A look at some fandom based money numbers

Disclaimer: I am not a marketing person. I'm not claiming to be an expert. I welcome expert input.

If you haven't figured it out, I like numbers and fandom. For me, numbers help give meaning to observations I see casually. The two together, fandom and numbers, is fascinating. One topic I've been discussing in private meta is how much money there is in fandom, who is making money off fandom, etc. I know and they know that people inside and outside of fandom are making money off fan creation, whether we realize it or not. 6Apart, CBS, FanFiction.Net, Quizilla, MySpace, YouTube, Yahoo!Groups, EBay are just a few. There are various fansites that have adverts, including fan history wiki which had made about $40 in the past year using text based Google ads. Many of these sites, especially the commercial ones, are integral to our fannish experience, even if they were never designed to be that to begin with. Where would fandom be with out them?

The money issue is one that's been discussed a bit recently in fandom. I know I've been privately discussing it with a number of people on my FList, on AIM and via e-mail. The issue of money as it pertains to FanFiction.Net has bugged me even more. It's been the focus of some speculation in light of other situations in fandom. 6Apart, YouTube, Quizilla, MySpace may profit off fandom activity but fan activity alone does not define these sites. For FanFiction.Net, a specific type of fan activity does. If you're going to talk about money in fandom and have a meaningful discussion, you really can't ignore it. FanFiction.Net is the giant elephant in the corner.

If you're a regular reader of Plagiarism Today, the money issue has been brought up. It's mostly been discussed in the context of scrapers, with Plagiarism Today saying how scrapers can make up to $80,000 a week, based on stealing and appropiating other people's content and putting it on domains, journals and blogs. If a scraper can do this, on minimal content, what could FanFiction.Net do money wise and based on their huge traffic volume? In a recent community locked post, some people speculated on this exact issue. The people involved in the discussion didn't have hard numbers, or information from marketers and advertisers. I'd looked at this sort of before, got a general idea for the numbers based on just the scraping thing, a discussion with someone in marketing and my own experience in fandom... and I'd arrived at a number similar to that of scrapers. FanFiction.Net just couldn't, based on that knowledge, make less than that. Not good enough. Numbers. Numbers. Need real numbers that I can cite. And learning what those numbers are based on, what they mean.

Ad revenue of the sort FanFiction.Net has is based on page views. How many page views?




Alexa image source.

That chart compares FanFiction.Net, Quizilla, MTV.com, iVillage and FictionAlley.Org. FictionAlley.Org was included because it is frequently held up as one of the largest archives in fandom. Quizilla is one that I know is probably, meh, the second or third or fourth largest fan fiction repository on the Internet. MTV.Com and iVillage were included just to give an idea of FanFiction.Net's size compared to main stream sites.

To put this into more perspective, FictionAlley is registered as a non-profit. I don't believe they earn enough to pay taxes. Neither does HPEF, Inc. because they do not make over $25,000. (source) iVillage mainstream site, it was in the news a while back. It sold for $558 million. (source) Quizilla, that second to fourth largest repository of fan fiction was rumored to have been sold to Viacom for $10 to $20 million. (source)

FanFiction.Net tops them all. Yesterday, FanFiction.Net was the 193rd most popular site on the Internet. Think about the sheer size of that. It boggles my mind. In the Philippines? FanFiction.Net is the 44th most popular website on the Internet. In the United States? It's the 126th. I boggle. It gets more traffic than Quizilla. It has to be worth more than ivillage and Quizilla. Back to numbers... because yeah, that's what I am focusing on.

Anyway, so FanFiction.Net is large. It's popular. It gets huge amounts of volume. This translates into dollars. FanFiction.Net sells ads. They get money based on page views, based on advertisement sizes, etc. Adbrite is a site that gives advertising information, traffic information, user demographics, where to buy ads, etc. It tells you the type of ads FanFiction.Net is selling.

And before we get back to the money, another number detour. Adbrite has some interesting information about demographics of its user base that kind of contradicts some ideas about fandom, specifically gender representation in fandom. It also has an idea about race, supported by my own casual fandom observations. This information applies only to the US audience. (Xing added an asian based server which means his advertisements handled out of Asia are bought for there.) ". According to comScore Media Metrix the site's user base is 61% female (75% according to internal surveys), 58% are 18+, 65% have household incomes exceeding $60,000 and 90% are Caucasian." (source)

First, to define some terms and ideas. FanFiction.Net uses Active interstitials ads. These are pay per view, pay per impression ads. This differs from GoogleAd sense type ads which are generally text based and are pay per click. (source)

Back to the money. The Adbrite data also says FanFiction.Net makes $0.01 to $0.04 per as impressions for the ad linked to. According to the AdBrite info, FanFiction.Net gets 330,000 visitors a day. (source)
According to AdBrite, the site gets 9,700,000 impressions/page views a day. (source)
This would be supported by Compete which shows the average user viewing between 26 and 32 pages a day. (source) If you assume the the ad in question nets FanFiction.Net an average of $.02 per ad impression on the site, and that the site gets 9,700,000 impressions a day, FanFiction.Net may receive as much as $194,000 per day. ($0.02 x 9,700,000 = $194,000) Boggle that one. One ad on FanFiction.Net makes $194,000.



And FanFiction.Net isn't just using one advertising source, nor randomly advertising anywhere. FanFiction.Net allows advertisers to buy ad space on certain parts of there site, like the Anime, Harry Potter, television, books, Naruto sections. (source) They also an advertiser to buy different size ads. (source). FanFiction.Net doesn't just use one advertiser. If you poke around the site, look the different advertisements they have, you can tell they use different advertisement places like AdonNetwork, GoogleAds, Advertising.com and FastClick. In the past, FanFiction.Net used Gator. (Which I remember and hate because Gator tried to install software on my computer, manipulating holes in IE's security to do so. It might have been tied to the distributing the ads, bootlegging of ads, not FanFiction.Net's adsell itself. But that's neither here nor there.) I would guess that FanFiction.Net uses the different ad places to maximize their revenue.

Let's do the math based on the Adbrite information. $194,000 based on one ad alone for United States based audiences only, multiple that by 365 for the number of days in the year... Based on that information, FanFiction.Net could possibly make as much as $70,810,000 a year in revenue, FanFiction.Net's income before expenses. That's... a fascinating number.