Convention Economics

[kevin_standlee]

In case you're not following the Emerald City weblogs -- any if you're not, you should be -- cherylmorgan, after watching the steam come out of my ears too many times, has written an article about the economics of Worldcon memberships that I think many of you will find interesting, in light of L.A.con IV's "Taster Memberships" and the uproar about them on the SMOFS e-mail list -- although I've seen little serious complaint about it in any other forum.

Comments

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't think of what's been going on at Smofs a real uproar...more like a couple of people with blinders on and a couple of people being themselves -- picking nits or looking for holes.

The likelihood is that (1) few people will buy the taster memberships unless they are widely advertised; (2) those who buy them will *not* be regular con-goers; and (3) most of the people who try a taste of Worldcon will find (as Cheryl notes) that 3 hours isn't enough time to do *anything*.

I hope the test by L.A. yields some useful results. At the very least, it's likely to give us some data.

[thirdworld.livejournal.com]

I agree. The opposite of an uproar I feel. Most liked the idea, except most of this "positive" group either did not post at all, or only posted once. Those who post often sometimes give the illusion of being a majority, but they are far from it. Smofs is no different in that to any other discussion forum out there.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

While Cheryl is certainly correct that attending a Worldcon is more like a theatrical festival than the zoo, I suspect that the pool of people who buy one-day memberships is skewed towards those who think differently. There probably are a fair number of people who buy one-days who do it only to get into the dealer's room.

But I still think the taster membership is a good idea, because 1) it will tell us how many such people there are; 2) perhaps many of them will decide that 3 hours isn't even enough time to see the dealer's room; 3) they're gambling that the taster will bring in more new people than it lures away old people; 4) from the numbers I've seen, Worldcons can afford a certain drop in income anyway.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

You may well be right that there are a lot of of people who buy one-day memberships only to get at the dealer's room, but I think the number of such people is actually quite small. (It's probably nonzero, but I'm getting tired of us gearing everything we do around the behaviors of the 5% outliers.) I just don't see that admission to a Worldcon dealer's room by itself delivers $50-$75 worth of value. We would have heard a lot more complaints by now from people who bought one-days and then said they were being ripped off.

And for that matter, if most of the one-day attendees are solely interested in the Dealers Room, then we're overcharging them anyway. Heck, I chaired one and don't think 3 hours' admission to a Dealers room is worth $75. Maybe $20 -- after all, I paid $15 to get into WonderCon for one afternoon -- but certainly not $75.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Point, but I'm not sure it isn't $75 worth of value to one of those legendary omniverous SF readers with no interest in fandom (a category that we know outnumbers fans, or else who buys all those books?). The Worldcon dealers' room is the biggest goldarn collection of SF books I've ever seen, and if I were planning on spending hundreds of dollars in a giant shopping spree, $75 might not be too much to get in. Probably 3 hours wouldn't be enough to do it all, either.

Complaints? I bought a ticket to last year's APE just to browse the dealer's room (there's nothing else to the APE except one track of programming in a back room) and bought zip. But I didn't complain, because I'm sure it was worth what it cost, just not to me.

Why do you think people buy one-day Worldcon memberships? Genuine "tasters" who don't want to invest any more money than a one-day costs? People who like Worldcons but consider one day of it enough? People who only have one day off work? Some mixture of the above? Something else altogether? Have we ever surveyed them and asked?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, as far as I know, no systematic survey of single-day attendees has ever been done. There have been several haphazard "surveys" of Worldcon members, most of which have seemed to me to have flaws in them, and none of which made their data available, and none of which have been done recently anyway.

I do hope that LA makes an effort to survey people, especially "tasters" who cash in refunds.

I think one-day members are indeed a mixture of people who are interested in what a Worldcon offers, but don't think they can afford more than one day; people who are interested in one of the major events (particularly the Masquerade and to a lesser extent the Hugo Awards); people can only get one or two days available -- ConJose had combinations of multi-day memberships as odd as Thursday-Monday only; probably a few "tasters" who showed up, attended for a while, said, "that's $75 of my life wasted" and left in disgust (but not a lot of those); and, as you say, people who say "one day is enough." There's no one answer to the question.

Surveying people would help, but designing a good survey would be hard. Worse, results are likely be wildly different in LA or San Jose compared to, say, Winnipeg, Melbourne, or Glasgow; therefore, to get any sort of meaningful answers on which you could predict future behavior, you'd have to do surveys every year, keep the data available so people can look through it themselves (smofinfo.com would be a good place for this), and keep things fresh and updated. It's not a trivial task.

I expect the people in fandom who would be good at doing such survey work are being used in more productive roles. Part of that may be because they're busily dealing with individual alligators instead of working on the swamp-draining project.

Say what

[nwl.livejournal.com]

I really like your idea for the one day memberships. I think it could work quite well with a little fine tuning. Keeping it simple would help with getting the idea across.

I think we talked about something along these lines several years ago. I mentioned that quilt shows do something like that - you buy a membership to view the quilts and pay additional fees if you want to take classes or attend special events during the show.

What I don't like is the name - "taster"? Makes it sound like a food event. It should be more skiffy. Marketing is about names - pick a "sexier" name and the resistance might be less. Just a thought.

Re: Say what

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

This discussion came on on SMOFS, too. I had been calling it "trial membership" because I'm boring. The marketing pitch that L.A.con IV came up with involved getting "a taste of Worldcon," but you're not the only person who thought that meant exclusively food.