kevin_standlee | Worldcon Vs. Comic-Con?

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: Fremont, California

Entry tags:

Worldcon Vs. Comic-Con?

SF Signal has published one of their "Mind Melds" about What Worldcon and Comic-Con can learn from each other. Like Cheryl says, I think anyone proposing that Worldcon should settle down in one place so it can Get Big has missed the point. The Olympics have had similar arguments. It's very inefficient for the Olympics to be in a different place every four years; it would be much better if they picked one place and built a permanent Olympic facility. (Greece would be traditional, but I bet Sydney would work out better and be more comfortable.) But part of the point of moving around is to bring the event closer to different people. Comic-Con may be wonderful, but it's always in San Diego, and if you live in (say) Glasgow, it's always going to cost you a fortune to attend, whereas a Worldcon can be expected to sometimes come within relatively easy striking distance.

But what do I know? The last time I attended Comic-Con, it was merely 30,000 people.

That doesn't mean that I think Worldcon is Just Right. It isn't. If we could get it up to or beyond its historical peak attendance of about 8,000, it would work better as a convention without destroying the management paradigm Fandom developed for running it. And it would cost less per person and we could charge less for membership, too -- on the order of $100 less at the door than we currently charge.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I agree with that point that one of the things that makes Worldcon special is that it does travel. I would love to see a Baltimore/DC Worldcon sometime before 2020, but I don't have the fannish clout to make it happen. The best chance of that happening is if Peggy Rae Sapienza is involved, but she is a very divisive figure in Baltimore/DC Fandom.

Comic-Con is different to Worldcon in so many ways but then again so are all the major conventions such as Dragon*Con. The biggest con of them all, Comiket in Tokyo has no membership or entry fee and it exists mainly for amateur manga artists to sell their stuff. There is some promotion done by professional publications there but it's run mainly for fans by fans. I don't know how it's paid for though...

One of the biggest sources of funds for the semiannual Comiket/Tokyo is their sale of advertisements or promotional spaces in their directory, think of it as the Comic Book Buyers Guide on a massive OD of steroids, and the subsequent sale of the directory. The other source of income for the show is that they do charge for table space "roughly $65 + $8 application fee" and a small amount for use of the changing rooms for Cosplay also $8 / person for the day.

As for the directory is about the size of the NY city phone book and features approximately 50 or more small square advertisements per page. From what I recall from talking with some of the Japanese fans at Nippon 2007, each square advertisement is roughly $20 and the book is about $10. I am told being listed in it is almost mandatory for success as a manga artist and no true Japanese fan would be without one. Given its shear size, I suspect that one or more of the major companies also helps with its publication.

I only wish I had realized that in 2007 the summer version of Comiket 72 was August 17-19, as I would have gleefully gone early rather than stayed later to attend. For English details on this massive show see: http://www.comiket.co.jp/info-a/WhatIsEng080528.pdf (What is Comic Market (aka Comiket)

For comparison purposes: Comiket 72 attendance was reported as 550,000 over 3 days (which if you assume is 1 person x 3 days = approximately 183,000 average daily attendance, with a potentially much high total number of unique attendees). Using this method of counting San Diego Comic Con 2009 would be 4 days x 125,000 (sold out / membership cap) - 500,000 + preview night attendance (unknown).

"I only wish I had realized that in 2007 the summer version of Comiket 72 was August 17-19, as I would have gleefully gone early rather than stayed later to attend."

I spotted this coincidence some time before Nippon2007 and made my plans accordingly, spending a day at C72 and then touristing before finishing off my trip with the Worldcon at the beginning of September.

As for attendance, I would presume that only a small percentage of Comic-con attendees turn up for a single day or two and most attend for all four days i.e. similar to Worldcon attendance patterns. From what I have been given to understand very few Comiket attendees turn up for all three days of the event and only a few more even make two of the three days. Each day is themed to a certain extent and people interested in, say, BL/yaoi doujinshi won't necessarily bother to turn up for the shonen day. I do know that I only managed a single day on both my visits to Comiket in 2007 and 2008. For one thing the endless queuing in high heat is very exhausting.

My own guesstimate for recent Comikets is 160,000 different people each day, maybe 30,000 who make two days and 5,000 hardcore types (costumers, probably) who make all three days. From observation I'd say the audience is 99% Asian and probably 98% native Japanese.

Well put. Now that I live in the San Diego area I did take advantage of that and attended my first Comicon. It was fun, but standing in loooong lines to see the celebrities is nothing I would like to see at Worldcon. And, the crowds in the exhibit hall were something you had to see to believe.

On the other hand I really look forward to traveling to Worldcon and playing tourist in whatever beautiful and unique city I'm visiting - budget permitting of course.

Worldcon and Comic-Con are entirely different events which happen to have some fan base in common. Comparing the two, IMHO, is not useful, any more than comparing a county fair with your local supermarket.

I agree that much of the value of Worldcon is that it travels. I was surprised to run into one of my theater pals at Denvention, who told me the only con he goes to is Worldcon, because it gives him a chance to be fannish someplace different every year.

As for the Olympics, look at the improvement it made in China.

Edited 2009-09-02 17:57 (UTC)

Back when I was helping run Sacramento's Eclecticon, I was flying back from the 1991 Chicago Worldcon when I noticed that people claiming baggage from the same flight were wearing Chicon t-shirts. I didn't know these fans, but introduced myself and told them about Eclecticon. They said, effectively, "Thanks, but the only con we attend is Worldcon," even if there was a general SF convention in their figurative backyard.

When I think of Comic-Con, I cringe. When I think of DragonCon, I also *cringe*, for reasons not just related to size. I think if what you want is a *reallly* big dealers room, and a *reallly* big list of panels and a *lot* of celebrities and famous authors and big name fans you can stand in line to see, you probably would love that sort of con. If you're that sort of person, I'm sure you'd want to grow Worldcon bigger.

But I'm not that kind of person. What I want are parties that are interesting and not overrun with dickish guys going from door to door asking if there's beer. What I want is a party floor -- or party spaces -- that have room to move around, to sit, to carry on conversations. What I want is for the socializing to be intimate, without being invite-only. I want con spaces that are manageable to walk around and have lots of space for social interaction, without being too loud or crowded for conversation. I like *couches*. I want cons to be more like cocktail parties and less like stadium events.

I just don't think that happens with bigger cons. With something like a party floor, there's just a limit to how big hotel hallways are, how much room there is in hotel rooms, how many people you can fit on one floor. If Worldcon was at 30K, or even 10K people, party floors would either be constantly wedged (which they very nearly are now) or they would have to change. Can you imagine using a pass system to determine who can go to parties and when? Oh, sure, it would help with elevators, but it would suck for all the things I love about conventions.

Fanime has a mess more people than other bay area cons I attend these days. I spent about half an hour at Fanime this year, in the convention center, running an errand. I found the noise and crowding almost unbearable -- and I'm more extroverted than many people I know in fandom. Growing Worldcon? I'd end up staying home.

An 8-10K attendance doesn't necessarily mean an overwhelmed party space. Remember, I attended an 8000-person Worldcon, back in 1984, and L.A.con II did not seem excessively crowded. That's because they had sufficient social space in the form of those Lanai decks. There's no guarantee that every Worldcon can figure out how to make the social aspects of the evening work, but it is at least possible to point at object examples of when it did work.

Actually, based on the crowding I've seen at relatively small Worldcons such as Montreal and Yokohama, if "uncrowded party floors" becomes a higher priority, it's likely that Worldcon is still too large and should be limited to about 2,000 attendees. The memberships would also plummet in price, except that people would then start reselling them for a lot more than what they paid because the demand would exceed supply.

I don't mean to sound sarcastic or as if I'm making light of your concerns. They're quite legitimate, and if we do manage to grow the event back up to where it previously peaked twenty-five years ago, we're going to have to learn to deal with it. Right now we're not in a death spiral, but I think we are in a slow decline.

One thing I've been wondering is what the evidence is for the slow decline. Have membership numbers been headed steadily downward? (Sorry if this information is easily found on the web. I just tried a couple whacks at Google and couldn't come up with anything, although I did find another old post from your LJ.)

The graphs at SMOFInfo.com haven't been updated in five years -- partially because I haven't gotten around to doing it myself -- but I saw in some of the post-Worldcon blogs someone else having done a similar graph. Trying to leave out the significant outliers like the Australian Worldcons, the trend to me appears to be weakly downward. Not hugely so, though; off the top of my head, the 20-year average attendance is around 5500 +/- 1500 for North American and European Worldcons. That's still a lot of uncertainty, and I think 5500 is too low for effective use of resources, for reasons I've discussed excessively before.

One argument for decline would be that the numbers for LACons and Noreascons have declined over their last three iterations, but there's a lot of ambiguity in the data otherwise. The past three Canadian Worldcons have all been about the same size, if I'm correctly remembering the Anticipation numbers announced at the convention. (Once again my google-fu fails me.)

"...but I saw in some of the post-Worldcon blogs someone else having done a similar graph."

See here (http://sfscope.com/2009/08/attendance-at-the-world-scienc.html).

Thank you!

I bookmarked it for possible future blogging and reference. You're welcome.

If your average attendance is 5500, then +/- 1500 is a huge margin of error - roughly 27%.

On the positive side, it can me a lot more income when that 25% - we'll round down to make conversation easier, show up and pay their membership fees often at that high at the door rate. But it also means that you must build in a minimum of a 25% extra capacity in your program book orders, at con supplies, and other items that are given to each member. That's great, but only IF the float goes up.

If you float goes down, it's not necessarily a financial train wreck, most conventions have an excellent idea of the memberships they have already sold. You have the expense for the overage, but now you also have to cover the cost of their not attending. On the membership side, they paid in advance so no loss there. But it can impact costs that are contingent upon room reservation rates, like ballroom and meeting room space. You also now have all that extra "stuff" - con books, programs, gift bags that you need to store, sell, or worse just throw away. The bigger financial hit comes from a different direction, the lower number of potential sales in dealers room, art show, and explaining to your potential future advertisers / display groups why you were so far off your ATTENDING membership estimate. Fewer people in attendance means less money available for the dealers and artist. As I was pointed told by a former local convention advertiser, ".. it does me (the movie company) no good to send you (the convention) movie posters / displays / promotional material when few people are there to see it or pick them up." A 5,500 official attendance is far less impressive when only 4000 people actually are there to see the show.

Where did you get that line "A 5,500 official attendance is far less impressive when only 4000 people actually are there to see the show"? What I said was that, in recent years, the number of people actually attending -- by which I mean the number of individual human beings who were present for any part of the five days of the convention, and what I think you'd call "official attendance" -- is a figure of around 5500 +/- 1500. Yes, it's a huge uncertainty, and that's why Worldcon runners get ulcers. And furthermore, with no financial backstop and catastrophe if you overshoot expenses, we tend to build in far higher contingency amounts than a typical annual ongoing convention would have as a percentage of revenue. If Worldcon was an ongoing organization, it could build up a cushion against bad years, but it can't do that, and that probably adds at least $100K additional expense (around $20/membership) to each convention.

(And you couldn't impose such a financial structure on Worldcons by setting up a separate contingency fund, because every Worldcon would have a maximum incentive to draw on the fund and a minimum incentive to donate anything to it. "Why should I give you anything? It's not going to help my organization -- our Worldcon was last year.")

As far as trying to quanitify the uncertainy goes: the Worldcons for which we have figures suggest that the number of at-door members is around 10% of the pre-con registration, but again, it's a very rough number. Worldcons move around so much, and each area's demographics are so different, that it's extremely difficult to make meaningful generalizations.

One of the things that comes immediately to mind, should attendance grow, is that you'll need more evening programming. That siphons off a lot of the "party floor" problem. Indeed, I think one of the reasons cited for how large L.A.con II was in 1984 was that a lot of people came just for the back-to-back-to-back overnight showing of the first three Star Wars films, and that represents something like a thousand people for whom the "party" was standing in line waiting for the doors to open.

(I was in that line. I remember people getting pizza deliveries to the spot in line, which was more difficult in 1984 because mobile phones were a rarity rather than commonplace. Yeah, I know, I had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to the convention too, and I liked it.)

Another virtue of Worldcon traveling to different places is that it galvanizes and energizes local fandom. IIRC fandom in south Florida got a huge boost from Magicon in 1992; partly in monetary resources but also in networking and organizational experience. Even a losing bid can get people talking and involved who were never involved before. Putting Worldcon in one permanent location would destroy that.

And, conversely, ComicCon pretty much wipes out San Diego (and a chunk of LA) fandom. San Diego and LA should easily support local gen SF conventions in the 2500-3000 member range, but LA tops out at around 1k with Loscon (no, I refuse to count AnimeExpo) and the SD locals tend to run in the 500 person range.

I've got to say that Lou Anders' and John Picacio's ideas are the kind that we really should learn from. Some of them may be unwieldy, but they're at least worth trying.

FWIW, I wholeheartedly agree with Cheryl's five points, as well as most of John Picacio's.

On the whole, though, I don't think Worldcon needs to make a lot of changes. Sure, let's bring the graphics side of the con out of the mimeograph era and at least up to late-20th Century desktop publishing levels, but on the whole there's nothing wrong with Worldcon's content.

What it needs is presence. Worldcon is pulling 3000 paid attendees each year because there are only about 30,000 people on the planet who know there's an annual event called the World Science Fiction Convention. (If 10% of the people worldwide who know Comic Con exists all showed up there at once, southern California might actually break off the continent.) And no, it wouldn't be hard to do a whole lot more than is being done without spending any additional money at all. I won't go into detail here, but suffice to say I've been in touch with Reno to offer some assistance in that area if they want it. It appears to me that a huge portion of Worldcon's current logistical and site problems would be solved by having a con that consistently draws 8,000 to 10,000. It would also most likely offer a little more staff rotation, which I know at least some staffers would appreciate.

There are 3,000 people who go to Worldcon every year (more or less) because they like it and what it contain. It doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me to think that in the 6.5 billion on this planet there are another 5-7 thousand who would also like it, if only they knew it was taking place.

Gosh, at Anticipation some of the gang were discussing the possibility that Worldcon could get down to 2500 or so, and have many new locational options possible, some of them not involving convention centers.

Sure, but it wouldn't last. Shrink that much and the price would drop really significantly, down to below $100 -- think BayCon + 20%. Otherwise, the Worldcon would start making absurd amounts of money, and fandom won't stand for that. If the price dropped that low, the demand currently being choked off by the price would shoot up and we wouldn't fit anymore.

The only way to have a small American Worldcon and a low price would be to put a membership cap on it. Do that and people would just start buying memberships cheap and reselling them dear due to the excess of demand over supply.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Worldcon Vs. Comic-Con?

no subject

no subject

Comiket finances

Re: Comiket finances

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

graphs

Re: graphs

Re: graphs

Statistically speaking

Re: Statistically speaking

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Worldcon size, threat or

Re: Worldcon size, threat or