Hello,
Due to byonds situation I was talking with some people and asked what they would do to increase profits for byond.
We came up with a few ideas and I thought I would post them for your consideration.
1. Membership time frames and prices:
Right now memberships are very cheap in relation to the amount of time they give you as a member. And tho 24$ up front for a year might seem like a lot, Byond will only get 24$ from that person a year.
Therefore I suggest Lowering the prices and lowering the amount of time it gives you as a member. Or keeping the existing membership options and offer a one week membership option for 1$ or 2.95$ therefore the masses of byond users could pay every two weeks for membership and only be paying a small price.
If you could get the majority of the non members to pay 1$ or 2$ every two weeks you would make quite a good sum of money and people would get the benefits of membership while not having to drop a lot up front.
To have to wait a year for members to pay again Byond is only making money off of a member once a year. therefore profits are in dribs and drabs rather than a constant flow.
If you feel this is to radical, Try a 2.95$ membership deal month each year and sell a 6 month member ship for only 2.95$ for a limited time each year, This way you could get a huge amount of people paying 3$ at one time raiseing profits.
I would rather get 1$ from everyone that 24$ from only a small minority of members every once in a while.
2.Advertise membership and run a donation campaign.
Also I would suggest right on the front page (should you make a lower membership option, perhaps call it a trial membership)
Advertising it on the front page of byond and say something like:
Get The Most Out Of BYOND! Try Membership Today Only 2.95$!
The More people that see it the better.
Also I would promote becoming a member EVERYWHERE on the site with a short summery of why.
We need more sales.
I would run a donation called: Save BYOND! much like wikipedia does and explain that we can't run byond on nothing and if every member donated the price of a cup of coffee byond could continue on.
Perhaps run donation fund raisers 2 times a year to raise capital.
3.Byond products:
There are many sites where you can just put a logo on a t shirt, cup,key chain etc. and not actually have to make it yourself and sell the product. They make the shirt and you offer it in your websites shop and if someone buys it you make money and they get a cut and then they make the products and ship them and all you see is revenue.
Who wouldn't want a byond key chain?
Perhaps make it a membership perk that if you are member you can put your own games products on the byond website as well and the game creators could make profit and so could byond.
TL;DR Sell Products Sell More Memberships Advertise the piss out of Memberships and Run Fund Raiser events.
These are all just ideas and can be ignored mind you, but byond needs more income and ads alone won't do it. Ads are just a band-aid on the problem (However I would keep them of course as they promote membership sales!)
We need a long term solution.
If anyone else has good ideas feel free to add on and if you think I'm a loon and these ideas are just awful, Feel free to explain why.
With all our heads together we can come up with a strategy to market byond better and make some serious cash for all of toms hard work.
Fair Winds,
Bloodocean7
ID:1276186
 May 26 2013, 5:18 am
|
|
The best way to help BYOND is to make a profitable game, I would assume. Not only are you going to bring in new people to the website (increased ad revenue), ideally you'd be using the website's subscription system and they'll get a 20% cut.
There's a small handful of games that have made five digit figures, or close to that, at least... If there were a lot more projects like that, then perhaps the website wouldn't be in its current situation. I'm optimistic as always. I know of a decent number of projects being developed that I think are going to contribute greatly. Let's just hope they're live within a year. | |
Ratzy wrote:
Good, This is the kind of posts people should be doing now since Byonds looking for ways to make money. ^What ever the case Byond needs more frequent and steady income. Perhaps offer 1 month at a very cheap rate evry once in a while just to get spikes of profit evry so often, but more often than now. They have done Byond merchandise before ~ i guess it didn't work out. Perhaps they were making it on there own, these websites do all the work you just design the products, Also having members put there games icons on a shirt or key chain and selling on byond would be a awesome members perk that would up the membership sales. I think Byond should have an actual "donate thermometer thing" with a visible display of how Byond is doing to meet the required amount, it could be done as a % if revealing the exact money is something you do not wish to reveal. That would be Great! I say put a article up about byond's situation and ask for donations and advertise the heck out of the fund raiser all over the site! People need to see it and if they do they will help, and if the ad for that said people only need to give a dollar, people will and Tom will have some breathing room at least. Currently we can only donate extra if we buy a membership ~ which i think is fine... i guess, but you're need to stay alive should out weigh your pride. Yes, Allow Donations without the cost of membership so people who are already members can donate more and non-members who don't have the funds to get a membership but still want to give, can. If every byond member gave Tom a dollar Today he would be in a better situation by far and byond would have a much longer life. Thanks for your thoughts, Bloodocean7 | |
Writing A New One wrote:
The best way to help BYOND is to make a profitable game, I would assume. Not only are you going to bring in new people to the website (increased ad revenue), ideally you'd be using the website's subscription system and they'll get a 20% cut. I agree with you fully, however in years the games haven't saved byond yet and in order for original great profitable games to come out, Byond will need some capital to keep it floating until these miracle games arrive, I just don't want to pin byonds future on the hope of profit, Rather Byond needs a plan and a course of action that will help revive it and keep it going no matter what. I hope these profitable games come out soon as well, but I also hope for other sources of revenue. Right now byond has all its eggs in one basket and that's a dangerous thing. | |
Bloodocean7 wrote:
If every byond member gave Tom a dollar Today... That's an interesting idea, anyone know how many byond users there are? | |
It tends to peak out at 8000 online at once, so I've already tended to apply a rule of thumb of 15,000 or so.
| |
Stephen001 wrote:
It tends to peak out at 8000 online at once, so I've already tended to apply a rule of thumb of 15,000 or so. If that's the case, 15,000 dollars isn't enough to save byond by a long shot hah. I think there's gotta be a lot more users than that if we're talking keys registered. | |
A group of developers and artist should come together and design a game or two. Maybe, just maybe.
| |
Well even 8000$ would help byond survive and pay for other methods of bringing in more members. Byond needs more advertisement really.
Perhaps have a ad members can post to their facebooks and other networks and bring in members and as a reward it puts their name in a drawing for a membership, that way people are always trying to advertise byond so they get a chance at something free, that one membership given away a month would be a good incentive to get free advertising for byond, We need to get a lot more quality members to help byond in the long run, not to mention those ads if Search engine optimized will make byond easier to find on google, bing, etc. Also It woulden't just be 8000$ and thats it, Run the Fund Raiser a few times a year to always bring in extra income on top of other ideas and membership sales, and as a added bonus people will know more about byond's situation and be more inclined to help by buying memberships. | |
Bloodocean7 wrote:
Well even 8000$ would help byond survive and pay for other methods of bringing in more members. Byond needs more advertisement really. I'm pretty sure they need something more like 50k per year... (that's only 25 an hour for something that is worth 50 an hour) You're talking about paying a full time programmer, mainly. I could be wrong! Anyway if there are no ads, that's like 3000 memberships. I run several businesses, and the lowest paid employee makes 26k a year. There's no way a business who has a full time employee can run on less than half of that. | |
I agree that Byond would need a lot more than that, however in order to bring in quick profits now to save byond and give it a fighting chance, Thats what these suggestions are for.
Hopefully in time with the capital from fund raising and increased members byond will have better footing and be able to rake in a decent amount to pay for their expenses, But let's face it anything would be an improvement over the current income they are obtaining now. Any step in the right direction is a good step and more money now for Tom so he can at least pay some bills and eat a more nutritious diet and take away some stress, would be helpful to byond's future as a whole. | |
To be honest, BYOND doesn't have enough players to give Tom much money per month. I liked the $1~$2 for a 2 weeks membership idea though.
Maybe BYOND should try to advertise itself more on FaceBook, we should make a page for it and advertise good games, invite our friends, etc. We don't really need the Flash Client, just friends who like playing games. I don't have many friends who like 2D Games though, but I'm sure there are lots of guys who would love to try them. Let's get serious, we should probably make a thread on BYOND Forums, and then tell the players to fan the BYOND Page, advertise good games there, and more.. | |
I think when the flash client is here, BYOND could easily explode on FaceBook. There's a lot of people who could ease into fleshing out a fully capable facebook game and making money quickly with how BYOND is set up. The flash client is sorta the final key to taking over facebook (or even a fraction of it's gaming community).
| |
Albro1 wrote:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Free-Online-Games-with-BYOND/ 393784178242 So far it's the one with most likes, but for some reason it doesn't appear when you type BYOND on FaceBook, and I think that's a problem. Maybe it should be renamed to BYOND - Free Games? | |
I like the ideas and I love to see the community working toward saving this beautiful project. I hope it keeps up and I hope tom will use some of the ideas mentioned here to raise money to pay him for all his hard work and to have byond continue strong into the future.
Facebook is a good free start that the byond community can use, but much more can be done. For now I suggest posting a link to byond and information about it where ever you can, such as your facebook and your friends families facebook pages as well. anywhere a link is posted it makes link backs to the site and allows more people to find us not only through the sites where it is posted but search engines will bring us traffic, be sure to use key words like free games, create your own game etc. when discussing byond anywhere. | |
I also have ideas that could benefit BYOND! First of all - Videos. Taking the examples of the products, how about a lot of products and once you guys get a X amount of money. You make videos and advertise your products and show some stuff on BYOND,etc. Also - BYOND could make an app with Apple which would let people play X Mini-Game. For exemple: Box Zombies, single-player. First, it would advertise BYOND and second you could make game have sub(a bit like Jetpack Joyride) or make them pay to play the (FULL) game. Now let's think a bit of what Eternia guy said.. He said that the only way to advertise BYOND is by making profitable games. Now, when people are searching for Pixel artist they tend to make the biggest mistake in their life. Classified Ads. Now If I want to buy food, I go to the grocery-store. Same with Internet.. if I want to find a pixel artist I go to way of the pixel or Pixel Joint. Now if BYOND just invites random players to Pixel Joint, more pixel artist, right?? Now if we have more pixel artist it means more games, right?? Now if we have more games, we might have more money, right?? NOW if we want MORE money, how do we do? Simple.. we remake the Pixel Art community. Pixel Art sell their Pixel Arts and, just like the sub (or more), they make 40% of the money. Now for the Ads. Now I thought of a system that would benefit BYOND and programmers/pixel artist. If we made this "forum" a bit more "forumish" we could add a Classes and Rank system. Classes would be(example): Programmer, Pixel Artist and the Rank would be stars. Now for the classified ads... it would cost money to post there. Why? 'Cause now all the Programmers/Pixel Artist(Whatever you are looking for) get your post in their pager. Though, it would only post to programmers that had been here 6 Month before or later than that.
| |
Most good developers don't look at the Classified Ads because it's trash. Making people pay is really tossing a coin up for the future of the Ads section. I don't think it's a good idea.
| |
I have not read it all, but I know there's quite a few issues about Byond making smaller payment increments for memberships, So paying monthly payments which would seem a lot more affordable apparently does not work out well in the long run?
They have done Byond merchandise before ~ i guess it didn't work out.
I think Byond should have an actual "donate thermometer thing" with a visible display of how Byond is doing to meet the required amount, it could be done as a % if revealing the exact money is something you do not wish to reveal.
Currently we can only donate extra if we buy a membership ~ which i think is fine... i guess, but you're need to stay alive should out weigh your pride.