I was originally going to post a collection of mini-articles, as I did a while back in Typo Inzpiration and other mini-posts – but, just before actually starting work, I changed my mind.

Separating the three into distinct posts not only gives each room to grow (the way this one did), which may be important (given the planned content of the three), it gives me content for several weeks that (hopefully) won’t take too long to write, freeing up more time for the ongoing Image Project articles, which will take longer than usual to write.

Mark Clover, host of the Okay Grognard Show (a Twitch stream / podcast), and it’s Facebook page, recently asked a question – the YouTube channel which archives the streams had 188 subscribers, which led him to write,

“in the grand scheme of things, 200 subscribers seems like it should be easy to do. What say you?

This touched on a thought that I offered to Johnn when we were first planning what would become Campaign Mastery, about the Marketing of e-books. It’s also relevant to web page subscriptions, attracting Twitter followers, and all sorts of other activities, and I don’t think that I’ve ever explained it here.

(Before I go any further, I should point out that a day or two later, the YouTube channel reached that 200 subscribers mark, so it was in fact fairly easy to achieve).

The Drake Equation

My thinking on such marketing and projected sales / subscribers / website visitors is all built around a formula inspired by the famous Drake equation for predicting the number of civilizations that are potentially ‘out there’. I discussed that equation extensively in A Game Of Drakes and Detectives: Where’s ET? in 2019 – almost exactly 2 years ago.

The Drake Of Marketing

Because the text in the image is a little hard to read, it’s so small, and for the benefit of ‘readers’ with impaired vision, here it is again in a more user-friendly format:

N = T × I × G × Sy × Su × K × W × R × C × D × A, where:

  • N: Number Of Sales / Subscriptions / Readers / Followers
  • T: Total population
  • I: Percent with internet access
  • G: Percent interested in the general subject
  • Sy: Percent interested in the game system
  • Su: Percent interested in the specific subject
  • K: Percent who learn of the product within the availability window
  • W: Percent who subscribe / purchase / read products of this type
  • R: Percent who are not turned off by price, reputation, product description, etc
  • C: Percent who have the capacity to subscribe / purchase / read
  • D: Percent who do not disapprove of the product / author / publisher, etc
  • A: Percent who actually do subscribe / purchase / read if given the opportunity

Let’s take a (fairly brief) look at each of these ten factors.

N: Number Of Sales / Subscriptions / Readers / Followers

This number is the object of the exercise – how many copies of my ebook cam I expect to sell? How many of my new paperback? How many twitter followers can U attract? How many people will read or subscribe to my blog or YouTube channel? But all is not what it seems with this number – I’ll get back to that in a little while.

T: Total population

The obvious starting point – if you could sell a copy of X to everyone on Earth, by definition, you have captured 100% of the theoretically possible market. The current population, despite Covid, is believed to be 7,900,000,000 – or 7.9 billion.

I: Percent with internet access

Most of the products that we’re talking about are to be sold over the internet, which requires that the individual has internet access to be a potential customer. This was last determined in January 2021 as being 59.5%, or 595/1000.

If you are offering a physical product through bricks-and-mortar outlets, this should be replaced with the percentage with access to the product – which may be a much smaller number.

This also doesn’t take into account the language of the product – only 25.9% of internet users speak English. So that 595/1000 suddenly shrinks to 154.105 / 1000. If the product is in some other language, that number will shrink even further – 19.4% of internet users speak a Chinese language, 7.9% speak Spanish, 5.2% speak Arabic, and the other languages of the world have even smaller numbers.

G: Percent interested in the general subject

What proportion of these people will have an interest in the general subject – in this case, we’re talking about TTRPGs, in others it might be Music or Movies or well, you name it. My experience suggests that this number is going to be somewhere in between 0.01 and 0.2 percent, but it could easily be smaller. If we include a more general meaning of ‘interested’, the number might go up.

There are cultural factors at work that I don’t have the knowledge to take into account. Most of the population of India will speak English, but I would not be at all surprised if the level of interest in TTRPGs within that population is just one one-hundredth of what it is in the US or Europe.

The best-selling TTRPG of all time is D&D in its many incarnations. In 2017, there were 12-to-15 million copies sold in the US alone. 2019 was even bigger, with sales of the starter set quadrupling. By the time we factor in people who bought a prior edition at some point in the past but didn’t update, it would be easy to double this number again. So, 4 × 13.5 (mid-way between 12 and 15 million) × 2 (midway between triple and quadruple) gives an estimate of 108 million in the US – out of a population of 332,403,650 – or about 32.5%.

That’s the high water mark – while some markets may be comparable (Canada, UK), most will be smaller, often by a huge factor.

Just like the real Drake equation, some numbers just have to be educated guesses. Because we’ve already taken language into account, we’ve excluded major population groups like China – but not others, like India.

As a conservative rough number, I would use 3%.

But some of those people will have dropped out of the hobby – my personal experience says only 1/3 of these people are still active in the hobby, and perhaps only 1/6 or 1/10. A conservative middle-of-road guesstimate would be 0.4% (that’s midway between 1/6 and 1/10th of 3%).

But that leaves a vast number potential market that might just be reachable with the right product and marketing.

This also neglects the casual observer or participant – there are all sorts of potential degrees of engagement with the hobby that are less than full participation. These add to the potential customer base, but at a depreciated amount. But these are, by definition, unexpected sales conversions and we’re after expected conversions. This simply adds a compensating factor to our low-ball estimates.

Sy: Percent interested in the game system

If your product is for D&D, there will be markedly less interest shown by those who never play that particular game. Not no interest – some people collect rules systems the way others collect stamps. But there is going to be a core market.

There will be some people who have no interest in whatever rules system your product uses, and some who have a high interest.

You might think that labeling something “Universal” might be the answer – but the fact is that there are some people who only want material dedicated to their particular game system, and who regard “Universal” as a dirty word.

There are also other ways of slicing this particular onion – “old-school gaming” as a label will attract some people regardless of game system, while turning others off.

So the numbers will vary by game system. In the absence of specific data, the only safe number is 50%. But it’s better to be conservative, so I would argue in favor of 25%, or 20%, or 10%, or even 5%.

Su: Percent interested in the specific subject

Some products are broad in scope – Campaign Mastery covers a very diverse range of topics, for example. In such cases, this will be quite high – 80 or 90%. When it comes to a specific product like Assassin’s Amulet, 5 or 10% is more appropriate.

Again, in looking for a generic ‘safe” answer, I would set this to 25% – but you can usually get more specific in specific cases.

K: Percent who learn of the product within the availability window

This is an important number. I’m aware of (conservatively) less than 1% of the RPG products that get released each year, and I’m reasonably well-informed on the subject. On top of that, most products aren’t available for an unlimited time period – what will happen to Campaign Mastery after I shuffle off this mortal coil?

Nor does the cause have to be anything so melodramatic – how many copies of D&D 2nd Ed are available for purchase right now?

So there is an availability window, and most of your potential customers will never have any idea that you even exist.

That’s why, even though the game systems for which it was designed and written are now depreciated, a few copies of Assassin’s Amulet get bought every year. But it’s not like the first year, when hundreds of copies were sold.

You can also define this ‘availability window’ in terms of proportion of sales peak. If I pick one of the more popular posts here at Campaign Mastery from the last few years for illustrative purposes – Let’s Talk About Containers: 22 Wondrous Items:

I’ve enhanced the contrast a little to make things more visible even at the reduced size of this graphic. Looking at this, you can see that traffic to this article can be divided up into four phases. I’ve marked them on this annotated version:

  • Phase 1 is the first few days to a week of the article. For a little while, it’s a hot property.
  • Phase 2 follows, with just the occasional reader. Phases 1 and 2 are typical behavior.
  • Phase 3 is atypical and shows what happens when someone drops a permanent link to the article on a moderately popular web page.
  • Phase 4 is even more atypical, and shows what happens when someone discovers the article and posts a permanent link in a highly popular web page, like a WOTC article.

Let’s put some numbers on those graphs:

This table shows the total number of visitors to the article every month for as long as this plug-in has been monitoring site stats or since the article was first published, whichever comes later. I deliberately chose this example because it does show the entire lifetime of the article.

  • So in the first month (May 2017), it had 149 views. In June, that dropped to 43 views.
  • Most months up until March 2018, it averaged 11-14 visitors a month (one month had just 4, I wonder what happened that month?).
  • April 2018, it had 25 views, then 34, then 54. Most months were 34-60 odd views through to March 2020; the occasional month was exceptional (Feb 2019 – 82, April 2019 – 72, Jan 2020 – 71).
  • Phase 4 commenced in April 2020 – the numbers for the rest of that year were 95, 75, 69, 75, 68, 102, 102, 104, and 126. Most of 2021 saw it even more popular: 179, 206 (the all-time high for the article), 198, 159, 142, 172, 142, 165, 152, 121, 97, 114. Notice that the low mark for that year was substantially higher even than the ‘exceptionally high’ marks for the previous phase.
  • The annual numbers tell a similar story – 253 in 2017, 431, 675, 1026, and 1850. Jan 2022 isn’t yet finished as I write this, and it’s already had 121 views for the month.

I also have a more detailed breakdown of the last few weeks, and it shows that the article has been receiving a steady stream of 3-4 views a day – all except for the week of New Years Day (average 3) and last week (average 5). Jan 28th, 9 people looked at it.

Here, for comparison purposes, is a more typical pattern, this time for ‘Every Shadow Has A Vanishing Point‘.

There’s the typical peak when it was first published (19 views on day 1) but by the end of the first week, it was 0 or 1 view a day. Most weeks, there would be one day that had two views. Every now and then, either through chance or because someone mentioned it in a volatile form like Twitter and it would leap up to 5 or 6 views – and then drop back again. That happens every 7 or 8 months or so.

Campaign Mastery’s traffic is the accumulation of more than 1300 such small trickles and a few handfuls of more popular posts.

It’s largely the same for any product. There’s a start and rapid acceleration as word spreads. This is largely over in the first week, month, 6 months, or year – depending on the product and the promotional platform you have for getting the word out. With a typical sales pattern, it will fall almost as fast as it climbed, with a popular product that tail-off will be even slower. But eventually, all things being equal, it will enter a stable state. Where that ‘floor’ is will depend on the popularity of the product.

Various things can ‘gee up’ market performance – bloggers writing about it regularly, for example. Free samples, demonstrations, advertising, and new additions and supplements, for example. And sometimes, a product is a sleeper, and it takes off some time after it’s initial burst of popularity.

Absent such stimulus, though, you can use (in hindsight) the attainment of that “floor’ as a signal that the product has ended its availability window, and it is now a ‘legacy product’.

The key point is this: everything new has a surge of popularity of unknown size.

In order to buy a product (whether it’s with dollars or simply with someone’s time), they have to know that it exists. Depending on how successful your initial marketing is, that will be a greater or lesser percentage of the people who might buy it if they know it exists. In most cases, that will be 5% or less.

W: Percent who subscribe / purchase / read products of this type

Some people don’t read blogs. Some people don’t listen to podcasts or stream video files. Some people won’t buy digital books. Others find them to be better value for money than physical media. A certain percentage of your market will not be served by any given format. The more strings you can add to your bow in this department, the better your product will sell.

As usual, context and expectations are everything – appear to fall short in any way, and your sales will plunge like a rock. Appear to exceed expectations, and word of mouth / publicity will follow, leading to popularity. Since I can’t be specific, 10-20% is the base expectation. The high-water mark might be 80%, a poor result would be 5% or less.

R: Percent who are not turned off by price, reputation, product description, etc

Even if someone is interested in a general sort of way, there are all sorts of resistances that have to be overcome. Price, for example – I argued very strongly that $15 or $18 were better price points for Assassin’s Amulet, but was overruled.

When it comes to price, the usual pattern is this:

Click on the image for a larger (800 × 800) version in a new tab.

As price goes up, sales go down. Marketing and promotion pushes the sales for a given price toward the upper right, but there are diminishing returns after a given point (actually, at several points). Negative expectations and reputation push sales for a given price toward the upper left. No matter what the combination, there is a ‘sweet spot’ that maximizes sales x price, i.e. profit (excluding marketing and promotion spending). Since the price of doubling the effectiveness of a given level of marketing and promotion rises more quickly than profit once those diminishing returns seriously kick in, there is also a sweet spot in terms of Marketing spend. The higher the negative expectations / damaged reputation that have to be overcome, the higher this sweet spot is, because part of the value lies in countering that negative perception.

Promotional expenditure doesn’t have to be money; it can be time, it can be promotional copies and other freebies, it can be making excerpts publicly available, it can be philanthropic or public activities while wearing a promotional T-shirt!

Different promotional activities target different variables in the ‘Drake Marketing’ formula – raising awareness, raising desirability, raising awareness of the product’s attributes. Even a 1% gain in 4 or 5 of them can be an extra 5% sales – 2%, more than 10%, 4%, more than 21% increase. What’s more likely is that you will have some quite high increases in performance metrics and some modest ones, for any given type of marketing or promotional campaign. +50%, +20%, +120%, +10%, +5% would not be at all unusual – and that yields a 357% sales increase!

Negative perceptions, warranted or otherwise, are a millstone around the neck of your sales. But the effect can be overcome. This variable measures the impact of those negatives that are not overcome – and predicting that ahead of time can be extremely difficult.

C: Percent who have the capacity to subscribe / purchase / read

You can have someone liking a product, and willing to purchase it – but still not close the sale, because the potential customer doesn’t have the wherewithal to make the purchase immediately. Discounts and sales and bonuses all push this metric (and several others) up in value.

But absent such promotional activities, this is another reflection of the relationship described regarding price earlier – you could say that this is the mechanism that couples the two factors (sales and price) together.

Depending on the price, this may be anywhere from 100% (free) to a tiny percentage of the potential marketplace.

You should also recognize that there is a reluctance to spend that has to be overcome even if the price is not unreasonable. I’ve lost count of the number of comments made here and elsewhere that shows that the person making the comment had read only the first and last couple of paragraphs, reacted to those, and put that reaction in writing.

D: Percent who do not disapprove of the product / author / publisher, etc

There are people out there who don’t like my writing style, just as there are those who do. There will be people out there who don’t like having PC Assassins in their campaigns. There are people who consider WOTC (and Wizards before them) to be next-door neighbors to the Antichrist. These are all potential sales that are almost certainly lost to you. This is a measure of the people who have NOT formed a negative opinion about one or more of these attributes. That, by definition, includes those who have formed a positive impression, and those who have never heard of you before.

A: Percent who actually do subscribe / purchase / read if given the opportunity

Finally, there’s a given percentage of potential customers who will simply get cold feet at the last minute. An overly lengthy, complex, invasive, or irritating sales process can send this percentage crashing down. The more painless that you can make implementing the decision to buy on, the better.

The cumulative effect

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that each step reduces the potential market to 10% of what it was. With 10 percentages, that’s 0.1 to the 10th power – or 0.000,000,01%. A drop by 1% in each of the metrics lowers this to 0.000,000,003,486,784,401%. Multiplying those two values by the population base, I get 0.79 people and 0.275 people, respectively. Fortunately, as discussed, several of the factors are much higher, and that makes a big difference.

If one was 59%, and one was 30%, and the other eight were just 10%, that yields an altogether more impressive number of 0.000,000,177%, or 13.983 sales. If those eight others were 15%, 0.000,004,536% and 358 sales are the outcome. At 20%, 0.000,045,312% and 3579.6 sales.

This is the power of a geometric expansion – the consequences of multiple factors improving, in aggregate, far outweigh the size of the individual change.

Getting back to the Okay Grognard

Ultimately, the YouTube channel had 188 subscribers and wanted to increase this by just 12 to 200. That’s only a 6.4% increase. Mark’s post calling attention to the potential milestone was largely going to be preaching to the choir, but it was a promotional effort that may have finally persuaded some who were wavering, or who simply hadn’t committed yet. On top of that, there may well have been promotional posts by others who wanted to see the target achieved. It would not have taken much for those twelve additional subscribers to have been found, and so it was that the target was achieved inside a couple of days of the announcement.

The same is true of every other form of sale that you might want to make – whether it’s acquiring twitter followers or blog readers, or actual for-money sales of a product.

Trying to assess the potential benefits of a marketing plan, that will cost X amount, can be very tricky. A step-by-step analysis, one factor at a time, can yield a vague but useful measuring stick. Achieve this much increase in sales, and the campaign is a success; achieve less, and it will nor.

And all this is relevant to GMs in general. We all have to ‘sell’ our campaign proposals to potential players; we all have to sell the players that we do have on the credibility of our plots and characters. When the wheels come off these purchases, the impact can be disastrous. If you have an acquired Resistance, you too may have to work that much harder just to be credible.

The Drake Equation For Marketing is, in the final analysis, less important than the factors that it contains, describes, and represents. Some of these are fixed and invariable; others can be influenced by you. Understanding them will help you find the sweet spot for your circumstances to optimize your outcomes – whatever you’re trying to sell.

Finally, congrats on making the target, Mark!


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