it does not usually lower the hurdle enough to overcome people's resistance to spending money. But when it does 'succeed', when people want to participate so badly that they are willing to fund an account with $3 to purchase $0.25 worth of product, it provides the user with a commercial experience at an extremely low price point. Instead of spending $18 on a t-shirt, they are spending a quarter. Not every BitPass user would have bought something from our store, but some of them would have, and it only would have taken 3 $18 t-shirts sold to surpass the earnings from one week of BitPass content.

Is this effect provable? Absolutely not. It could be a coincidence. Our products could be terrible. Any number of things may have contributed to this. But as a small business owner whose partner has a tiny baby to feed, I cannot take the risk that using BitPass may be detrimental to a business model that works, one that we have carefully honed over years and years, and continue to do so -- success only comes from hard work and innovation, not from any turnkey solution. If anyone tells you differently, use a healthy dose of skepticism. If their solution is such a good idea, why are they not using it to make a living? Is anyone using BitPass to make a living, or even supplement one? Who stands to gain from all this?

Anyway, needless to say, it's been a tough month for us. We're trying to get some new merch -- books and action figures -- into the store for you. We could use some help raising the money for production costs (as well as for food and small things like that).

So we're throwing an old-fashioned sale. It may not be as innovative as a really big canvas, but some things are timeless. First off, we're offering a Mystery Bundle -- three Goats t-shirts chosen randomly by us in the size of your choice, at the profit-defying price of $25 for either regular shirts or babydolls. Please buy them. Buy them like crazy, and tell your friends to do the same. If there's a particular design that you absolutely will not wear, drop us a note in the Message field when you check out and we'll do our best to comply.

Secondly, I've slashed prices on our prints by $10 for the 8.5x11" versions and $20 for the 13x19" versions. And the price of original art has been slashed by a whopping $80 (this would be a great time to snatch up that original you've been biting your nails over, before someone else gets it). To order original art and prints from any Goats strip, just click the handy links underneath the strip in question in our archive. This sale will probably only be on for the next few days. It won't last long, and neither would we, at this rate, so take advantage of us while you can.

If neither of these options intrigues you, I invite you to take a gander through our store. If there's something there that you like, please buy it, for you or for a friend. It's the single best way you can support our webcomic.