kevin_standlee | 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.

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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.

Worldcon Vs. Comic-Con?

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graphs

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Statistically speaking

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